It all began in 2001, when the Malaysian Government was seriously considering the OSS option. The then Ministry Energy, Communications and Multimedia requested PIKOM to submit suggestions on how it should approach OSS.
Looi Kien Leong, then chairman of PIKOM, together with well known local open source proponents, publicly introduced the OSS Whitepaper in 2001.
The Whitepaper contributed significantly to the formation of Government's Open Source Policy in 2004. Wanting to reduce its dependency on proprietary software, which often comes with a high cost of ownership, the Government's wants to use OSS in its machinery as wide as possible.
The Open Source Policy gives equal consideration to both commercial, proprietary software and to OSS, which is a major coup for open source proponents.
The open source policy went further and declared that when all considerations between proprietary software and OSS are equal, the latter should be given priority and some leverage in the decision making process. The Malaysian Administrative and Modernization Planning Unit (MAMPU) was assigned the task of coordinating the grand open source plan.
So far the move towards OSS in the government appears to be yielding its desired results rather well. According to MAMPU, in a recent survey of 122 Government ministries, 74% have implemented OSS, mostly relying on in house talents. The move to embrace open source has yielded tremendous cost savings to the government. For instance, says MAMPU, software licensing costs plummeted by 88%; development and consultancy costs dropped by 58% while software support costs decreased by 8%.
Since there is so much good news surrounding the deployments of open source software, why is PIKOM seeking to review its Whitepaper?
Mixed Concerns
Industry obersevers have mixed feelings about the Whitepaper review. Critics hint that PIKOM has been under pressure from closed source software vendors for a long time.
`(Thus) the review not only should maintain the original position of support for open source software, but also encourage further acceleration of its adoption,' says Hassanuddin, IBM's Government programs manager and PIKOM's open source Special Interest Group co-chairman.
Dinesh Nair, chief technology officer of Qubeconnect Sdn Bhd says that, despite the fear factor spread by some software vendors, OSS has delivered the goods. `The Government has begun to take open source seriously, and has already deployed open source in many of its projects in the various ministries and departments. Clearly, the government has seen the benefits that open source can give us, both from an economic perspective as well as the developmental benefits,' says Nair. `With this as the background, companies still practising the distribution of closed source software are now lobbying the government and related agencies to rescind this move which places OSS on an equal footing with closed source in Government procurement. It must be noted that these are usually multinational companies (MNCs) and not locally bred companies. These companies are driven by commercial interests and neglect to take cognisance of the uplifting factor which open source development can provide to our national software capacity.'
Nair also points to the fact that many countries have successfully deployed OSS and are reaping good benefits. These include Brazil, France and China.
Software giant, Microsoft, could not be reached for its comment. Microsoft is known to be fiercely against OSS. But in recent years, the company seems to be slowly warming up to OSS. So far it has released part of its Windows software source code to its developer community. Still, this may not signal a change in heart in its stand towards OSS. The software behemoth still argues that open source software industry has the potential to destroy the software economy and stifle commercial enterprises.
But not all agree with Microsoft. Among the international software club, IBM, Novell and Sun Microsystems all support open source software development, while at the same time peddling closed source software. To some extend, this strategy has gained them acceptance and gained benefits from both school of thought in the software industry.
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