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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."
By using an Anton Pilar act, SCO raided ATO offices demanding a AUD$904.32 (USD$699) licensing fee for each CPU.
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
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.
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
I am sorry - this does NOT mean you will get your Tax Return sooner.
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.
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
Just what Australians need, GNU Taxes!
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
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....
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.