Lazycoder

Australian Tax Office to change it’s SOE

Australian IT – Tax to open up software policy (James Riley, FEBRUARY 24, 2004)

The part I found interesting is the part where it mentions their previous Standard Operating Environment.
” The ATO’s present SOE restricts its systems to IBM mainframe technologies such as the z/OS operating system and Cool:Gen development environment for back-office functions, Microsoft’s Windows for its mid-range server and desktop platform and .NET as its front-end development environment.

Specifically “not recommended or supported” in the SOE are the GNU/Linux open source operating system and the Mozilla open-source browser. “

This seems like a big change, from, “Don’t consider open source products at all” to “Hey, start looking at them.” It looks like the fact that Open Source has had a chance to mature some since they last changed their SOE . It mentions Mozilla by name so they SOE can’t have been written too long ago.

On the other hand, they mention that the majority of their applications run on the Mainframe hardware from IBM. Sounds like a key entry point for the Australian SOA providers.