The Shire of Busselton’s Senior IT Officer, Paul Hamilton, said with an ICT budget that is tight at the best of times, open source software (OSS) is the way of the future for his Council.
In simple terms, OSS is computer software that comes with the actual programming code. This means users can use, change and improve the software to suit their needs, and redistribute it in modified or unmodified form.
The aim of OSS is to make products more understandable, modifiable, duplicatable, reliable or simply accessible. It is often developed in a public, collaborative manner, with many users contributing to the content.
Some closed source advocates see OSS as damaging to the market of commercial software. However, a large number of alternative funding streams exist, such as:
- giving away the software and charging for installation and support
- making the software available as open source so
that people will be more likely to purchase a related
product or service you sell.
Located in the Cape to Cape sub region of southwest Western Australia, Busselton has been using OSS for a number of purposes over the last few years.
FreeBSD server software is used in a number of areas throughout Council. This software has enabled Council to create an all in one package, incorporating a secure firewall, web server, antivirus spam filtering mail server and a backup server. It also comes with over 17,000 installable applications, with no financial outlay for the software itself.
Busselton has also used OSS to develop its website and intranets using the web based Drupal Content Management System (CMS).
Paul Hamilton said Drupal has over 1,000 modules to work from and Australian consultants are available if you need help.
“Over 200 developers have contributed to the Drupal package and so much information is available, that if you had to commercially write the program, it would cost over $25 million,” he said.
Busselton is also using OSS for its helpdesk application. Paul Hamilton said Council previously used Outlook Public folders, but found it hard to gather statistics on what problems were being addressed.
“I spent some time looking and trialling a lot of free and commercial helpdesk software packages before settling on ‘One or Zero’,” he said. “With One or Zero, users can use their normal network usernames and passwords, and they can also check the status of their submissions. The program also comes with a suite of reports and graphs, so we have great records of what we are doing.”
Paul Hamilton said he not only uses OSS because it is free, but because he wants a more reliable and secure server or services than is available in the commercial world.
“OSS avoids vendor lock in and is usually quite innovative,” he said. “I like to have the source code so I can adapt programs to different circumstances. While I am not a programmer, sometimes I have made small changes to the code, to elicit changes to suit my needs. I can’t do that with a proprietary binary program or windows based DLL.”
Paul Hamilton said Open Document Format (ODF), a file format for electronic office documents, such as spreadsheets, charts, presentations and word processing documents, is another tool that can save Councils money.
“If we all used ODF for document exchange, we wouldn’t have to upgrade to the latest version of MS Office, because we could read anyone’s documents from any version of MS Office,” he said.
For further information contact Paul Hamilton
(08) 9781 0444.
