A Guide to Open Source Software for Australian Government Agencies - review

by Stuart Yeates on 1 April 2005 , last updated

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Introduction

  • Publisher: Australian Government Information Management Office

  • Year: 2005
  • ISBN: 1 74082 085 1

On 18 April 2005 the Australian Government Information Management Office released a A Guide to Open Source Software for Australian Government Agencies. At sixty pages the guide is a focused and in-depth document on the administrative and managerial aspects of open source software. It is part of a larger policy framework for IT spending within the Australian government. In places this results in it having special reference to Australian institutional practices. However, the points being made are always clear and the material presented should have wide application.

Two of the best aspects of the guide are the sections on risk mitigation and licensing. The risk mitigation section discusses the fact that the key risks involved in open source software are the same as those in proprietary software. However, risk assessment and mitigation need to be performed differently because the software is produced by a community rather than by a commercial entity. There is an excellent due diligence risk mitigation checklist. It contains all of the things managers should know about before committing themselves to a particular project.

The licensing section includes six different scenarios and considers which of the more popular open source licences are likely to be applicable for each. This is perhaps the best presentation I’ve seen of this material for the non-technical readers.

The document is careful not to recommend or endorse any particular open source software, even the obvious contenders such as Linux or Apache. Surprisingly for such a non-technical document, an appendix covers packaging—distros.

The Australian document stands in contrast to a recent example-driven Danish government document. That study considers the same topic but looks at questions such as interoperability, politics and socio-economic consequences.

If there anything to be wary of in the Australian guide it would be its underlying assumptions, (a) that the primary reason one might use open source is to save money and (b) that organisations have no significant technical expertise in-house. Those assumptions largely do not hold for the organisations with which I am familiar, but maybe they do in governmental organisations.

If you have someone in your organisation who does not understand open source software (or software at all) because they are on the management wavelength, this is an ideal document to get them up to speed.

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