Embarrassing Governments Into Adopting Open Source

caitsith01 writes "An effort is currently underway to embarrass the Australian Federal Government into adopting open source software. As this story explains, the Australian Democrats have put questions on notice in Parliament that will require all government ministers to disclose how much money their departments spend on Microsoft products each year. The idea is to force open source issues to the fore by showing just how much money Microsoft receives from the government. It could be a smart approach - the average taxpayer knows little or nothing about OSS, but will rapidly form and express vocal opinions about the government wasting money. The article also mentions that a bill may be introduced to Federal Parliament to mandate the consideration of open source solutions (you may remember this story about an Australian state trying to introduce similar legislation). Some quotes from the article: "What the country doesn't need is to be tied into a profit-maximising licensing system, and the way to combat that is to get government to break out of the paradigm." On the other hand, the (right wing) Liberal Party criticises suggestions that use of open source should be compulsory as "hi-tech affirmative action.""

Comments

Liberal Party = Arch Conservatives

[Evil Pete]

The Liberal Party in Australia has morphed over the decades into something like your Republican Party only more right wing.

The Labour Party is usually considered by the Libs as a bunch a commies ... and yet they also have right wing tendencies (sometimes very).

The Democrats are made of left wing refugees from the Liberal Party and right wing refugees from the Labour Party. Sort of. Though I cried when they got rid of their leader Natasha Stott-Despoja ... a hot chick.

Please ignore the drivel posted above

[caitsith01]

The Liberal Party in Australia is basically an analogue of the US Republicans or the British Conservatives, but without the religious zeal of the US Party (or at least without as *much* religious zeal).

Their ideology in brief:
- pro business, especially bigger business
- anti welfare
- anti affirmative action
- pro US, pro US foreign policy
- pro invasions of civil liberties in the name of defence against 'terror'
- terrible on the environment
- like to be divisive (known as 'wedge politics')
- HATE labour movements, unions, (left) student movements etc.
- anti immigration
- anti government regulation/intervention, preferring the 'free' market to run itself

They are very firmly on the right of politics. Despite the idiotic rantings of other posters, their name is extremely misleading, even to some Australians. In the last few years they have lurched sharply right, especially in the wake of September 11.

Despite what you may be told, they are *nothing* like the Libertarians. They want a strong, omniscient federal government and are constantly clashing with the judiciary, civil rights groups and minorities over their (ab)use of power. Their Attorney General also makes Joseph Goebbels look soft on terrorism.

Re:where's the payback ?

[fatboyslack]

This is not really a true reflection of the Australian political system (Westminister system). The place where the Democrats have real power is in the Federal Senate, where they have enough power to start investigations, instigate inquiries etc. Although after the GST fiasco, "Keep the Bastards Honest" took a bit of a shellacking. They are a nice little check in the Westminister system, especially with how Labor (the party in opposition, like the Democrats in the US and Conservatives in UK) are laying down like beaten dogs at the moment. Also, in conjuncton with the Labor party, they can veto government policies.

(Amusingly, your nick' is Sad Loser and your .sig says you go for the magpies)

TCO

[feder]

Something similar was tried in Denmark not too long ago. As it turned out, the problem was not to determine how much was spent on Microsoft products but rather how much could be saved using Open Source.

In late 2002 the Danish Board of Technology, an independent government body advising the parliament on matters of technology, published a report examining the applicability of Open Source in government. The report estimated that the public sector could save several billion Danish kroner (one Danish krone is approximately 0.15 dollars) per year by switching to Open Source software - which is a lot in a small country like Denmark. The figure caught a lot of average goverment IT managers by surprise and consequently generated a lot of discussion as to the accuracy of the numbers and methodology used in the report but I think the general consensus now is that the only way to find out for sure is to give it a try.

Re:Need for training at early stages

[lazybeam]

I know for a fact that UTas (University of Tasmania) offers a standard of CompSci and sylabus similar to most other Australian universities - and its all MS based, plus a little Java for programming. I think there's a short section on *nix but it's all microsoft.

My uni's (USQ in Toowoomba Qld) IT department wants everyone to be using windows, but the Maths and Computing department is pretty much fully Linux. They have two undergraduate labs with only Linux, as well as many courses require the use of at least cygwin. This is a Good Thing. We do programming in GCC, G++ and Java. We had to write HTML using a text editor and networking software using Unix sockets...

A lot of the lecturers even don't use the new system they spent millions on (PeopleSoft) - I can't blame them, it is a lot slower than the old in-house system, even with the new hardware.

It would be good to see other companies get their products used; my mother works in a government department and they moved from Win 3.1 and Lotus Notes to a pretty much MS-only environment... (well of course they do have some specialised software)

Re:Not quite ready

[nadaou]

You know, if MS doesn't do it, there is probably one reason: It does not make big bucks. And remember all the distros out there are made by companies that care about big bucks also.

Ahem.
http://www.debian.org/social_contract

Re:High tech affirmative action....?!

[Zoolander]

Actually, he's 'finlandssvensk', which roughly means 'finnish-swedish' (I'm sure there's a more correct translation, but I can't be bothered...). He is from Finland, but talks swedish with a finnish accent (I'm sure there are more differences, but I don't know them). Don't know if he talks finnish too, but I think 'finlandssvenska' (finnish-swedish) is his native language. Finland is in many parts a two-language country.

So, I'm sad to say, he isn't swedish (which I am), but he talks swedish.

Re:Not quite ready

[nadaou]

Reality check no organisation is going to use Debian or any of the other distro's like it, the thing they really care about is the technical support.

Ahem.
http://www.debian.org/users

or how about getting outsourced Debian support from Ian Murdock, the IAN in DebIAN?
http://www.progeny.com

And many organizations ARE using debian, whether the PR dept/CEO/you know it or not. Ask the backroom guys or netcraft. For a non-Fortune-500 non-BSD server, can you really name a superior solution?

That doesn't always help

[leonbrooks]

One WestOz minister had to stand up and explain that the Muja power station burned 4Mt of coal a year, at 3ppm Uranium (for the maths impared, equals 12t a year of Uranium up the stack, to say nothing of the radium and stuff). They went ahead a built a second coal power station, instead of one running off out abundant natural gas supplies (piped over from Canberra? :-) or a cleaner, cheaper nuke.