Gershon report to be implemented in full
Posted by Dave Bath on 2008-11-28
A big round of applause to Lindsay Tanner, who has promised to implement in full the recommendations of the Gershon Report into Australian Government use of IT.
As regular readers will be aware, I was very happy with what was in the report, and indeed the report overall, even though I was disappointed at some things I thought missing (see "Gershon Report into Oz Gov IT: Good, but some holes").
Implementing the report could lead to huge savings in government spending, improved service levels, as well as being good for the environment.
I don’t just complain about, or to, politicians: I sent Tanner a "thankyou" note.
Sam Clifford said
So, when can we expect the Australian Government to move away from closed, commercial software towards open software which is free (OpenOffice, Ubuntu, Apache, etc.) or commercial (Enterprise Red Hat Linux)?
If the government’s concerned about wasteful IT spending perhaps we should analyze how much money we’re forking over to Microsoft to run basic systems which don’t require specialised software (or where specialised software can be run under Linux).
Dave Bath said
Totally agree Sam.
It’s worth noting that there have been “subversives” even contributing from inside government to the outside world, even under Howard:
* xena (at Sourceforge) contributed by National Archives, bulk converts documents to the naa standard archived formats (e.g. OpenOffice/ODF/ISO rather than MS)
* MySource Matrix a content management system, originally developed in-house for AGIMO (when NOIE was disbanded), uses open source tools (I convinced Avi to swap from MySQL from PostgreSQL – not difficult – Avi was an old Vaxer like me and familiar with Oracle, so pg wasn’t a difficult move), and was “white-branded” for use outside government.
Tanner is also hinting at such moves in things like his blog post a little while back. "Internet Drives Policy Rethink" (2008-11-24) include the following:
(My bolding).
To me, it seems Tanner’s comments indicate he is biased to open source / creative-commonsed material, and is probably fighting most areas of senior public service managers.
Actually, specialized software runs under Linux more often than it does under windows, because it is usually developed by academics or technicians. Just consider how much GIS stuff for postgresql came out of agencies like national parks services (and the ability of postgresql to use astronomical times and placements on the planet is a dead giveaway!)
Another example, the good old Gimp (from the unix world) happily opens the standard image archiving format used by astronomers. I doubt if photoshop or any standard commercial software does that!
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