Feds revise open source policy

By Liz Tay, John Hilvert on Jan 27, 2011 4:01 PM
Filed under Finance

Government policy to strengthen open source software procurements.

The Federal Government has revised its policy on open source software to strengthen the consideration of open source software by agencies when they go through ICT software procurements.

The revised policy on open source software (pdf) was issued today by Special Minister of State Gary Gray, who described it as a step up from the previous policy of 'informed neutrality'.

Under the 2005 policy, 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.

The new policy required agencies and prospective tenderers to consider open source software in the procurement process from 1 March 2011.

It targeted processes rather than outcomes, requiring agencies to comply with the Open Source Software Policy Principles while offering no targets for increasing open source software procurements.

The policy noted that agencies should consider first re-using existing software assets before acquiring either open source or proprietary software.

Procurers were required to actively and fairly consider "all types of available software", but decisions were to be made based on "value for money" -- meaning it was not enough that a product was available for free.

"Procurement decisions should take into account whole-of-life costs, capability, security, scalability, transferability, support and manageability requirements," the policy stated.

For procurements worth more than $80,000, agencies were required to include in their tender requirements that they would "consider open source software equally alongside proprietary software".

Agencies making procurements worth less than that amount were required only to document "how they considered open source software suppliers" when selecting suppliers to respond to the Select Tender or Request for Quotation.

Principle 2 of the policy put the onus on Government IT software vendors to consider "all types of available software", justifying their consideration or exclusion of open source software in their tender responses.

Australian Government agencies would also "actively participate in open source software communities" and contribute "where appropriate" under principle 3 of the policy.

The new open source policy came with an explicit opt-out provision (pdf), as with other Whole-of-Government ICT arrangements.

Former South Australian Government ICT service delivery director Stephen Schmid welcomed the changes as a "great step" towards open technology.

Schmid left his State Government post last month to establish the Open Technology Foundation, which aimed to represent Australia and New Zealand Governments in sharing best practices and knowledge with other countries.

The Australian Government Information Management Office declined to support the foundation last year, however, Schmid had been in discussions with Gray and Senator Kate Lundy, and was optimistic about a 2011 launch.

4 comments in this discussion

"@Inbetween_names, you should run your plan to retain a Microsoft Exchange Server solution (as your simplest 'status quo' solution) past the National Archives, for an independent opinion. There ..."

By Graeme Harrison (prof at-symbol post.harvard.edu)

