Thursday, June 26, 2008 IT players mull creation of open source association
THE turnout during the two-day Philippine Open Source Summit indicated that the open source movement in the country is “quite strong,” said Cebu Educational Development Foundation for Information Technology (Cedfit) president Bonifacio Belen.
“The turnout is great...they even braved the typhoon. (They were) determined to come over here. They are motivated and they have a vision and I think it augurs well for open source in the Philippines,” Belen said in an interview with Sun.Star
Cebu.
The summit ended on Tuesday with an entire day of technical sessions on different open source applications and tools, as well as lectures on experiences on open source deployment by government agencies and nongovernment organizations.
The sessions discussed use of open source applications, such as Sugar CRM for costumer relations management and Drupal for running websites. Some sessions also tackled the use of open source software for information technology infrastructure and security.
The push for open source, Belen said, will be sustained by regular meetings and conferences. Stakeholders in the open
source community met Tuesday to discuss the establishment of a national open source association.
Belen said regular open source sessions will be held in the coming weeks, in the runoff to the Asian Open Source Summit in Cebu in October.
Belen also said that he sees open source penetrating the curriculum of computer schools in Cebu soon.
“Computer science students, on their own, are exposed to open source because it’s available on the Internet,” Belen sad.
He said the recent summit gathered representatives from all sectors, including the academe, to also look into how it can be used in schools and in course curricula. (MTL)
