The Australian Government Information Management Office (AGIMO) has released a summary of the findings of its investigations into the use of free and open source software (FOSS) within federal government agencies indicating most expect to increase its use over the next five years.

AGIMO, part of the Department of Finance and Deregulation (formerly Administration) awarded a tender to the Australian Service for Knowledge of Open Source Software (ASK-OSS) in October 2006 to undertake a FOSS survey of Australian government agencies.

The key findings of the survey include that 86 percent of agencies have a positive view of OSS and expect its usage to increase over the next five years, the "vast majority" of OSS usage is the back-end server environment, OSS functionality, not cost savings, was the highest priority, and some 90 percent of respondents expected increased usage of OSS in the areas of Web applications, science and education, middleware and back-office systems across all levels of the government.

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