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Our Blogs Open Sauce When politics does not get in the way of FOSS | When politics does not get in the way of FOSS |
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| by Sam Varghese | |
| Monday, 23 March 2009 | |
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The Australian Greens have been using FOSS in some states for a few years; one of their policies is to "encourage government use of open-source software and require the use of open and publicly documented file formats." The use of FOSS in Victoria has been pushed along by a few super-geeks, one of whom, Matthew Wright, now serves as an IT spokesman; Russell Coker, a well-known FOSS developer and independent consultant, is also part of the IT working group. This makes FOSS adoption relatively easy - there are experts who can roll out what is needed. And their motivation is that they are relatively aligned with the party's policies, not because of indoctrination but because they are naturally inclined that way. Wright, a former employee of Reuters and HP, says the use of FOSS fits in with Green policies well. Russell points to a few policies: that government information, both internal and external, should be made available in a format that is accessible by all, and is not restricted by the need to purchase additional software; that electronic government documents should be saved in an open document standard; and that government should be an active proponent and contributor to open standard forums. The process of FOSS adoption by the Greens began seven years ago and now the servers are all running Linux. There are also a number of Linux desktops in the Victorian and other set-ups, with an upgrade to Fedora 10, the latest version of Red Hat's community Linux distribution, being due. Says Wright: "Originally they just had a couple of computers that had been ad-hoc whacked together, and I was just generally making myself available to help. I went and fixed something and that got me in trouble, you know!" He said the next thing was that he began playing the role of IT support person in his spare time. "I spent about two years looking after the boxes they had at the time and they kept falling over and they kept getting viruses and they kept sending out viruses to people and it was just a real disaster. "We had to move to better infrastructure. Being a political party you couldn't risk pirated software. We had to be serious about it and I showed them the cost difference of going down the route of getting a server infrastructure, with Microsoft software at the time versus delivering the same kind of services from a Linux open source platform." CONTINUED |
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