Responding to survey results prepared recently by OSIA, the Australian Labor Party, the Liberal-National Coalition, the Australian Democrats and the Australian Greens have all voiced strong support for the adoption of Free and Open Source Software for both boosting local ICT development and ensuring open and interoperable standards.
Awesome work by Open Source Industry Australia in this excellent little document that outlines the perspectives of all the major parties towards Open Source.
In the answers, Labor refers to their “10 year strategy for software” which was announced in 2004. In it was this little gem:
A 10-year strategy for software and digital content would also be created under a Labor government, Lundy said. This strategy would aim to increase the local software industry’s global market share by focusing on open source development and partnering with SMEs.
The change in Government has provided the FOSS community and industry a real opportunity to get FOSS on the political agenda, and into a meaningful discussion about the broader benefits FOSS can offer both economically and socially to Australia.
As always the proof will lie in the pudding, let’s see what Labor actually does on this (and their mandatory ISP level filtering proposal)..
Hi Pia. The Greens are keen to get a good free software policy, it’s really just a matter of writing it and pushing it through the policy process. Equally there’s a large amount of momentum for copyright and patent reform. As you know The Greens were the only party to oppose the free trade agreement that has brought the DMCA down under.
Pia
it seems that some intense lobbying needs to be done – of Julia Gillard and other responisble ministers (eg communications etc)
Is Linux Au doing this? Or anyone?
Martin