Slashdot Mirror
.gov.au Guide to Open Source Software
kieronb writes "The Australian Government Information Management Office has recently released
"A Guide to Open Source Software for Australian Government Agencies". Surprisingly, it actually appears to have been written by someone with a clue, and provides quite a balanced overview of what F/OSS is and how it differs to proprietary software. Choice quotes: "Sourcing OSS solutions is a new and less understood area for Government Agencies. As a recult, it often seems to involve higher risk. As open source solutions become more mainstream and agencies gain expertise in evaluating and deploying them, this perception of risk should subside."; "Access to source code is, however, valuable to agencies by virtue of the economic flow-on effects that accrue when multiple vendors offer competing products based on the same technology. Access to source code also reduces the risk of vendor lock-in.""
Finally we don't look like a bunch of flaming drongos.
PDF Mirror
It is good to se that some governemts are actually begining to consider the potential benefits of using F/OSS software. I susspect that this is a trend that will increase dramatically over the next few years. As a few govnernments sets sucessful examples of F/OSS deplyment others will follow!
Luckily not everybody buys into the FUD.
- nhnFreespirit
Personally, I don't see how any government can in good conscience spend money on a solution, when there is a free, standards based alternative.
Go Away! Not for Sale
the first step was a mandate that new acquisitions ought to include open source solutions, I however remain unsure as to whether we'll actually see a move or not.
lets face it I had to install win2k3 and exchange today, and the whole time I wanted to pop in Slackware cd1...
They approved a licence that is not open source and branded it as "open source". Read the following:
3 ,39190311,00.htm
http://www.zdnet.com.au/news/software/0,200006173
PDF is an open format, anyone can write a PDF reader. There are even some free (as in speech) PDF readers, xpdf for example
Access to source code also reduces the risk of vendor lock-in.
MS bashing aside, this is the real issue. If you like MS software and it does the job for you, then go ahead and use it if that is what you want. The problem I have is when some government agency makes their public record information available only in Word or Publisher format. (I know OOo does word, but that is not the point). Once governments push for truly open data interchange standards, industry will follow and the sky is the limit.
Simply look at the history of telecommunications and the early years of the automotive industry before things like ITU and SAE standards were around. It was a dismal place for consumers and businesses. That is the current state of the IT industry. It is a patchwork of incompatible and proprietary lock in devices.
I think that at some point, an organization as big as a country's government should consider itself in a good position not to accept vendor lock-in, where the cost savings are just part of the equation. So yes, it will probably catch on. This demand is already being recognized by vendors, considering MS' shared-source program.
see a Text Widget
Erm... is anyone else having trouble reading this is xpdf? I just get random letters and punctuation everywhere. Gv is fine, though.
-ReK
md5sum -c reality.md5
reality: FAILED
md5sum: WARNING: 1 of 1 computed checksum did NOT match
Brazil has done this a while ago already. Nobody never mentioned anything !!!!
you can find a lot of stuff in http://www.softwarelivre.gov.br/documentos/
Several documents go way back to 2003 !!!!
I'm sure everyone knows who developed SELinux? Surpise... NSA! The FCC as well has been using at least 4 distos of linux for quite a few years, and not just for their severs either.
I also know that my local city govenment (Bakersfield, CA) is using Firefox. (although they still leave shortcuts for IE). To further make my point... quit assuming that US govenment agencies are not considering OSS. Even Redmond,WA (until recently) was using linux servers. I would love to know how many MS employees have Firefox on their desktops.
What other TLA's are using OSS/Linux?
Aaah... who exactly do you think is going to maintain the software if not software engineers?
but Acroread 7.0 locked up on the pdf (again!).
What the hell is that?!
It looks kind of like a cypher, but kinda doesn't... I wonder what it means (if anything)
Kinda looks like segments of domain names. Weird.
Is it any surprise that a nation descended from the worst convicts and criminals England could throw away would eventually align itself with Open Source Software, well known throughout the world as a transparent price-fixing scam... :)
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
PDF is an open format, anyone can write a PDF reader.
Yep... Just read the PDF Reference (1236 pages), and implement everything. Nothing hard, right?
