Australian Tax Office Adopts Open Source Software 167
James Roberts writes "AustralianIT is reporting today that the Australian Tax Office, or ATO (Australian IRS equivalent) has ditched its standard Microsoft SOE and will now adopt the Linux operating system 'where appropriate.' It was reported late last year that the ATO was originally considering Longhorn as its preferred SOE. This is a big step for Australian Federal Government, who have been slow in the uptake of open source policies despite ongoing petitioning by several high profile pressure groups."
Re:SOE what? (Score:5, Informative)
another stupid TLA, meaning a PC running windows...
Re:SOE what? (Score:1, Informative)
Pretty Misleading Slashdot Blurb (Score:5, Informative)
Probably due to... (Score:3, Informative)
As a contractor on the ATO account, I for one, welcome our new open-source weilding overlords!
Mind you, Bill did pull a huge tender [news.com.au] recently, so maybe this won't make it through the next month without being reversed.
Re:SOE what? (Score:3, Informative)
I've seen SOE applied to other boxen, including in one case Solaris 8 with a particular set of patches.
Its just a way of saying "This is our standard box".
Re:Why start in the tax office? (Score:5, Informative)
* Department of Veterans Affairs: Ditched a bunch of NT4 file servers for a big samba box running on an existing s390 machine.
* Northern Territory Department of Education: Open Source focussed for many years.
* NSW Department of Transport: Moving down the open source (particularly, open-office) path.
* Aust Department of Defence: LOTS of open source here, regardless of lack of any official position om the issue.
* About a dozen other government departments: Using open source security auditing agents (Snare, Snort) to comply with national security requirements.
* ACT open-source legislation will probably mean a heightened open-source focus for the ACT government IT provider, InTACT.
* Several small DB projects in quite a few agencies, using postgres/mysql.
* Websphere (which has a apache backend) being used in a bunch of organisations, including the DVA.
* many more examples...
However, I'm not certain that the ATO are converting just yet, they're just not excluding it any more (ie: Allowing prospective bidders to NOT take into account the current (windows) SOE when developing proposals). I also suspect that the tax records will not be affected by this change - from memory, they're on a bunch of big-iron machines.
Red.
Re:Does this mean... (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Why start in the tax office? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Does this mean... (Score:1, Informative)
Quite Significant! (Score:4, Informative)
I was amazed when they snuck in fax numbers to allow businesses to submit their BAS (Business Activity Statement - paperwork for the "New Tax System." Is submitted anywhere from Quarterly through to twice-per-fscking-week depending on size of the business).
Because they aren't publicised, here's some of the fax numbers that I've been able to find out:
+61-3-9937-9200
+61-3-9937-9400
+61-8-8228-4399
+61-8-8228-4297
Of course, now I can sit back and watch these fax machines get slashdotted. Not that they don't every day that a BAS/IAS is due anyway!
The non-Linux move comes as no surprise. It's no secret that the current hardware is great for Fragfests (Some of the best Quake players that I knew were ATO employees...)
As to Mozilla? Also no surprise. If their own webpage isn't 100% Mozilla friendly, who'd expect any advances in this field?
Linux Australia (Score:4, Informative)
Linux Australia [linux.org.au], the national Linux body, have been doing a lot more interesting work in the Government space.
Not Ditched, just the Policy Changed: (Score:5, Informative)
Don't get me wrong. It is a positive move, and hopefully, good will come out of it.
Re:Say what? (Score:5, Informative)
The very first paragraph states:
Sharing Code Already (Score:4, Informative)
The Intellectual Property departments are sharing source code with the Taxation Departments instead of spending tax dollars to rewrite the same functionality (online identification verification using PKI in Java).
Very good to hear already. This makes sense as well.
From The Trenches (Score:5, Informative)
Yes, all ATO mid-range systems are developed on the Microsoft platform. Most are recently developed
And yes, the vast, vast majority of core business processing continues to take place on mainframes - tax processing, enforcement, GST, BAS. The data for these systems are all ultimately stored and processed on big iron.
As for the SOE, well, mid-range developers have (you guessed it) an all Microsoft SOE running W2K server (progressively rolling out W2K3), SQL Server 2000, IIS 5, etc, etc, etc. Business users run XP with the usual collection of Office and Outlook, plus a good old mainframe client to connect to those core systems.
Sure, the lip service paid to adopting open source might be encouraging, but I wouldn't hold my breath! The Change Program needs to make these announcements, but much of the technology solutions are already proposed and are only a rubber stamp away from approval.
Re:SOE what? (Score:3, Informative)
Many organisations have server SOEs as well as desktop ones.
Re:Make it Government Wide (Score:3, Informative)
But that doesn't mean that you won't require more or less the same amount for user-support as you needed under Windows. Indeed you'd probably need more in the change-over period. Not because Linux is so much harder to use, but simply because *any* change requires some amount of retraining. (changing from Linux to Windows would also require extra user-support for a period.)
So, the likely calculations goes something like this:
Thereafter you'll save money, because re-training and higher costs in support for converting stuff is a one-off affair while the savings in licensing and in lower administration are permanent.
For foreign (as in Non-US) governments an additional factor is at work; The licensing-money you save would have been shipped more or less wholesale to the US. The wages you pay local people stay in the local economy, goes to grow the local IT-bussiness and you get parts of it back (the people hired pay income-tax which return to the state, then they buy stuff in the shops, where the VAT returns to the state etc etc etc)