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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."
Sorry, SCO licences are only available to comercial entities. ATO is anything but comercial. It may be a parasite of comercial entities, as well as individuals, but it is not comercial in nature.
You never know...
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.
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....