1. Waving an Open Source Flag in
Government
The Highs, The Lows
and Community Code
Aimee Maree Forsstrom
@aimee_maree

2. Who Am I and Why Am I Here
Worked in Information Technology since 2000
Been a Linux user since 1997
Early advocate for Open Source in Australian enterprise and
government
Contributions to Content Management Systems and Linux
administration
Dual bachelors degree with honours in IT and programming
Post graduate studies in law and licensing
Board member of Open Source Industry Australia

3. Eight Years Ago
Very different scene
Most Government Departments were
“Microsoft Shops”
Linux servers not the norm in government
Proprietary Content Management Systems
Licensing fees where in abunbance
Tenders favoured “Closed Source Systems”

4. Lets Start With a Story

5. In 2008 The Bat Phone Rings
“We need you
to rescue a
project”

6. Putting Out Fires On a Navy Ship At War

7. In Comes Linux
Very different scene
Microsoft servers and Microsoft admins
“Will it run on MSSQL?”
Our new web applications ran on Linux
This meant we needed Linux servers
But we had no Linux admins?
The development team became the admins

8. Breaking The Open Source Myth
But people had their “concerns”
Security concerns
Licensing jargon
Support issues
Do we need to release all the things?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AiVnMazRIII

9. Building Teams
Skill sets require new ways of approaching hiring
Traditional recruiters did not understand needs
New technology with a small pool of people
Seek out community groups
We went grass roots
Who was contributing and what
Not just code but documentation
Who was willing to learn new skills

10. Support Subscriptions
Even with support subscriptions
Always requires hands on the code
No more can you throw it to a company to fix
But this adds so much value for peoples growth

11. You Mean It's In The Open?
Lawyers could not understand
Academics were afraid
Lawyers where scared
Management was unaware what this meant
Academics needed a new model of sharing
We needed champions to advocate to people

12. Open Source and Open Standards
Teaching people what Open Source means
Getting contributions going with patches
Creative Commons on documentation
Creative Commons on web content

13. Where The Story Ended or Started?
This was the first big Linux and Open Source software
implementation that was in the public eye
Disclaimer: **If this did happen before there was no one
talking about it
What came out of this was a clear need for federal
government level policy change

14. Policy Changes Needed to Occur
In January 2011, the Australian government released a policy
requiring agencies to consider open source software for all
software procurements.
Applied to all ICT procurement after 1 March 2011.
Open Source software policy requires agencies to consider
Open Source software in relation to any approach to market
to acquire software.
Department of Finance Australian Federal Government

15. Three Principles For Open Source
Principle 1: Australian government ICT procurement
processes must actively and fairly consider all types of
available software.
Principle 2: Suppliers must consider all types of available
software when dealing with Australian government agencies.
Principle 3: Australian government agencies will actively
participate in Open Source software communities and
contribute back where appropriate.

16. This Ushered In a New Era of Change

17. New Ways of Managing Code
Traditional companies are used to purchasing a code base
that has yearly (if) update cycles
We moved into a moving target
Drupal, like all OSS, requires constant updates
RHEL, unlike Windows servers utilizes a package
management system so again constant updates
You need to implement a release cycle based on days, not
months or years (in some cases)

18. Freedom For Developers
Development of plugins or addins for proprietary systems like
Aptrix would take months
We reduced this to two weeks
Developers are not the issue
Developers want to see what is under the hood
Give your developers the source code and they will love you
for it

19. Reduction of Time To Market
For marketing it means faster updates
For management it means keeping up the pace
Where you replace propietary codebases you move from:
Four month release cycles
Weekly release cycles
Daily release cycles

20. Return On Investment
"The proprietary solutions require increasing fees, require
expensive support or maintenance costs, and often the more
advanced or popular features — the ones that really make a
business difference — require so much investment of time
and were so hard to get people to do that in some cases, it is
prohibitively expensive or impossible to get out of once
you're in."
John Sherriden – Department of Finance 2012

21. No Vendor Lock-In
Open Source enables no vendor lock-in
Move away from old busines models
Open Source code bases can be hosted by anyone and can be
supported by a variety of companies
Removed the government away from a single point of vendor
failure
We could seek support from RedHat. We could also seek
support from Linux based agencies

22. DevOps
Allows for faster cultural change
Helped break out of silos of Dev and Ops
Closer working of internal departments
Greater collaboration of internal departments
Allowed for the beginings of traditionally siloed departments
to share code, knowledge and hardware

23. Here Comes The Clouds
The cloud lead to great innovation and change
Break out of traditional operations requests
Put the power into the developers hands
Reduce Total Cost of Ownership
Started with Amazon opening up a data center in Australia and
from the get-go ensuring they meet government standards
No need to spend months on vetting documentation when we
could have a dev environment in one day

24. Consolidation of Resources
This has lead to consilidation projects
Current NSW initiative is the GOVDC
This is a Government Data Centre that also has a Government
Marketplace
All these services are pre vetted and meet procurement
initatives and security requirments
Various companies involved so you can move between
vendors in the DC

25. Custom Code in a Propietary World
NSW State Library WOSIP
14 systems integrating to create one web portal
World class standard
Mixed licensing models
GPL – CopyLeft
Permissive
Proprietary

26. Slow and Steady Wins The Race
Tortise and the Hare
Incremental changes
Needs for a new development environment
This has been made easier with DevOps culture

27. Before DevOps
Linux on the desktop was a scary idea
How do you convince mangement
“File systems and permissions”
“Replication of production ennvironment”
We started with virtual machines
Eight years later…

28. New Business Models

29. Breaking Down The Silos

30. Open Data for Citizen Engagement
First Gov Hack Day 2009 – Thanks Steve King
Started small
Growth was inevitable – Thanks Pia Waugh
This year was our first Cultural Data Hack ran by the NSW
State Libary – Thanks team!

31. You Will Not Always Get to the Goal Post

32. But Planting Seeds Is Most Important
“We catalyze direction. That means you are the agent that
makes something happen, but it’s your role to do this in an
indirect way. It’s my job to say, ‘This is the hill we want to
take, and here’s why,’ and then let the organization take over
from there.”
Jim Whitehurst
RedHat CEO

33. Its a Hard Job But Someone Has To Do It
Long meetings
Lots of lawyers and legal speak
Providing the dream of where you're heading
Holding hands
Happy developers
Happy operations
Change in management models

34. Dont Be Discouraged
All this leads to greater
citizen engagement
Reduction in overall operating costs and
time to market
And more Open Data