[LINK] Australian Government Open Source Guide Released

[Tom Worthington]

Greetings from the Second annual Open Computing in Government Conference at 
Australian National University in Canberra. The Senator Abetz, Special 
Minister of State launched the Australian Government's open source software 
guide at the conference this morning.

The guide is available in PDF format at 
<http://www.sourceit.gov.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/42065/A_Guide_to_Open_Source_Software.pdf> 
(HTML is promised "shortly"). After the speech I asked the minister if 
there was scope of government helping companies sell open source products 
to governments of other countries. He suggested working with state 
governments to promote Australian open source. The shadow IT minister 
Stephen Conroy also talked of working with the state government in his 
talked earlier in the day. One point of difference is that Senator Abetz 
suggested Free Trade Agreements, such as the one with Singapore, could 
assist Australian companies selling software overseas.

Gus Robertson, VP Channel & Partners Asia Pacific for RedHat said the 
federal government  had done "a lot of work" on open source and said work 
was now needed in the CITC 4 to settle on standard liability and indemnity 
conciliations for government.

In his speech Senator Eric Abetz also said "Shortly the Government will 
release MySource as a 'white-branded' product. He said it was "... a fine 
example of the Government sharing and re-using technology, delivering 
greater value for money from its ICT investment."  MySource is a Content 
Management System product from Squiz Pty Limited <http://www.squiz.net/> 
used for the AGIMO website.

The conference continues today and tomorrow with speakers on opens source 
policy for government 
<http://www.auug.org.au/events/2005/ocg/program.html>. I am chairing panel 
sessions today on opens source business models and tomorrow on intellectual 
property issues.



Tom Worthington FACS HLM tom.worthington at tomw.net.au Ph: 0419 496150
Director, Tomw Communications Pty Ltd            ABN: 17 088 714 309
http://www.tomw.net.au                PO Box 13, Belconnen ACT 2617
Visiting Fellow, Computer Science, Australian National University