Age: “Australia’s federal and state governments are under fire for taking a blinkered approach to information technology spending – ignoring local companies and alternatives to Microsoft.”
…
“According to the federal “e-government” strategy, Better Services, Better Government, announced last week, Canberra will encourage trials of open-source software within the framework of fit-for-purpose and value-for-money.
But the moves come too late, says shadow federal minister for information technology, Senator Kate Lundy; federal IT spending with Microsoft has already placed the government in an “innovation straitjacket.””
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“Open source has begun to make inroads locally. The Department of Veterans’ Affairs, Centrelink and Bureau of Meteorology recently made separate decisions to move part of their IT infrastructure to Linux. Early this year, the Northern Territory Department of Education replaced Microsoft software with the open source word processing suite StarOffice 5.2 in its 160 schools.”
(As a reward for making it that far, Moo!)