Greens to use political power in push for open source software
- 22 July, 2010 17:20
- Comments 5
The Australian Greens will use any gain in political influence to push for more open source software procurement by Government, according to its spokesperson, Senator Scott Ludlam.
According to the latest polling data and election experts, the Australian Greens are on track to win the balance of power in the Senate after the Federal Election on August 21.
“The issue we’ve followed most closely [in Government procurement] is open sourcing,” he said. “We’ll be pushing for more open source software because I think there are some serious benefits to doing that.
“Supporting an open source culture for software development is healthy for a couple of different reasons. We’ve got a really vibrant community developing that.”
Microsoft and other major vendors currently supply a large amount of software to the Government through resellers and the channel. But Ludlam said he did not believe a change to open source software would have a major negative effect the industry.
“One of the things we need to do is establish just what the consequences will be,” he said. “It was really difficult to establish that from the conversations I had with the bureaucracy.
“Microsoft is a pretty robust player in global IT markets and I don’t think it’ll go bankrupt if Australia moves over to open sourced technology.”
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Comments
A joke
1
This is just hilarious. Sure let's run all Government departments off Linux then, yeah? And they can use OpenOffice when trying to work on word documents. Image manipulation? Try running Gimp! All good fun.
Until you actually need to do some real work! The fees that would be needed and the retraining are absolutely immense! As a former IT manager, I can say that you'll get a much better deal in the long run with established software that lots of IT professionals are trained to run.
Just more proof that the Greens aren't fit to run anything outside of a local council!
Scott
2
In the words of John McEnroe - "You cannot be serious". Try getting rd level support for Open Source software. Who's going to assess security vulnerabilities in the software? Who's going to implement security vulnerability patches? Most of the people applying for jobs in the Public Service know how to use major vendor office software - are we going to have to pay for every public servant to be retrained? Who's going to pay for the reintegration of Open Source software with government bespoke software that already integrates major vendor software. Do the greens seriously believe this hasn't been looked at before?
Jon Bays
3
There is a place for open source sw in Government and I am certain the public service IT Mandarins know exactly where that is and how to get their political masters to agree to restrict it's use to where it actually makes sense.
Andy
4
Typical myopic attitude from people unwilling or unable to see past the current environment. Proprietary vendor lock-in is actually costing business and our government severely. Open Source OS's & software for backend operations makes perfect sense. The desktop is a trickier proposition but only because of an irrational fear of change. Linux has some very sophisticated and advanced desktop environments that are stable and easy to use.
I wouldn't argue that Linux is the only way to go, that it must replace Windows on the desktop. I would suggest that the decision is not clear cut like it once was. If the right decisions are made on the backend - the desktop can be whatever suits the users output requirements. If it's just simple word processing and web browsing, linux would be perfectly appropriate. A more advanced user may get use from the more mature Windows file management and integrated services - spell check etc. An even more demanding user may benefit from OS X and the interface efficiency that brings...
The key point is that the current situation actually limits our choices.
Pete
5
Anon: That's the way, keep people stupid by forcing them to only know a product, not a procedure. Force them to forever drive a Ford because (paternalistically) we know they're too stupid to drive any other kind of car.
Scott: Who's going to asses? Probably the same people who asses precisely the same at Whitehouse.gov. You do know that's open source, don't you? Or how about Facebook.com. Or twitter.com. Or any other of the major sites created using Open Source.