Thursday, October 30, 2008 Alliance vows to promote wider use of open source tech in Asia
THE alliance of Asian governments can further promote the use of open source software in the region.
Nine member-countries of the Asia Open Source Software Center (AOSSC) last Tuesday signed a memorandum of cooperation that indicates their mutual understanding to promote open source software (OSS) in the region.
Those who signed were information technology officials or representatives of OSS centers from China, Hong Kong, India, Japan, Macau, Malaysia, Philippines, Singapore and Thailand. Representatives from Indonesia, Pakistan and Vietnam were not present during the signing, however.
The scope of AOSSC’s alliance will include human resource development, conferences, seminars, workshops and regular meetings, among others.
The first project of the AOSSC after the signing of the memorandum would be the development of a website that will host a database and venue for knowledge exchange.
“There are so many challenges in promoting open source software that is why we have to work together,” AOSSC 2008 chairman Gordon Lo said during the group’s morning meeting at the Plantation Bay Resort and Spa last Tuesday.
Challenges
Although open source software can be shared without cost, Lo said the challenges of promoting OSS include piracy, and getting more people to be trained and to work in OSS-related applications.
“Developing countries like Cambodia and Vietnam are (more keen about) using OSS because it is strategically low-cost for them than (for) more established countries like Japan or Hong Kong,” Lo noted.
He added that economies have different demands, as far as OSS is concerned.
China, for instance, has a government that is very conscious about software security and is very active in promoting OSS due to its very big market, Lo noted.
In the Philippines, OSS remains to be an open choice, depending on the user requirement. This leaves the market to decide weather to use OSS or proprietary operating systems, like Windows.
“Our government is very heterogeneous. Local government agencies and units have different situations and needs. We have to assess if they are capable for OSS. In our experience, we realized that since OSS is not as common as the proprietary software, the skill for OSS is not common as well,” said Angelo Timoteo Diaz de Rivera of the Commission on Information and Communication Technology-National Computer Center (CICT-NCC).
He lamented that after CICT-NCC has trained individuals as administrators of OSS solutions, some of them would either be pirated by local companies or would get hired abroad.
“Again, it’s a law of supply and demand. While we don’t want to deprive them of the privilege of working wherever they chose, we are continually faced with the lack of human resources and the problem of sustainability for our OSS projects,” he said.
For his part, Bonifacio Belen, executive director of the Cebu Educational Development Foundation for Information Technology (Cedf-it), said that the cooperation of various Asian countries already provides a network that can be tapped in terms of training and resources for future conferences and events.
“In collaboration with the governments in these countries, AOSSC opened the doors for OSS to penetrate a wider and bigger market,” said Belen, who was an observer during the group’s meeting. (NRC)
