Government Moves to Actively Consider the Greater Use of Open Source Software
- 27
- Jan
Today I released the revised Australian Government policy on open source software. The revised policy aims to strengthen the consideration of open source software by agencies when they go through ICT software procurements.
The Government’s previous policy, established in 2005, was one of ‘informed neutrality.’ This meant that agencies took an unbiased position that did not favour open source or proprietary software and procured the solution that was the best ’value for money’ and ‘fit for purpose’ for their specific requirement. Since then, there has been an increase in the maturity of the open source software products and the use of open source software by governments around the world. In recent years, many governments have revised their policies to increase the adoption of open source software.
This revised Australian Government policy on open source software will ensure that we maintain international best practice and that our purchases of software will continue to reflect best value for money for the Government.
The revised policy will commence on 1 March 2011 for all ICT software procurements. The revised policy is available on the Department of Finance and Deregulation website in PDF (134 KB) and RTF (103 KB) formats. This revised policy will also be included in the revised Guide to Open Source Software for Australian Government Agencies, which is due for release in March 2011.
I encourage you to read the revised policy.
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You can start by not mandating the ECMA version of OOXML. That automatically precludes the use of any open source software for office productivity.
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“You can start by not mandating the ECMA version of OOXML. That automatically precludes the use of any open source software for office productivity.”
+1
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I’m afraid that statement appears to be incorrect – there are a number of open source (including GPL) offerings listed as implementing that version here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_software_that_supports_Office_Open_XML#ECMA-376_1st_edition_implementations
It is also worth noting that the requirement to support that particular version of OOXML actualy excludes the latest version of Microsoft Office – Office 2010 cannot output the required version of files.
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Hi Chris,
Although those FOSS products might support OOXML, they do not necessarily support the proprietary components in EMCA-376 and ISO 29500 Transitional and are therefore not necessarily interoperable. This is why at least, the Strict version of ISO 29500 should have been chosen over both Transitional and ECMA-376 (naturally, ODF is by far a better choice over these), if we care about openness and interoperability. Of course Microsoft can’t write to this standard yet, so we’d have to change office suites.
Similarly, although Microsoft Office 2007 SP2 (and 2010) “support” saving as ODF documents, they don’t necessarily meet the standard (surprise, surprise). This is for a different reason however – poor implementation of the standard. See Rob Weir’s investigation http://ur1.ca/30wf5
Growlaw covered the interoperability of OOXML between Microsoft Office and OpenOffice.org (Go-OO) quite well last December, see http://ur1.ca/2n3c7
Cheers,
-c
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“so we’d have to change office suites”
The cost of this would be material. It may be unfortunate, but we need to understand gov’s attitude here is pragmatic.
Remember ‘open’ does not always mean ‘free’. Especially when product use falls under ‘commercial’ description.
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Wonderful news, and a very well timed announcement.
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Agreed! Perfect way to end Australia Day
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actively participating in open technology communities is a great step – i take my hat off to agimo.
looking forward to agimo participating in the Open Technology Foundation which already has the support of State Governments
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This policy is simple, well thought out and puts Open Source where it should be: fairly in competition.
In our panel session at the “Open in the Public Sector” at lca2011 on Tuesday we were discussing exactly this problem. The consensus was that Open Source often has a great business case, but it’s not seen at the same level as proprietary software. This policy should change that.
Encouraging governemnt participation in open source communities is also a very effective use of government money.
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Agreed, the treatment of open source as an equal party in such purchases is to be commended.
I would like to see that extended to other parts of government in the policy making side too, so that the voices of open source companies, developers and users can be heard in the discussions on items like the damage of software patents, ACTA and the proposed Trans-Pacific Partnership.
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Thank you, and bravo. I look forward to reading the updated Guide to Open Source Software for Australian Government Agencies in March.
Chris
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[...] new policy, announced by Federal Special Minister of State Gary Gray on the Australian Government Information Management Office blog this morning, asks agencies to include a provision in their procurement plans for projects over [...]