The PDF has a url to slashdot -:)
There are also free PDF writers - PDFLatex, the PDF printer for Openoffice, the KDE PDF printers, ps2pdf etc.
I have prefered to circulate documents in PDF ever since a time when I used to get a daily email that usually came as a PDF but would occasionally come as a Word doc, the former looked much more polished.
Particularly in the education sector. As a student at a Queensland State School, I have no other choice than to use Windows boxes, with Word and Internet Explorer. Not because it's easier for the admin to set up (and let's face it, most school admins are a bit dim), but because Education Queensland has a contract with Microsoft to teach me about Microsoft products. We get advertisements about special deals on Office, frequent assignments (in the junior school) centred around PowerPoint and our ANZAC day ceremony was nothing more than two "Presentations" and a trumpeteer. Why is it that the Liberal (not actual liberals) government is buying into Open Source, while Labor is siding with Microsoft?
This has been happening for a while now, in different countries. Unfortunately, governments seem to have difficulty making the reality in low-level department branches match up with their official national policies. Branches in the UK still actively demand Microsoft Windows, despite policies of equal consideration for open source, for example.
Bloody hell. The day I skip work with the flu and a kitchen-shelf-related near-concussion, the agency gets slashdotted. I'm glad I'm not looking after that site -- just four or five other ones run by AGIMO. I wonder if they're still up... yep. Phew!
I can report that I've been using PHP, Perl, the Sablotron XSLT parser and other FOSS tools in the service of AGIMO for the last couple of years. I even develop in Emacs. AGIMO and the AusGov in general are quite amenable to open source s/w. They even have no particular objection to me open-sourcing the tools I've produced at work, like the XBlurb text parser and the Xenolith site engine -- not that I have, since neither of them is particularly interesting, but the willingness is there.
Meanwhile, AGIMO is getting in bed an awful, awful content mismanagement system, which I'm doing my best to avoid. It's not all good news. But it's a long way from a single vendor, thank the gods.
I have discovered a truly remarkable
I was in Canberra just yesterday doing an install of software that can (and does in this case) run on on opensource base.
According to the person I shared a cab with the ATO (Australian Tax Office) is a big M$ shop with an almost permanent staff of visiting Redmond Monkeys(tm).
Yeah it's hearsay, but, you know, my tax dollars at work...
Does that turn you on like it does for me?
Support is not free. User training is not free. IT training is not free. Making all your other applications play nice, integrate into websites, case management, workflow management, document management and so on isn't. Exchange and integration with other departments, end-users and subcontractors isn't. Custom development isn't. And by that I mean everything from huge internal applications to simple VBA macros.
Maybe there's money to be saved in the long run. But in the short run, the current solutions are cheaper, and those money can be spent right now to improve social security, public schools, public healthcare, public roads, tax relief or whatever else you consider a "good cause". Yes, it is sort of counterproductive, like how I see some public schools decay much too fast due to missing maintenance budget (and they end up building new and more expensive ones instead) but they are like the rest of society. Long term is what the stock price is next quarter.
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
The problem with your view on these things is that this site is pro-everything OSS. As long as you don't share the same view as the rest of us, you risk getting tarred, feathered, hung, and displayed on the streets for everyone to see. If I were you, I would keep those communist views to yourself.
Whilst a free reference implementation would be nice, that's enough. Implementing a 1236 page specification is a helluva lot easier than working out the document format by reverse engineering like has to be done with .doc.
I am trolling
Whoever called this a balanced view wasn't too careful in reading the article. Later on, it just reads like MS FUD.
"... however, liability in open source is still a glaring issue in comparison to proprietary counterparts, with most licenses including the popular GPL explicitly disclaiming any warranty and liability on behalf of the authors."
Yes, we love our Fosters, it is the best Aussie beer ever. I personally drink 3 pints of the stuff with breakfast, lunch and tea.
Shh! We've got to let them think we drink camel piss ..ur... Fosters, so we can keep all the good beer to ourselves.
The Internet's nature is peer to peer - 20050301_cs_profs.pdf
I'm certainly an OSS advocate, however, I consider open data formats to be even more important, in particular for government use.
