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Australian Tax Office Adopts Open Source Software
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."
Why not call them what they are, "non-profit sales teams"?
Here's a funny thought. The government saves money by not paying Microsoft licensing fees. Do they expect to return that windfall back to the tax payers?
I have been pwned because my
Just what operations are they moving to open source? Is this the standard day to day operating tasks such as word processing and spreadsheets, or are they writing custom software?
No, I mean wtf is SOE?
By using an Anton Pilar act, SCO raided ATO offices demanding a AUD$904.32 (USD$699) licensing fee for each CPU.
Shouldn't the ITs over there start with thing less important then tax records to start with converting computers to Open Source? Don't get me wrong, I am all for a switch anywhere, but why start with such a massive undertaking?
...will now adopt the Linux operating system 'where appropriate.'
Where SCO cannot find them?
As opposed to what they were doing before: adopting it where inappropriate! :)
Seriously though, is it just me or does that wording imply that they've been inappropriately using Windows? Maybe it's good they can admit such a thing.
It was reported late last year that the ATO was originally considering Longhorn as its preferred SOE
What? How can they even consider an OS that won't be released for about 2 years?
Open Source Java Web Forum with LDAP authentication
But how about using nothing but Free Software? You could call the suite GNU Money Management or Free Money.
Does this mean that in future, e-tax (the software the ATO provides for people to lodge their own personal returns) will run on Linux? At present it only runs on Windows.
Their web site runs IIS.
Open source? That'll be $699 to mile a letter, mate. Drop it in the kangaroo's pouch.
You mean that there is free/inexpensive sofware that governments can use? I thought that they needed to pay tons of money for everything. That's just mind-boggling!
I'm going to have to rethink this whole Open Source thing...
One man's -1 Flamebait is another man's +5 Funny.
Among the Gartner Group's key findings were that the ATO should develop an open-source policy and review procurement processes to better enable the evaluation, selection and sharing of open-source software.
It looks like someone at Gartner is going to get fired when big Billy finds out that theey have broken ranks!I am sorry - this does NOT mean you will get your Tax Return sooner.
yay for the Penguin...
/me grumbles at tax bill
I'd say they'll be hopping into bed with Sun, that Sun Desktop thing (based on RH I beleive?)
Now maybe one day they'll stop bleeding us dry too huh?....one can only dream..
I dont see why they dont do this government wide as China is attempting. The amount of money saved on licensing would hire a lot of staff for support and training. Thus the money previously paid for licensing would be directed into the local IT workforce, creating jobs, producing local IT experience and knowledge that can then boost the local industry instead of watching all our tax money go offshore...
In Soviet Russia the insensitive clod is YOU!
The article did not say they were going to switch from Microsoft to Linux. The gist of it is that they will no longer dismiss open-source solutions out of hand, but will at least give it some consideration.
the hiring of Bill Gibson as CIO, and his review of all things IT in the ATO.
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 recently, so maybe this won't make it through the next month without being reversed.
it's GNU/ATO. In the future please correctly refer to the organization as GNU/ATO.
All your taxes belong to us.
Hitler also followed this numbering scheme. He started numbering his troops at something like 10,000 to make the first recruits think there were many before them.
I would love to use quickbooks but am sick to death of microsoft. Maybe this will help them to see it is a good idea.
comment directly in my journal
Having friends within the ATO I can tell you with certainty that no savings will be passed on to the public.
That said, we may incur LESS additional budget bloat (a fixture since the introduction of GST and the complete farce of it's implementation).
Q.
Insert Signature Here
Much as I'd love to see a Gov't move to OSS, I wouldn't be surprised if this turned out to be another bait'n'switch to get Microsoft to give 'em some discounts. What I really want to see is them roll out linux desktops. They might still (why any country in it's right mind would trust a foriegn company with a history of getting away with shady monopolitic practices is beyond me), but I'm not gonna hold my breath.
