I’ve worked in and around gov­ern­ment a long time — prob­a­bly 20 years or more now. And much of that in or around IT and web units in gov­ern­ment departments.

Today’s announce­ment by the Spe­cial Min­is­ter of State that Fed­eral agen­cies are now required to con­sider open source options in their pro­cure­ments is cer­tainly a step for­ward in get­ting open source soft­ware and tools con­sid­ered by gov­ern­ment. But as Delim­iter head hon­cho, Renai LeMay accu­rately notes, there’s noth­ing in the announce­ment or the pol­icy that is likely to really have any mea­sur­able effect.

In spite of what I des­per­ately hope will ring in some real and wide-​​ranging con­sid­er­a­tion of open source options (note, I don’t say deploy­ment — that’s a choice based on many com­pli­cated fac­tors), I’m doubt­ful it will result in much change any time soon. In fact, based on my expe­ri­ence, the sta­tus quo will hold.

It’s not that these poli­cies pre­vent change hap­pen­ing, it’s just that they do noth­ing to actively encour­age it. There’s noth­ing in them to ensure change, or the intro­duc­tion of addi­tional, and often use­ful tools or alter­na­tives. We’re a long way off, for exam­ple, any fed­eral agency deploy­ing OpenOf­fice as stan­dard, and fur­ther still from a com­mon Linux desktop.

If organ­i­sa­tions like Google can man­age this sort of thing, a decently staffed and equipped fed­eral agency cer­tainly can.

In the pub­lic sec­tor, Microsoft Win­dows (with many deploy­ments still at Win­dows XP) holds mas­sive sway, Inter­net Explorer is the default for web brows­ing (and more often than not, is still IE6, a 10-​​year-​​old, non-​​standards com­pli­ant dinosaur) and Microsoft Office remains the near-​​default office pro­duc­tiv­ity (cough) suite (again, with many agen­cies still using installs of Office 2003).

Are we detect­ing a theme here?

So too, as Renai notes, AGIMO’s CoE guid­ance released last week, though allow­ing for non-​​Microsoft options, does lit­tle to actively encour­age agen­cies to intro­duce new options — con­tin­u­ing a pol­icy of bound to Microsoft, locked-​​down desk­tops, bog-​​standard oper­at­ing envi­ron­ments with lit­tle scope for cus­tomi­sa­tion or needed addi­tional tools. When it takes 6 – 8 weeks or more to get an extra piece of soft­ware added to your machine at 2 – 3 times its shelf cost because of main­te­nance agree­ments, you often do with­out, or bring in your per­sonal machine (a sight becom­ing ever more preva­lent) and sneak­er­net stuff via USB (also some­times locked down) or email between per­sonal and offi­cial machines.

Get­ting a toe­hold for any­thing out­side the Microsoft (and occa­sion­ally IBM) jug­ger­naut is a near impos­si­bil­ity. There’s no dri­ving rea­son for IT man­agers in fed­eral agen­cies to con­sider any­thing else — legacy back-​​compatibility, ease of SoE man­age­ment, train­ing (when and if it’s offered, rarely), built-​​in man­age­ment all make the choice not to change easy. There’s barely a drive to upgrade exist­ing ver­sions of Microsoft tools given the ingrained risk aver­sion, costs, bureau­cratic rig­ma­role asso­ci­ated with the FMA and plain resis­tance to change endemic in parts of the pub­lic sector.

Mind you, this is as much an issue in pub­lic sec­tors beyond Aus­tralia as well as big busi­ness. They’re all tied into inflex­i­ble arrange­ments and archi­tec­tures that dis­cour­age change.

I think I raised options for use of Apache for the first time in the fed­eral agency I was then in (work­ing as a man­ager in a big­gish web devel­op­ment team) in 2001. About a year later, I raised the option of using early ver­sions of OpenOf­fice and not long after that, the use of early ver­sions of Eclipse as an IDE and Fire­fox (then Fire­bird) as an alter­na­tive browser option. At each of those times, and sub­se­quently, I was told politely to shut my mouth — intro­duc­ing these new things would cause unnec­es­sary need for change, incon­ve­nience IT man­age­ment and illus­trated a propen­sity to not accept the sta­tus quo.

I hope I’m badly wrong.

EDIT — I had a short and inter­est­ing con­ver­sa­tion on Twit­ter with Glenn Archer, the senior exec­u­tive at AGIMO with respon­si­bil­ity for the changes men­tioned in this post. My inter­ac­tions with them in the past have me pre­pared to trust peo­ple like Glenn and John Sheri­dan at AGIMO to do their level best to ensure these poli­cies are fol­lowed in spirit and in the actual words. The tweets I exchanged with Glenn are pub­lic and shown below.