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Australian Tax Office Adopts Open Source Software

Posted by timothy on from the updated-fleecing-techniques dept.

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."

3 of 167 comments (clear)

  1. Does this mean... by propellor_head · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

  2. Yes, No by quinkin · · Score: 5, Interesting
    Who says they are "non-profit(sic) sales teams"? You don't think the Initiative for Software Choice doesn't get a kickback for scuttling another Open Source bill?

    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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  3. It can't be a full scale conversion. by penpen · · Score: 5, Interesting

    The Australian Taxation Office is the so entrenched with microsoft products, I doubt that will ever look at moving away from these solutions.

    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 .net. Now simply the cost of moving over these third party software pieces would make any more away from microsoft extremely difficult.