The Internet's nature is peer to peer - 20050301_cs_profs.pdf
Nobody, that is, except these Slashdot contributers:
But other than that, nobody ever mentioned anything.
"If it's real, then it gets more interesting the closer you examine it. If it's not real, just the opposite is true." -
What I'd really love is if the Australian Government would make more grants available to its local software industry.
There's a lot of adverts on TV and in the paper about the government caring about "small businesses" (hahaha, sorry, I'm laughing already) and wanting local "innovation" - I say it's a load of bollocks. I've approached several different government departments about getting grants/loans/funding/support for extending my existing software business (of which over 90% of its income is exports!) and all they ever end up doing is either dissapearing in the night or saying "sorry, you're too small" or "sorry, you're too successful".
Paul.
It's a recursive loop. Nooooooooooo.
While I do agree with the sentiments of the very first post...
:-o).
... ... but I can ring Microsoft 24/7 and talk to someone who will sort me out with basically anything on Windows, Office, the Internet... ... (ellipses are cool) ...
As a programmer and hardware salesman/repairman I've seen and dealt with open source as well as MS solutions in both the home and office, long and short term.
I will say that the price of Microsoft software is pretty outrageous, almost the same as the hardware if you want the whole shebang. (Then again, try buying enough MYOB functionality to run a shop, that will set you back a pretty penny
Some free software is fantastic, in fact in many cases the free stuff is superior in various ways.
Some users will NEVER get the hang of Open Office. "It's just all too differenty to Word".
It's good to see a worldwide push towards this sort of software model because it will drive prices down and functionality up.
The question still remains whether or not these government departments (or anyone) will benefit in the long term. One thing I can tell you is that in Australia getting some guy to fix your XP box will cost about $35/hr whereas a really hopeless Linux administrator will cost about $75. In a 'regional' area like Newcastle you'll have a hard time finding a guy who can install Debian.
("Debbie who?")
I think it will depend on what these people are doing, and how often they normally have to call the 'computer guy' (me).
this.mod(-2, "RAMBLING");
Aaron.
It's OK Bender, there's no such thing as 2.
Yeah, the maintainers will get paid, but the developers won't. For OSS to take off, we'll need to see:
A) Current COTS developers switch to an OSS model, and make their money through maintenance (By having some sort of "Authorized" system, or other BS way of passing the costs up the chain).
B) Governments not just procuring established OSS projects, but funding the development of new ones.
C) The "old guard" of interests be unsuccessful in convincing legislators to waste money on their products; or if they realize that, under the OSS flag, they can convince governments to pay them outright, without all this nonsense of enterprise licenses, "per seat" charges, and so on.
But to attain such a shift in understanding, one must eliminate the idea -- present at least in the part of the document I was able to read -- that one of the major advantages of OSS is that development is for free, by highly motivated nerds. As long as that's predominantly the case, OSS projects will suffer from the instability, amateurism and inconsistency that we all love, but that professional end users would rather do away with. For business, a predictable mediocrity is better than uncertain brilliance.
If you're up to it... I posted a longer reply (i did get a little off topic to this) on my journal As far as lucid thought go... well, it's all a matter of perspective.
For those not following the constant stream of bullshit coming from Canberra, this is a half-arsed shot at the claim that won the Liberals the previous election: "They're throwing their children overboard".
Jokes aside, the federal government doesn't have a shred of social conscience in them, and a small donation from Billy G will put an end to this lunacy. Mark my words.
I have prefered to circulate documents in PDF ever since a time when I used to get a daily email that usually came as a PDF but would occasionally come as a Word doc, the former looked much more polished.
I also prefer PDF for this reason, it looks smoother and I know it's going to look right pretty much every time for the person viewing it. With docs and Word/Wordpad/Ooo it seems they always render different results and overall does not look as nice.
Over the last 6 months I have applied to many jobs using PDF for resumes, around 10% replied saying they refused to even read it until a doc was given to them. In one instance I even gave them a simple xmlresume generated plain txt file and they still wanted doc before reading.
Wow, that was ... eventfull. I clicked thy image, but nothing displayed. Do you mean the manual way or the highway? Because I'm all for hitchhiking.
