The Australian government’s decision to adopt FOSS stems from the desire to provide its citizens with a more open, better-informed, interactive and efficient government service practice. The current strategy extends from 2012-2015. The government, however, has been adopting a policy of “informed neutrality” and “value for money” since 2005.
In 2010, ICT Strategy Board of Trustees approved a memo on that instructed all governmental departments to consider FOSS solutions in their procurement of new ICT products and to provide a detailed explanation of why a department chose to opt out of FOSS if that situation should occur. This same board then released a general FOSS strategy for Australia in the following year as specified above.
Along with this strategy, the board also produced literature on open source, regarding its philosophy, structure, benefits and comparison to proprietary software. This went along with another piece of literature with instructions of how to execute the strategy for top-level management. This additive covers aspects in detail such as the current state of the FOSS sector, and development of SME’s, general concerns regarding licenses and support, sourcing, preparing a procurement plan, risk management and mitigation, and the legalities concerned with FOSS procurement.
This way, the Australian government went from a more decentralized agency lead approach to open source procurement to a much more centralized and stream-lined manner due to an ICT reform programme that aims at improving integration, cooperation and transparency.
Along with its desire to improve its government services, the Australian government has found, after conducting studies, that the FOSS use in ICT directly leads to
- GDP growth
- Decreases leakage from licensing agreements with proprietary corporations.
Australian FOSS strategy main goals:
Within the national strategy, there are three large based priority areas:
- Delivering better service.
- Improving the efficiency of government operations.
- Engaging openly.
Advantages of Australian FOSS strategy
Below are some of the advantages brought by FOSS since 2008 prior to the release of the newest one have been:
- Delivered improved agency capability to manage large ICT-enabled programs.
- Focused on ICT sustainability and realized $1 billion in efficiencies from agency ICT business-as-usual operations.
- Accelerated a coordinated, whole-of-government approach to data centres, which will avoid $1 billion in costs over the next 10 to 15 years.
- Coordinated ICT procurement and associated efficiencies in high volume, high cost areas such as Microsoft licensing, telecommunications, desktops and data centres.
- Provided better information on agency ICT costs.