Victoria’s Electoral Commission has flagged plans to expand its use of electronic voting kiosks based on Linux software in the next state election in November this year.

The state first started using the machines in a limited trial during the last state election in 2006. It appears as if the machines were used for voting for the vision-impaired, as well as for military personnel. News of the rollout was broken by Computerworld.

However, in tender documents released last week, the state revealed it would expand its use of the machines. About one hundred kiosks will be deployed to early voting centres (including mobile facilities) around the state as well as in the United Kingdom.

According to the tender documentation, the machines will consist of one in-built 19″ LCD touch-screen, one PC with an Ethernet network port, and an in-built USB smartcard reader. The machine must be able to run Linux, as the commission has requested Linux drivers for the components.

The commission stated it would install Linux on the machines itself, but it remains unclear which exact version of the open source operating system it will use.

The tender documents stated that drivers must be compatible with the "2.6 kernel/Gentoo release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux”. However Red Hat and Gentoo are quite different Linux distributions.

It appears as if Victoria’s previous e-voting system was supplied by Hewlett-Packard, in conjunction with Spanish company Scytl.

The news comes as Linux has not been making headway for desktop use in Australia — even in such limited use as customised and locked down terminals such as e-voting systems require.

One of the last stand-out Linux desktop deployments in Australia was that found at Kennards Hire. However, in December 2009 the plant and equipment company revealed it had migrated its 300 desktop machines running Fedora Linux back to Windows (thin clients) in 2008.

In contrast, the New Zealand government is currently engaged in a pilot to replace Windows PCs with desktops running Linux and open source software. However, Linux remains a force in local server deployments, where it is seen as the main rival operating system to Microsoft Windows.

In May, Swiss company Business Systems Integration AG (BSI) will release its Scout business application framework to the open source community. A first look at the Scout project's source code will be available to attendees at this year's EclipseCon conference, taking place from the 22nd to the 25th of March, 2010 in Santa Clara, California.

The Scout framework is the foundation for a number of BSI's products, such as BSI CRM. It consists of an application model, a reference implementation, an SDK (Scout Development Toolkit) and a number of development tools. Its primary goal is to reduce development time for service-oriented architecture (SOA) and Java 2 Platform, Enterprise Edition (J2EE) compliant business solutions.

According to Andreas Hoegger, Eclipse Scout project co-leader and System Architect for BSI, opening up the framework is the next logical step. During EclipseCon 2010, Hoegger and BSI project manager Matthias Zimmermann will present a two hour tutorial on Eclipse Scout. 

BSI joined the Ecilpse Foundation in May of last year as an Eclipse Solutions Member. Eclipse Scout is currently at the project proposal status. The Scout source code to be released in May will be made publicly available under an Eclipse license.

Simon Phipps, Chief Open Source Officer at Sun, has left the company following its acquisition by Oracle. Reflecting on his nearly ten years at Sun in a posting on his personal blog, Phipps feels he achieved some "amazing things", including the releasing of code for Unix, Java, elements of Linux and the SPARC chip under free licenses. Phipps is also proud of the part he has played in guiding the Open Document Format at Sun and his role in kick starting Sun's blogging culture. He pays credit to the people he worked with in pushing forward those ideas within Sun.

Phipps has had disappointments though; he wanted to see Apache get the Java TCK licence that they wanted, an issue which has led to constant friction within the Java Community Process, and he didn't manage to get code for some projects "permanently outside the Sun firewall". Overall though, Phipps says he is "amazed and humbled to see what the open source team at Sun has achieved". Phipps has not made a decision on what he will do next, but will be keeping people informed through his Wild Webmink blog.

Phipps joins a number of former Sun employees who have left since the acquisition by Oracle. Tim Bray, SGML and XML expert, left on March 1st, and a number of the Drizzle developers, but apparently not including lead developer Brian Akers, have moved to RackSpace Cloud.

The SCO Group is to receive 2 million dollars from a group of investors headed by majority shareholder Ralph Yarro. Following an oral hearing, the Delaware bankruptcy court dealing with SCO has approved the loan. This means that the company now has sufficient funds for the pending jury trial against Novell. The trial, which is to address rights to Unix and the legality of protective licences for Linux users, is set to start today and is expected to last three weeks.

At the hearing, SCO was able to persuade the judge that the loan offered by a group of investors headed by Ralph Yarro represented the best of twelve offers. The injection of funds will incur interest at 6.6 per cent, which compares well with one competitor offer which set out an interest rate of 10 per cent. That offer would also have seen charges imposed for setting up the loan – the Yarro offer does not impose set-up charges.

As well as the details of the loan, SCO presented a two-part business plan for the next 13 weeks developed under administrator Edward Cahn. The two parts are the software business, which is generating revenues, and the litigation business, which has so far generated only costs. Without the loan, it would, according to Cahn, not have been possible to continue litigation. Once the trial between SCO and Novell ends at the end of this month, SCO will have sufficient funds to repay the loan – assuming it wins the case. Regarding further restructuring of the troubled company, Cahn also told the court that he had visited the company's subsidiaries in the UK and Germany and it should soon be possible to close these down. The bankruptcy court approved the transactions.