The Governement du Québec also published information for it's ministères regarding the use of OSS. http://www.logiciel-libre.gouv.qc.ca/index.php?id= 296
True, slashdot is home of the "everything but open source is evil shit" kiddies.
And closed source is more capitalist. Open source is more communist.. think about it. In my career I've developed about half MS and about half OSS. Both have sucked equally.
Actually, the US was not a penal colony. Only one state (Georgia - and only the upper, non-coastal area at that) had a few ships (from 1732 to 1776) of almost entirely banished debtors, but that does not equate to a generalization about the country as a whole like you tried to present it.
Contrast that small influx of people to the Australian system where 162,000 criminals were imported.
Interestingly, the purpose of this lone penal colony was actually not to get rid of criminals (like the australian migration) but was the result of the Oglethorpe Proposal, in which the monarchy was trying to put a buffer between their southern territory (South Carolina) and the Spaniards in Florida.
Rename the .txt file to .doc, and MS Word will open it happily enough. The clueless HR people just want the nice .doc extension, they don't care whether it's actually .doc format.
Probably more than you think. There was some news a while ago (I think it was on /. actually) about some MS employees who refused to use IE.
Some firms (mostly consulting firms) *insist* on .doc format because they can strip off all details about the person and make it a "company resource". They will add the consulting company logo and details of the company and hmmm... pim^H^H^H market the resume.
That is primarily the reason for some companies wanting only a word doc. They don't have to do a lot of work to "personalize" the resume.
S
... not "differs to."
Now that you mention it I do remember it. You've got a good memory (while I call my friends by the wrong name).
MS's recompense is capped at $5.
Akarsz Magyar Gentoo fórumot? Akkor
The quote "... however, liability in open source is still a glaring issue in comparison to proprietary counterparts, with most licenses including the popular GPL explicitly disclaiming any warranty and liability on behalf of the authors." implies that this is somehow special or different. It is not. All software is entirely without warranty.
Unless you wish to count MS's willingness to back their products with a pay-out up to $5.
Akarsz Magyar Gentoo fórumot? Akkor
It makes at least konqueror widen the page enormously. I don't know if this affects any other browsers - it certainly doesn't work in firefox.
I fully agree that this may not be the right time or place for a government to spend, and as others have pointed out, free software doesn't necessarily mean free. That aside, though, excessive government spending is not unusual and it's not always unjustified. I think the situation's at least slightly more complicated than you make out, however.
In technology or elsewhere, governments will often deliberately arrange to pump extra money into an industry to stimulate it, keep people employed, or keep it going through difficult times so it doesn't collapse before the market comes around again. At the very least, the US government could argue that it's sponsoring Microsoft, which is a US company that employs US workers (despite its overseas interests) and, with its software exports, brings a lot of money into the US economy.
Personally I don't think the IT industry normally requires this type of government sponsorship, however, especially if much of the money is actually going off-shore rather than being recycled within the local economy, as is the case with many non-US countries. In many ways, it'd arguably make more sense for such governments to deploy free software, and circulate money to local people to deploy and support it. In fact, this is exactly what actually is happening in several non-US countries. Doing so keeps more money within the local economy, instead of draining it off to US companies such as Microsoft, and it helps to train local people... if only because Open Source tends to encourage more training and understanding than typical Microsoft products.
Even then it's complex, though, because many of the other contries involved still have economies that are built around big international companies, which tend to deploy and support Microsoft, but also invest lots of money locally.
I don't think it'll catch on though. The standards that we've been handed over the past 15 or so years have tied infrastructure and software to proprietery products.
However, if you're familiar with the Fibonacci sequence, you might find some interesting OSS quotes througout the document by putting together the first letters of the respective words in the sequence.
Sending a PDF also alerts you to which recruitment companies are editing your CV very heavily - most people can not figure out how to copy text from a PDF.
Whoever modded this as flamebait has no clue what working with the Australian gov is like. Unfortunately it is actually far closer to reality than you might think.
Lorem ipsum etc but some of the letters replaced with capital W, and dots added.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing