Slashdot Mirror
Australian Tax Office Moves Toward Open Standards
An anonymous reader writes "Neat! The Australian Tax Office (the Aussie equivalent of the IRS) has been criticised for being too reliant on Microsoft software and, well, they're doing something about it such as supporting Java runtime for the first time. So maybe I can do my tax return on something more secure than a Windows PC this year?" This makes a good update for our previous post on the office's open source moves.
I thought that Java was far from open, and not even an official standard?
http://blog.astyran.sg
It's pretty straightforward. The Australian government is driven primarily and irrevocably by budget. Budget is king and lord of all machinations of the Australian government at the functional level. (At the upper levels of course it's driven by backscratching, porkbarreling, ignorance, and the usual corruption, and at the lower levels it's driven by apathy and the job security of the public service).
If a government department, federal, state or local, uses all of it's budget, it gets the same budget next year. If it doesn't, it loses budget. This is of course why government IT buying is always frenzied just before budget time.
Also, in government, there is a perception, a strong perception, that money spent = value, as money spent increases, value increases. A product that is given freely therefore has no value. It does not therefore work properly because it is valueless. If, in the case of vendorless open source software, it can not be made to work because you cannot pay the vendor to make it work. All tasks in government resolve around expenditure rather than functionality. For example, they don't put up a website for australian heritage, they spend money on doing... something... for australian heritage. Senator Alston doesn't have a website, instead he spends $4M on an IT project of great importance.
So you see why they can't just use web based forms. No vendor to spend money on.
I am government man, come from the government. The government has sent me. -- G.I.R.
Seriously -- welcome to the beauracracy. Every multi-tiered business, every government, every organization that actually requires organization; they all work this way. It's the sad, pathetic result of budgets.
I've heard of organizations that don't tell their sub-organizations what their budgets are. They just let them request money, and as the money gets used up they make it harder to request more. It's a nice idea, but ultimately just leads to more complex and annoying ways of gaming the system.