A question for all the ‘glass-half-full’ types:
What implementations of Free and Open Source software in government where undertaken as a result of the previous policy of ‘informed neutrality’?
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Hi Arthur,
Thank you for your question. My name is Scott Wallace and I’m the Assistant Secretary at AGIMO responsible for the Open Source Software policy.
Under the previous policy of ‘informed neutrality’, there have been quite a few instances of open source software products within the Australian Government. Recent data indicates that there are more than 200 open source software products in use across 100 agencies. These products include, for example, Apache Jakarta, Eclipse, Real VNC, 7-zip, PuTTY, Apache Tomcat and Mozilla Firefox. We anticipate that the new policy will further encourage agencies to adopt open source software where it is fit for purpose and represents value for money.
Cheers,
Scott
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Thanks for the feedback.
As to interaction with the public, how should one encourage government websites to link to sites like http://pdfreaders.org/ instead of Adobe and inform people of Free software that can read documents created in Microsoft Word rather than just advertise the Microsoft product?
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Arthur
Thanks for your suggestion – we have just released a updated Web Guide and included a page in it on PDF Readers.
We will encourage agencies to link to this PDF Reader page from their websites.
Peter
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Thanks for the feedback… for those who didn’t follow the link, it only lists 4 readers and includes Adobe Acrobat Reader as a “free alternative”, whilst omitting links to other readers like Sumatra or in fact to http://www.pdfreaders.org/ or http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_PDF_software
okular and evince are Free As In Freedom and free as in beer pdf readers, whilst Adobe Acrobat reader and Foxit are free as in beer closed source proprietary pdf readers.
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The Prime Ministers website was redeveloped using the open source content management system – Drupal.
More and more government departments are seeing the benefits of open source CMSs for their web presence.
Bravo AGIMO!
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“Don’t forget Squiz Matrix is the most used CMS by Australian government, has been for years and it’s also GPL. Point is, the government has been using open source for years so it’s good to see it’s finally being officially recognised.”
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Minister,
As a former SES officer with several years experience working with AGITMO’s predecessors (OGO, OGIT, NOIE, et. al.) I’m surprised this organisation is still in existence. I could never understand how it survived the fall of the Howard Government; it was a creation of Mr Howard when he was first elected and had a raft of grand plans and ideas that were going to enhance the Australian economy through up-take of “on-line everything”. It would be worth your while to sit back and evaluate what this organisation has actually achieved; my take on it would be “absolutely nothing”! Look at GateKeeper (which I managed and failed to kill) for example. Look at these recent announcements on open systems. What does all this actually mean? And where is the benefit for the economy? Disbanding AGITMO and like organisations and putting the savings into flood reconstruction would be a much better use ...
... of your time.
Happy to discuss further.
Regards,
Peter
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Great new, I see great things from this policy, just remember Microsoft will always tell you that their software is open source, however if you look closer, you will see it’s not. Shared source doesn’t equal open source.
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[...] post: Government Moves to Actively Consider the Greater Use of Open … This entry was posted on Thursday, January 27th, 2011 at 1:00 am and is filed under Software, [...]
Congratulations. Mandating the consideration of open source solutions may deliver substantial savings for all Australians. I look forward to the states and quangos following your lead.
However what really excites me is Principle 3 “Australian Government agencies will actively participate in open source software communities and contribute back where appropriate.” Such active engagement could spawn the growth of a host of substantial local open source businesses -which would help redress our country’s ever growing ICT trade balance.
Thanks
Bob
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Congratulations. Mandating the consideration of open source solutions may deliver substantial savings for all Australians. I look forward to the states and quangos following your lead.
However what really excites me is Principle 3 “Australian Government agencies will actively participate in open source software communities and contribute back where appropriate.” Such active engagement could spawn the growth of a host of substantial local open source businesses – which would help redress our country’s ever growing ICT trade balance.
