Australian Tax Office Moves Toward Open Standards 10
An anonymous reader writes "Neat! The Australian Tax Office (the Aussie equivalent of the IRS) has been criticised for being too reliant on Microsoft software and, well, they're doing something about it such as supporting Java runtime for the first time. So maybe I can do my tax return on something more secure than a Windows PC this year?" This makes a good update for our previous post on the office's open source moves.
Great...where is the link on YRO ? (Score:2, Insightful)
Comment Title is wrong (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Java efforts (Score:5, Insightful)
If a government department, federal, state or local, uses all of it's budget, it gets the same budget next year. If it doesn't, it loses budget. This is of course why government IT buying is always frenzied just before budget time.
Also, in government, there is a perception, a strong perception, that money spent = value, as money spent increases, value increases. A product that is given freely therefore has no value. It does not therefore work properly because it is valueless. If, in the case of vendorless open source software, it can not be made to work because you cannot pay the vendor to make it work. All tasks in government resolve around expenditure rather than functionality. For example, they don't put up a website for australian heritage, they spend money on doing... something... for australian heritage. Senator Alston doesn't have a website, instead he spends $4M on an IT project of great importance.
So you see why they can't just use web based forms. No vendor to spend money on.
Java (Score:3, Insightful)
Yeah... (Score:4, Insightful)
Seriously -- welcome to the beauracracy. Every multi-tiered business, every government, every organization that actually requires organization; they all work this way. It's the sad, pathetic result of budgets.
I've heard of organizations that don't tell their sub-organizations what their budgets are. They just let them request money, and as the money gets used up they make it harder to request more. It's a nice idea, but ultimately just leads to more complex and annoying ways of gaming the system.
Re:Java efforts (Score:3, Insightful)