News stories about Linux and Open Source in government and legislation about Open Source.

 NSW Revenue Office bets on Linux agility, Oct 01, 2009

The NSW Office of State Revenue (OSR) collects about $14 billion a year and Linux plays a key part in it.

The Australian Defence Force's latest flight simulator runs on SuSE Linux-based clusters of Opteron servers.

Tomorrow, the Department of Health and Human Services will host its first “code-a-thon” dedicated to the National Health Information Network and its Connect software. About 80 programmers, led by Apache developer (and Collabnet employee) Brian Behlendorf, will spend about four hours trying to stamp out bugs in the open source software gateway, which is based on National Health Information Network (NHIN) conventions.

Linux-based and open-source healthcare software has been around for years. Unless you were in health IT, however, chances are you never even heard of it. It's time to pay attention, because it may soon be tracking your medical records.

If you’ve gone to USPS.com to track and confirm delivery of a letter or package, you’ve used the U.S. Postal Service’s Product Tracking System (PTS) and probably not known it. And you might not have noticed either when USPS moved the system to open source.

While some organizations continue to hide their open-source adoption, NOiV (Nederland Open in Verbinding), has published a map of over 200 open-source products currently in use by the Dutch central government as of mid-2009.

The company in charge of providing technology to the US intelligence community has invested in an open source firm to provide enterprise-search technology to the CIA and other intelligence agencies.

Using the open-source model, whoever wins a public IT contract could use existing open software as a starting point, and the finished product would be open-source as well. That would allow government departments to easily modify and customize software when they need to, and even open them up for governments elsewhere to use for their own purposes.

Whatever the Swiss government thinks, there are plenty of users in Switzerland who know that open source provides a viable alternative route.

The government’s renewed commitment to open source and the downturn are combining to drive double-digit growth for the UK Linux channel.

This is a key moment for open source. In some ways it is going from strength to strength. But it remains vulnerable to counter-attack from the copyright industries.

South African government policy on open source software use exists, but it still has a lot of work to do, says the State IT Agency (SITA).

Open source is picking up steam in enterprise computing, even as the economy peters out. If West Virginia Sen. Jay Rockefeller has his way, open source will soon make its mark on medicine, too, with the lower cost of open source a key impetus behind the move.

The NSW Electoral Commission (NSWEC) will leave Linux for Windows Server when it develops its new vote counting and reporting application, which is slated to cost $1.4 million over the next two years.

The President’s announcement of a coordinated system of Electronic Medical Records for both soldiers and veterans could be a big win for open source. The military and VA records will transfer under NHIN-CONNECT.

Once again, the New South Wales State Government has left Linux out in the cold after being knee-deep in speculation the open source platform would make in-roads into its desktop environment.

The U.S government can save billions and foster innovation if it deploys open-source software.

The Gendarmie Nationale – France’s national police force – has been slowly introducing open source software to its 105,000+ policemen since 2005. In 2008 the decision was made to use only Ubuntu for all new workstations. A year on shows this has been a great success with happy users, a better network and cost savings of over seven million euro per year.

Open source solutions Red Hat announced that Ecuador's Internal Revenue Service, SRI Ecuador, has developed a stable and secure platform for its Internet-based tax return project using a combination of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 and JBoss Enterprise Application Platform.

Vivek Kundra says he'll improve the federal government's technology, but he faces an immense challenge. His plan for using more open-source software, such as the Linux computer operating system and MySQL database, is an affront to Microsoft and Oracle, which sell software that competes with open-source products.

A New York State Assembly bill intends to give open source developers the opportunity to offset 20 per cent of their development expenses, up to a maximum of $200, against tax. The bill summary explains that the New York parliament considerably reduces its costs by using open source software "such as Mozilla for email, Firefox for web browsing and WebCal for electronic calendars".

The first Open Source Project to Be Implemented by the Ecuadorian Government Enables Internet-based Tax Returns with a Combination of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 and JBoss Enterprise Application Platform.

Our world is changing technologically at an astonishingly fast rate. Billions of computer chips are being embedded in devices from mobile phones to traffic sensors. All these new devices are being linked together along with the computers already connected around the world through the Internet.