Thanks
Bob
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You may want to ask why local governments in Queensland opted for an expensive, proprietary and untried disaster management application written by some ex-employees of one of the councils. QLD local government had the option of deploying the open source Sahana application that has been used in most of the major disasters around the world since the 2005 tsunami but chose to waste money instead.
Not-invented-here syndrome?
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while bob has highlighted the best thing to come out of this development, this is still merely periphery; tackle the real issue – open-sourcing the development life-cycle
this is the big one and represents yet another burden of waste on the economy – directly in the costs associated with systems developers reinventing the wheel, but also indirectly, by keeping the (often costly) experience gained as proprietary to those that were involved.
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Speaking as an IT contractor in Canberra: I’d like to see open-sourcing of software developed in-house by the government itself, to the point of the source code repositories having public mirrors. I’d like to see it become common practise for departments to re-use one another’s code, for “They wrote something over at DFAT that does that” to be a common occurrence, for a government codebase to develop, for that codebase to be the first place that you look when you need something.
It’d also do us all a world of good to know that every line we write (that isn’t sensitive in itself) will be public.
I’d also like to see things like XML schema documents to be publicly hosted, with an organisational commitment to the urls at which they are available. Need to put a BSB number in an XML document? Don’t roll your own – declare the element to be ...
... of the XML type defined at the publicly viewable schema at the ATO.
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Agreed. Just think of the possibilities the Government could do to improve existing open source software by having teams of developers instead of paying annual license fees.
Instead of forking out millions each year for Microsoft Office, spend that money on enhancing OpenOffice.org or LibreOffice for future benefit!
Instead of handing over millions each year for Microsoft Exchange, support development of one (or more) of the dozens of competing products.
And so on…
-c
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while source-code is a good start, i would have to add the other documents & artefacts generated as part of the development lifecycle…
of particular interest are post-mortems, independent reviews, enhancements & bug-fixes made to systems that have already been operational, ‘lessons learnt’ and the like. anything that highlights a design flaw and it’s fix; (the more unexpected the better!)
obviously the goal here is not to hang joe bloggs out to dry, so anonymity should be allowed for.
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Great policy, and good first step, however, government purchasing practices will continue to inadvertently favour proprietary software until we see guidelines on how to compare the value Open Source and Proprietary Software which provide tools to assess the holistic value of Open Source. This is explained in the article Governments don’t know how to buy free software .
A good starting point would be the European Union “Guideline for Public administrations on Procurement and Open Source Software”, summarised here: http://cameronshorter.blogspot.com/2010/10/eu-guidelines-for-public.html
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To webmaster regarding recent spam: If you haven’t already, take a look at Akismet comment spam filter for WordPress. It’s brilliant at blocking spam and will make your lives much easier.
The plugin ships with WordPress by default, so just get an account (Gov might need to pay) and enable it. If not, you can search and add it yourself.
Feel free to delete this comment.
-c
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Thanks for the feedback Chris. We’re familiar with Akismet but use a different spam plug-in for the AGIMO Blog instead. Providing Akismet for all of the current and future sites hosted on our govspace service (including the AGIMO Blog) would incur licensing costs that we’d rather avoid. Using Akismet also involves sending comment data through their service – we’d rather use a solution that keeps the data on our own infrastructure.
You may also be interested in a recent post about spam management on the blog. The amount of spam comments on the blog has dramatically reduced over time thanks to measures like the ones discussed in that post, but it’s almost impossible to block spam completely.
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The first thing Open Source Software to succeed in Government is to let Technical Managers educate themselves, go the hard yard and think how OSS communities work. They have to start browsing all the OSS communities on the net and start registering and collaborate.
Majority of the gov’t Technical Managers are not innovative and they just rely on proprietary software!
Most of the gov’t systems and applications could be converted in 5 to 10 years with open source software if Technical Managers have good planning, courage and vision.
Open Source Software is F R E E … as in FREEDOM!
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Microsoft welcomes the release of the Government’s revised open source software policy. See Microsoft’s letter to the Minister at http://blogs.msdn.com/b/govtech/archive/2011/02/04/microsoft-welcomes-federal-commitment-to-value-for-money-procurement.aspx
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Note: These are my own thoughts.
