Oz government gets a clue about Open Source

In my spare time, I'm organising the second annual Open Computing in Government conference, in Canberra (that's Australia, don't you know).

And today, after much behind the scenes negotiating, I got the news that the Australian Government is finally ... after much promising ... going to release the official guide to how government departments should do open source. Everything from assessing its merits against proprietary software, through to comparing TCO, examples of previous open source projects, etc. What's even better, is they've agreed to do the launch at the conference! Cool!

It's called the "Guide to Open Source Software for Australian Government Agencies". It'll be launched by the Minister responsible for the governments "CIO agency", AGIMO, and followed up by a talk from the team at AGIMO who put it together. More details are available in the press release, but the cool thing is this will finally convince a bunch of software companies, System Integrators, service firms and the like that open source is here to stay, and their biggest customer just got serious about it.

Now, if only I could get my boss to turn up ... we could have a "healing" right there on the conference room floor. :-) (Mmm, I think I'm going to burn for that comment :-) ). If you're already going to linux.conf.au 2005, we'll be right next door!