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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."
another stupid TLA, meaning a PC running windows...
"If we hit that bullseye, the rest of the dominoes should fall like a house of cards. Checkmate." - Zapp Brannigan
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.
We have..
* 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.
They're already planning a major change. This is not actually a commitment to use any OSS, but rather a decision to evaluate OSS solutions as part of the change. Furthermore, they run relatively little software on their desktops; most of the work is done on their mainframes. So the OSS portion of this is not really a massive undertaking. For that matter, if they start running Linux on their mainframes (side-by-side with what they're currently running), they can start a tighter integration between their mainframe and desktop environment.
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, the national Linux body, have been doing a lot more interesting work in the Government space.
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.
The very first paragraph states:
If Tyranny and Oppression come to this land,
it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy. -James Madison
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.