Sun Microsystems Inc. Chairman Scott McNealy wants President Barack Obama's administration do what the United Kingdom, Denmark and other countries have done: Encourage, as a matter of policy, open-source software adoption.

Will the UK government really embrace open source and open standards?

The UK government is getting serious about using open source as a building block in systems development. Yesterday its top IT policy-making body, the CIO Council, published a 10 point action plan that frees central and local government departments to use open source systems where possible.

President Obama’s Administration is being encouraged to embrace open source software, copying a similar UK government game plan.

A firestorm is brewing over proposals issued by the UK's IT advisory body over which browsers the public sector should support. Taxpayers will be forced to change their browsing habits and computer setup to accommodate the guidelines, say web standards experts.

If you want local and state government officials to take a serious look at open-source software,

The Australian Taxation Office has advised Australians using Apple or Linux operating systems that they will be unable to lodge tax returns electronically using the ATO's e-tax software unless they use a Windows emulator or a kiosk in one of the agency's shop fronts.

In a setback for the City of Vienna's three-year-old open-source migration programme, city authorities decided on Wednesday to scrap most of the systems that have so far adopted the city's custom-built Linux distribution, instead approving an €8m migration to Windows Vista.

Casey Coleman, the chief information officer of the General Services Administration, spoke at a Federal Open Source Alliance Web seminar held earlier today.

The Brazilian Electoral Supreme Court announced last Friday that Brazil's 2008 elections will use 430,000 electronic voting machines running GNU/Linux and open sauce voting applications.

In multiple media reports over the past two weeks, the US Army has professed its love for the penguin. The Army eventually intends to move from a Windows-based infrastructure over to Linux for its new, roughly $200bn weapons program.

Trusted Computer Solutions has upgraded its Security Blanket security compliance software so that it can make Red Hat Enterprise Linux compliant with the settings defined in the Defense Information Systems Agency’s Security Technical Implementation Guide for that operating system.

What happens when the U.S. Army, whose Blue-Force Tracking system runs on Microsoft software, starts introducing the Future Combat Systems (FCS) vehicles that use the Linux operating system?

France's gendarmerie has apparently taken quite a liking to such open source software as Firefox and OpenOffice. Now, there are plans to migrate 70,000 workstations in the country's largest administrative complex to Linux according to a report in the French daily L'Express

Agencies expect to increase open source use, vendor support remains a concern

Norway has established a new policy mandating government adoption of open standards. Starting in 2009, all documents published on state-operated web sites will have to use HTML, PDF, or ODF formats.

According to this article (Norwegian only, sorry) on digi.no the Norwegian government has mandated the use of open document formats from January 1st, 2009. I’ll give a brief overview of what the article actually says.

The New Zealand Ministry for Justice believes that open source software is a more stable, supportable, and cost-effective choice compared to proprietary solutions.

Bitter political foes South and North Korea are to jointly develop a version of Linux.

As Microsoft's Office Open XML document format remains in ISO limbo, a trio of countries are pushing forward an adoption of the alternative Open Document Format (ODF) instead, according to an ODF advocacy group.

ODF supporters are welcoming presidential hopeful Sen. Barack Obama's promise to put government data online in universally accessible formats should he be elected.

The demand of the police union now is to drop the Microsoft-based software and to reconsider the usage of free and open source systems instead. The saved money could then be used to pay the officers their full christmas gratification.

It wasn't very long ago that open-source developers struggled to make the market believe that open source was secure, ready for prime-time adoption, etc. Now the debate has shifted to demonstrating just how widespread adoption is and and pointing to case studies of how to get the most from open source.

A week before the workshop the South African government became the latest country in the world to adopt the OpenDocument Format (ODF) as a government standard for information exchange.

More than half of all US government executives have rolled out open-source software at their agencies, and 71% believe their agency can benefit from open-source software, according to a survey.

In order to fully take advantage of open-source software, Defense Department agencies may need to rethink how they do procurement, said Fritz Schulz, who works in the chief technology office of the Defense Information Systems Agency.

The UK government does not know how much open-source software it uses or what its value is, ministers have admitted.

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