[plug] linux and the ATO

[John Breen]

AFAIR In Australia the source code still remains copyright and
departments/developers are under NO obligation to release it...

-----Original Message-----
From: again at amnet.net.au [mailto:again at amnet.net.au]On Behalf Of
Christian
Sent: Tuesday, 6 February 2001 19:12
To: plug at plug.linux.org.au
Subject: Re: [plug] linux and the ATO


On Tue, Feb 06, 2001 at 02:01:42PM +0800, Alex Polglaze wrote:
> This has just arrived following a post on this list in 28/11/00 which I
> followed up with the ATO.
>
> This is a call to the battlements.
>
> If we want a Unix/Linux version of this then we had better inundate the
> ATO with requests and show how many real businesses wants Unix/Linux
> based products.

This is probably a stupid question (I don't remember what your original
post contained) but have you tried asking them for the source code?
Given that presumably they are making this software available for free,
I don't see any reason why they wouldn't want to make the source
available.  I also remember reading somewhere that in the U.S. where
software is developed with government money it must be made available in
the public domain... not sure if this is true in Australia too (probably
not) but considering it was developed with taxpayers' money it would be
nice if it were freely available...