The comment about mid range stikes me though. XP's a resource hog, but older Windows are insecure as heck. Linux could find itself a nice nitch where people need a secure desktop OS with access to patchs but don't want to buy new hardware.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
The Australian Taxation Office is the so entrenched with microsoft products, I doubt that will ever look at moving away from these solutions.
.net. Now simply the cost of moving over these third party software pieces would make any more away from microsoft extremely difficult.
Perhaps the greatest entrenchment is something called the ATO innovation centre. This is where they collaborate at a high level with microsoft, on new products and solutions to what they're working on.
I'm sure I would have heard about news as big as the ATO closing down their innovation centre so one can assume, they aren't even close to getting rid of ms, but are still deep in bed taking a pounding in the wallet.
Other reasons I'm doubtful of the move are custom pieces of software that have been made for the ATO would have to be ported.
I know for a fact that the company I work has over the years written a large number of pieces of software for the ATO using, vb and
In Australia you can file your taxes electronically using a WIN32 application that is terribly written. It consistently estimates your refund/liability incorrectly even with the simplest tax information. For example, a salary-only return with no deductions, no adjustments, etc.
Putting their support for monopolists aside, government incompetence is so 90's. The concept of DETERMINISM needs to be explained to the ATO.
If anything should be deterministic it's the tax code. The refund/liability amount should be perfect to the last penny, in all but the most complex returns.
Even in that situation, the estimated return should be correct, but potentially there may be arguments about the content of the return itself, not the resulting amount.
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?
Actually I think Steve Irwin will be voted "Father of the Year" first.
One of these days I'm moving to Theory - everything works there
I can't see the problem with sending boatloads of cash to Microsoft for Windows. I mean, the ATO can just purchase boxes of Windows make a tax write-off. ba dum dum ching...
READY.
PRINT ""+-0
Linux Australia, the national Linux body, have been doing a lot more interesting work in the Government space.
... that I'm not the only one who's noticed this glaring ommission. I dislike having to reboot into windows for e-tax. I've tried running e-tax under WINE, but had troubles, so unless they want to take e-tax online or port it to java instead of MS Visual Basic or whatever it is they use (the widgets are vaguely familiar but I can't remember where they're from) I would hope that since they're adopting a more open philisophy the openness would flow on to its "end user" applications.
HTH
All this means is the ATO has changed their policy to that non-Microsoft software *MAY* be used where appropriate. This does not mean they are ditching any existing software, just they will be more inclusive in future decision. Hardly newsworthy, I would say!
Similar to an Australian hospital group I once worked for, ATO is so entrenched in Microsoft it is unlikely anything will change in the immediate future. Such organisation have many Linux and open source haters within their IT departments, it is very hard for pro Linux and open source people to have any impact.
CIOs are only interested in the bottom line and this could just be the ATOs attempt at getting a better deal from Microsoft.
I'm betting that e-tax will be Windows-only again this year, but it's a bet I wouldn't mind losing.
proof, n. A demonstration that a conclusion is implied by certain premises and axioms.
The comment is pretty misleading. The ATO had a SOE policy wich explicitly excluded non-Microsoft products. What they are doing now is ditching this part of the SOE policy. In other words, they will still be a Microsoft shop, but in the future, non-Microsoft products have, in theory, and equal footing to be accepted as SOE.
Don't get me wrong. It is a positive move, and hopefully, good will come out of it.
you people haven't a clue. You think linux = programmers not getting paid? idiot, there is nothing stopping the ATO employing programmers to work on OSS for them, if anything it means MORE free money for I.T jobs in general and not sending money down a large over seas corp. hole. good work ATO i hope you can ween yourselfs off MS software altogether.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
Anyone?
Taxelation = The joy of receiving your tax return, which lasts until you realise it was your money to begin with.
I don't make predictions, and I never will.