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Comments: 4

Graeme Harrison (prof at-symbol post.harvard.edu) Jan 27, 2011 5:09 PM	Of course, when there is no target, there can be no aim. When any government wants to actually do something, they set a target (eg UK government's cull of public sector jobs)... and when they don't actually intend to do something, they simply have a policy without a target. I note from above: "requiring agencies to comply with the Open Source Software Policy Principles while offering no targets for increasing open source software procurements" At a minimum, AGIMO ought be reporting annually on Open Source use, comparing Australia to those countries which are actively trying to limit the Balance of Payments outflows for proprietary software. Such comparison data will be useful, and ultimately lead to some targets. It can take a long time to turn a ship around, but you can't expect it to start happening until you apply your hand to the wheel. AGIMO ought develop a stick-reboot approach, of a standardised minimum-workstation approach, based on say Ubuntu with full Open Office, Firefox, etc installation, and suggest that three years is a reasonable period to have some of the vanilla workstations in agencies running such systems. In other words, those agencies whose systems are run via web interface (not local EXE files) could consider such a solution. Then if the workstation is playing up, one simply inserts the standard USB stick, and reboots, and a clean install is achieved, without any back-ups necessary. The basic users could have their work email provided via web-based email, to avoid backup issues, and web-based document back-up/storage (cloud or agency based) for docs, also avoiding need to back-up/restore client data. It would greatly lessen the need for first-level IT support in the agencies...
inbetween_names Jan 27, 2011 9:30 PM	LOL funny stuff. Graeme these are wonderful aspirations but I live in a world of legacy systems, belligerent users and limited budgets. Let me just wave my magical Ubuntu wand which is going to effortlessly migrate terrabytes of legacy data to the cloud, transform my users to accepting drones that won’t question change and buckets of money to implement these changes. Oh wait that’s right open source is free so it won’t cost anything to implement and support, so you can scrub the last item. Don’t get me wrong, in some situations and some applications open source is a great solution but it is not the be all and end all. But until you understand the requirements you can’t mandate the solution, yet here we are and you have boldly mandated a one size fits all solution without even knowing the requirements of the basic user, oh that’s right, email, they just need email. Let’s just can that Exchange infrastructure and migrate them all to Gmail. Wow, how simple is that. Sorry but your simplistic solution deserves a flippant response.
Ace Jan 28, 2011 2:37 AM	Yes, I think that Open Source as a desktop OS is still a little ways off. It would seem to make more sense to concentrate (at least in the short to medium term) on the server side of things, where open source solutions are more than a match in many cases for proprietary solutions. As more applications become web based, and cloud options mature, the role of the desktop will probably fade to presumeably a point in the future where they become more of a network device than a desktop.
Graeme Harrison (prof at-symbol post.harvard.edu) Jan 28, 2011 2:35 PM	@Inbetween_names, you should run your plan to retain a Microsoft Exchange Server solution (as your simplest 'status quo' solution) past the National Archives, for an independent opinion. There are few pieces of software as proprietary as Exchange, for doing such an OpenSource thing as handling public email. The Exchange default is for users to wrap their past dealings (old email traffic) in Archive Files (dot PST). But wait, Microsoft's archives aren't really archives, as they don't meet any archive standards. They are entirely proprietary formats, just with further Microsoft-only encoding, to make them even less available to anything other than a Microsoft program. Even external access needs to go through proprietary Microsoft software to temporarily access these files. This is the worst possible format for any government agency (or anyone else) to keep their email history within. Because more and more of the total internal and external communications are done via email, it is a recipe for disaster. Even at a cost, I would immediately get all email off Exchange. And importantly, sit back and ask yourself how it came to pass that government agencies are locking up their archives in an entirely proprietorial format, when the original idea of email was a very open standard available to a whole range of email application software. The answer is Microsoft. Microsoft couldn't lock people in with a generic email format, interchangeable with other email apps, so Microsoft went for its famous "Embrace, Enhance, Extinguish" approach to email as well, so now Microsoft takes email files (originally derived from the Unix-based internet) and saves them in a very proprietorial way. When your agency goes to its old records for something, you will not find that prior generations allowed correspondence to be put in entirely proprietary formats - you can still read the letters etc. Future generations will think the current generation were all fed a story about the Emperor's New Clothes, in terms of how they let a whole generation of public information get stored in a proprietary format. And Microsoft knows that the longer you continue putting all of your data in a proprietary format, the harder and harder it is to decide to go to open formats and true standards. But it is in fact always worth making the switch. And as to my specifying a basic workstation, I was simply suggesting that those workstations that only do email, office productivity suite, and web-based access to central databases/applications are suitable for standardising on (say) Ubuntu/OpenOffice/Firefox, over Windows/MSoffice/IE, as it does overcome all licensing issues, and would allow implementation of true ISO standard formats (eg Open Text over MS pseudo-ISO memory dump formats). Anyone with any knowledge of how the formats actually store things understands that with Open Text having the plain ASCII text of the document at the start of the file, with all format encoding after that in the file, this approach guarantees content readability in hundreds of years time, whereas all the memory dump (binary object) formats are inherently a function of the generation of software used to write them. I have keenly followed Microsoft's approach to standards since Microsoft first started copying the functionality of Word Perfect in the mid-1980s to make Word a functional word processing solution. If you want to understand where you will go with Microsoft "standards" look to the past and see what they have done. Besides, I was not mandating a basic workstation configuration, but rather suggesting a 'preferred solution' that agencies would need to consider before jumping to their own preference for proprietorial lock-in. And I am very sensitive to the issue of costs and legacy systems. As to costs, I believe a lot of first-level support disappears when you get rid of licensing, and when you allow users (especially those in remote offices) to have a one-step memory stick re-install to 'as supplied' for all workstations. That allows the IT resources to be applied to useful functions, not sorting out re-installs of basic workstations or chasing licensing issues, or doing package-by-package reinstalls. And as to legacy systems, government will always have preference for having systems that work for 10-15 years, rather than 1-4 years as some faster-moving commercial outfits might prefer. But if you want legacy systems to keep running, it is far preferable to write them upon Open Source platforms, as the platform will remain stable for the life of the custom application. If you write the same app to run in a Microsoft environment, you will have three major re-writes required in the same period, just to keep migrating to new API sets, and newer Microsoft tools, given Microsoft is so quick to drop it last-great-idea approach in favour of its next-great-idea approach. And all of those approaches, from the PC-Cobol compiler of 1985 that never worked (and was withdrawn) to Dot Net, the one common thread is that they are destined to keep you entirely wed to Microsoft-only products, and to migrate the customer further and further away from vendor neutrality. So, I understand that most places are so locked-up in Microsoft formats and environments, that change is very difficult, but I say, "Look at that mess, and tell me this is the way it ought to be!" And when you decide that no rational process would have led to the current problems, that is the point where it becomes obvious that change should come, even if it will take a long time, and present difficulties. But it is time for AGIMO to encourage at least small steps, rather than locking-in the status quo.