Microsoft starts by saying that they welcome it, but put in a line about how so long as everything is judged on whether it’s “fit for purpose”.
“A public policy that requires that all options be considered makes perfect sense. Procurement based on whole of life costs, capability, security, scalability, transferability, interoperability, support and management requirements will deliver taxpayers the best value for their money.”
So the trick is, defining the purpose. When you define the purpose in terms of a specific Microsoft technology, it effectively rules out open source and even competing proprietary products. This is what the current COE is saying for example, in “office suites must support ECMA-376″ so that only something which can do that specific thing is “fit for purpose”. The purpose is not “creating a document which is truly interoperable with a wide variety of products”, no, it’s “supporting Microsoft specific ...
... ECMA-376″.
Similarly, COE mandates the MAPI protocol for email and calendaring, instead of specifying “a calendaring system that does, X, Y, Z.”
So when your “purpose” is defined in the support of a Microsoft specific technology, it nullifies the whole point. This is why Microsoft always touts this line about something being “fit for purpose” – they know that Government departments are already locked into Microsoft and that they define their requirements around that fact. That way, competing products which offer a perfectly legitimate solution, cannot be considered because they don’t support Microsoft specific technology. Cool, huh?
Microsoft then goes on to say how they want to make changes to the policy, to no-doubt further push their own agenda:
“We have also offered to assist AGIMO, if the Government considers it appropriate, in its revision of the Guide to Open Source Software. While there will probably be some who think this would be inappropriate, the offer of contribution has been made in good faith and in recognition of Microsoft Australia’s experience with some of the challenges of mixed software environments.”
As long as departments continue to define their “purposes” in Microsoft specific terms, wonderful policies like this will continue to have minimal impact.
-c
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Whoops, I cut the wrong quote:
“There is no obvious reason why any purchaser would need or want to limit by policy the scope of available potential products and vendors in software procurement. All suitable options should always be considered provided the ultimate procurement decision is based upon a ‘value for money, fit for purpose’ calculation.”
-c
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The revised open source policy is welcomed but falls far short of what needs to be done to accelerate a change in an agency’s ICT procurement behaviour. The following are current issues my company has encountered when dealing with government agencies:
- lack of understanding that open source software is to be procured as a service not as a product.
- lack of understanding that open source software is developed on a global scale yet supported locally.
- lack of understanding of licensing models resulting in tenders that exclude open source options.
- lack of skills within Government to assess, develop and support open source.
- lack of knowledge on the use of open standards in procurement specifications and the requirement for solutions to comply with open standards.
To address the above issues the Government could:
- implement a programme of procurement skills needed to evaluate open source solutions and then chose a service provider. In ...
... other words, the procurement of open source solutions is about the evaluation of software and the procurement of services.
- raise the level of awareness, skills and confidence in agencies on the different licensing, support, commercial and cost models associated with open source solutions.
In addition firm guidelines for ensuring open source and proprietary solutions are to be considered equally during procurement exercises could include:
- a standard form of words to state positively in tenders that the Government’s policy is to consider open source solutions on their merits according to total lifetime cost of ownership.
- authoritative advice for those involved in procurement to the particulars on licensing, warranty and indemnity associated with open source.
- the specification and evaluation of compliance with open standards.
evaluating the potential for re-use across the public sector.
Apart from the obvious benefits of cost savings, elimination of duplication and innovation that open source brings, wider adoption of open source in general will boost the Australian ICT industry. Large proprietary software companies are usually global and concentrated in a few parts of the world. These global companies make investments on the basis of global returns, and licence fee payments are returned to the global revenue pool, in other words much of the Australian tax dollars used to pay for software is moved off-shore.
Due to the nature of open development where global communities of coders collaborate to produce complex software solutions, local Australian SMEs will usually provide installation, customisations and post implementation support for the open source solution. Thus most of the money spent on the total cost of ownership for an IT project remains within the local economy.
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