[Gllug] Tax returns online? On Linux?

[Richard Jones]

On Wed, Sep 24, 2003 at 10:15:28PM +0100, Mark Preston wrote:
> The 
> governments own GGSec signature library is Windows-only and depends 
> heavily on Microsoft XML libraries.

I can actually offer some more information about this, since when I
worked at Red Hat we tendered for a project which involved this very
library.

The GGSec library is used to create canonical hashes of XML documents
(SOAP-format MS BizTalk documents to be precise), and this is a
necessary step in signing all documents which pass over the Government
Gateway. Without GGSec you can't play on the Govt. Gateway.

The library was written by some [possibly MI{5,6}] department, but
source (in Visual Basic!) is available. We never actually got so far
as getting the source, but I imagine from what you say that it
probably requires some proprietary Win32 libraries to compile, so it
wouldn't be a straightforward conversion.

The Office of the e-Envoy's excuse is that when they devised the
signing scheme W3C hadn't standardised XML signatures, so they had to
go their own way. They do indeed promise to resolve the signing issue
soon, and they are very sensitive to charges that they depend on MS
proprietary solutions, which are expensive, poor quality and lock them
in.

I think that's all I can say without revealing commercial secrets
about the tender ...

Rich.

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