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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."
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?
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?
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.
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.
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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.
... 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.
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.
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
If the NSA were to try to sneak something like that into a piece of F/OSS, others among the "many eyes" would almost certainly spot it. And before some wag asks, no, the recent release of some old Win2K source on P2P filesharing networks does not give Windows the same advantage...
--Mark
"It is nice to know that the computer understands the problem. But I would like to understand it too." --Eugene Wigner