One pet peeve of mine is when I hear local input that for various reasons business, research grants etc. is difficult for open source.

There are plenty of examples, where local people have done very well for themselves at the local and international level. They're working for open source MNCs (not sales), wrote a key database library for PHP, developing on Linux/FreeBSD kernels, released popular open source e-HRM systems.. the list goes on. Most of the people I know in this group, don't get any form of grants, support or incentives from local sources. And yes.. they're getting nice income from it, invited to speak at international conferences etc.

The same goes for research, Andrew Tridgell who wrote rsync for this Phd. thesis and during his studies also wrote Samba So if he can do this at the ANU as a side project, why not locally?

For his master thesis, Linus Torvalds wrote Linux. What are the submissions that failed to get grants locally? Are they at a similar level?

Have a read also of Michael Tiemann's startup of Cygnus Solutions They started up with USD6,000. RedHat started in an apartment, Google in a garage.

Did you know that a local IT SME can get up to 5 years tax free profit without even getting MSC status?

A lot of innovation can happen if you main incentive is the will to succeed and not handouts.