New Zealand Ministry of Justice Open Source Discussion Paper

Fascinating! Congralutaions to the New Zealand Open Source Society for all their good work! This is a really interesting read and certainly useful for Australia Government agencies.

Knee-jerk prohibition of OSS is no longer feasible or cost-effective. Rather than pretend OSS is a passing fad, or ignore the growth of OSS use because it is a change from past Ministry practices, a rational adoption strategy would:
1) Encourage a selection process for internal adoption.
2) Identify specifically prohibited application types and licencing models.
3) Specify the rules by which in-house developers contribute to open source projects.

Another part of the paper (in the Appendix) is the Open Source policies for the Ministry of Justice:

Policy 1: Open standards
Policy 2: Prefer OSS
Policy 3: Review licences
Policy 4: Formal OSS evaluation
Policy 5: Version
Policy 6: Active development
Policy 7: Commercial support
Policy 8: Enterprise architecture
Policy 9: Release Code Changes (Integrate, Don’t Build)
Policy 10: Documentation

Check out the NZOSS blog post and link for more details.