A beautiful thing I heard from the horse's mouth last time I was in Canberra:
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.
http://pcblues.com - Digits and Wood
I went back to manual filling in for the same reason. Weird, because the software is written in Java.
http://pcblues.com - Digits and Wood
Having spent more than my fair share of time (though not as much as some!) working on ATO mid-range systems, I can confirm most of the technical aspects of the article.
.NET applications to web-enable existing mainframe applications; Others were designed to integrate across agencies via web-services; Others still do little more than send an email.
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.
FLAG - Forensic and Log Analysis GUI
e x. html
Ran across this morning looking for something else
http://www.dsd.gov.au/library/software/flag/ind
You may want to check the source or have someone you trust do so
The Singularity is closer than you think
Quant
ATO, Australian for robbery.
Lets take a look at how the OpenSource community has taken a media source which may or may not be reliable and taken it out of context. Let me quote a few key phases:
"concluded that the agency should evaluate and use open-source software where appropriate."
"key findings were that the ATO should develop an open-source policy"
At not point does it say that the ATO has decided to act upon this recommendation and at no point does it say that it will replace all the Microsoft products with Linux! The Australian Government has policies as to what products are certified for use within government departments and at the moment their aint too many, if any, open source products that are on that list.
Heck, speaking with first-hand experience, I can plainly state that some places didn't upgrade to Windows NT until Windows 2000 had come out. And have only recently gone to Windows 2000.
Of course, even with spending the next few years evaluating the unevaluable (an unreleased OS), that'd come up when they'd finally gotten to making a decision, which in turn means the evaluation would be thrown out, and restarted at point zero.
Which almost certainly means, "We might stick it on some web servers to keep the hippy freaks off our backs"
Ah, Slashdot, where not even the submitters and editors RTFA.
Xix.
"Everything is adjustable, provided you have the right tools"
Clicking around for about 15 minutes with Firebird 0.7 at www.ato.gov.au resulted in everything responding quite nicely.
Just my 2 cents.
If so, I think version 7.5 of Opera
is available on SuSE Linux, so there
may be a way to do what you want to do
Implimentation of new IT strategies requires new OSSy rules!
I guess from now on we should call it "Australian Tux Office".
Less is more !
suggest that you check out:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/pyflag
If your actually interested, it's a forensics package, being very actively developed atm.
It has changed enormously since the version hosted at www.dsd.gov.au
if anything it means MORE free money
;-)
free money? Is the free as in free beer? I would like some of that.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
The IRS and its equivalents in other countries are the last organizations I'd want using F/OSS.
Yes, I recognize all the advantages of F/OSS-- security, stability, supportability and lifetime, etc. I'd prefer not to have a BSOD or some worm-induced malfunction on, for example, the avionics systems of a jetliner.
I'm also thrilled to see the Brazilian government taking steps toward independence from Redmond (and, indirectly, the US Government-- everyone down here remembers the "NSA Key" very clearly) by moving toward F/OSS.
But for the tax collectors? I'd just as soon have them all sign perpetual Microsoft-only contracts. Imagine it-- they would be as frustrated trying to do their day-to-day work EVERY DAY as we are when tax day rolls around. Plus a good worm could knock out all their records. The security problems would also allow people naughtier than I to get in and "update" some of the algorithms used to calculate how much each taxpayer owes.
Tax collection agencies seem to me to be excellent places for Microsoft-only software.
Now that I think of it, I wonder if there's any chance we can convince the "Total Information Awareness" (or whatever they're calling it now that it doesn't officially exist) folks to use only Microsoft software? I know I'd feel a lot safer from Big Brother if I knew he was using MS software. He'd be too busy patching and trying to recover lost data (plus going through MS license audits) to bother me...
--Mark
"It is nice to know that the computer understands the problem. But I would like to understand it too." --Eugene Wigner
I am really glad they finally adopted Open Source Software. That seems to be the most reasonable thing the Australian Tux Office could do.
Sincerely,
Pan Tarhei Hosé, PhD.
"Homo sum et cogito ergo odi profanum vulgus et libido."