[LINK] Reports damn Australia's IT record

[hartr@redhat.com]

On 11 Oct, richard@auscoms.com.au wrote:
> Jan -- the problem at the ABS -- and in most market research -- is
> that software is counted as a subset of "services".
> 
> We're way behind in this. The .au software market is worth billions at
> retail - but that's mostly imported.
> 
> Even more importantly, our production in terms of output by individual
> developers (whomever they work for) is also billions. But we don't
> measure how much that's worth, how much of it is exported, how much
> software intellectual property is locally owned versus internationally
> owned, etc etc etc.
> 
> Let me illustrate with what I up-front caution to be guesstimates
> only: 1) There are around 70,000 IT staff in Australia with jobs
> described by development languages. (I think this is a conservative
> number). Now, let's imagine that half of these -- 35,000 -- are "real"
> developers that spend half their time or more writing software of some
> kind or other. Say 17,500 person-years annually on generating lines of
> code. 2) Let's take a conservative $50,000 salary for these people.
> That's $875 million spent building code -- actually writing software. 
> 3) What if the industry average markup for software sold is 25% -- I'm 
> discounting real markups to take into account internal development
> which isn't marked up at all. That gives us something like a
> billion-dollar industry. But we don't know the real size, because it's
> not measured.

There is a significant issue here which you have not really addressed,
approx 80%+ of all software is written for internal consumption by
corporations - ie only something under 20% of all software is written as
'shrink wrap' software intended for sale.

Finally, how do you count major open source projects in terms of their
economic activity? For example, the Samba project is Australian
originated and led and Red Hat employs several people here in Oz who
work on the Gnu C Compiler and tool chain.

-- 
Robert Hart						 hartr@redhat.com
Red Hat Asia-Pacific, Unit 15, 23 James St, Brisbane, Qld 4006, Australia
Tel +61 (0)7 3872 4808                             Fax +61 (0)7 3257 4800