Slashdot Mirror
Malaysian Government Prefers Open Code
Suresh Gnasegarah writes "All Malaysian government technology procurement will now have a preference for open source software (OSS), under the Malaysian Public Sector Open Source Software Masterplan. The masterplan's near-term targets includes: 60% of all new servers able to run OSS operating systems, 30% of office infrastructure -- like e-mail, DNS, proxy servers -- on OSS, and 20% of school computer labs to have OSS applications such as productivity suites installed. Looks like old Bill's scare tactic that OSS software kills jobs didn't quite work. Another victory for the open source software movement!"
Victory? While it's a step in the right direction, I think the matter is far from "victory" as the OP surmises.
harmonious design
As far as making a real dent in software sales there... well, let's just say that I went to four or five different malls in Malaysia when I was there and not once did I see any legit software offered.
----- Wtcher Dragon, UDIC
I've travelled much of the far east, and my experience has been that Microsoft has primarly dominated the markets. Microsoft donates huge amounts of money (relative to there economy) to forign university's which basically provides them with free Microsoft products.
I'm suprised to see a government in a developing nation pass up on the potentially huge amount of money that Microsoft would willing pump into there universities.
xoduszero
Gamblers Forum
Cost is not the only criterion here. It is a sad truth that countries which suspect/fear that the US will cut off their access to technology by issuing a Department of Commerce export notification are increasingly turning to Open Source as a viable option that circumvents real or prophesized export controls.
Does that make Open Source unpatriotic? If it is, who is culpable? Is Joe Coder a traitor because he fixed a header file macro in an Open Source project which helps to bypass US laws? Will Ashkroft send his goons to nab Joe? What if Joe lives in Switzerland or New Zealand? Will Ashkroft still send his goons anyway?
See that long UID - that's what you get for lurking too long
This will probably be marked as a troll, but here we go:
;)
You say it's all about choice, and that the best product will win, and then celebrate when that choice is taken away, and it's in your favor. Governments should choose the best software for the job, period. Not because one is open source, vs. closed source, that shouldn't matter, if the people of the government are paying taxes, it should go to the best product that does the job, for the lowest TCO. But again, if a government said 100% of the machines have to be windows, you'd guys bitch that it's unfair that windows was just chosen without a competition.
If open source is accepted within govt, and that governemnt starts pouring cash into specific projects, how many programmers will work for free if they see that the leaders of those projects are making money and they aren't?...it might send ripples through what we know as open and free....
ItWasFree.com - Take the mystery
Less govenment money spent on paying companies to write custom software, which is nearly always over due and over budget, is less money wasted. That means less taxes. That means more money in the hands of consumers to spend. Which means more jobs.
You skipped basic economics in school, didn't you?
-- Will program for bandwidth
If the work is useful, it is unique and/or custom. And open source offers more opportunities for customization than closed-source anyway.
It seems like you are arguing in favor of specialized welfare programs for computer programmers who don't otherwise offer any value to the market.
Otherwise there's no possible reason to write the same things over and over and over again. It's like having every agency in the government outsource their own national census.
"Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all other countries because you were born in it." -- GBS
Let's let the industries based on re-coding the same old proprietary systems die so that new industries that can push the frontiers of computer science may be born. So long as the majority of the competent computer scientists and engineers in the world are working on new versions of Oracle, Windows, Solaris, Office, proprietary government procurement software, etc.., those new frontiers are just a dream!
Personally, I say good riddance.
The reason that it can be true that 1+1 > 2 is that very peculiar nonzero value of the + operator
Poor MS. Why if this continues they may actually have to concentrate on selling a good product rather then scare the customer into staying with them. I am crying for all the MS coders who will loose their jobs, ignore the hysterical laughter that is just my way of showing grief. Really.
Anyone know the travelling plans of IBM or Novell or Sun or HP?
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
As media solutions fall into the hands of the general populace, we can expect the "fundamental" notion of individual countries to continue to erode. There will be a strong fight against this trend, but the fact of the matter remains: the governed will always outnumber the governors. The trick is that the governed must be educated. This is the difficulty.
harmonious design
Donating source is much better, IMHO.
This is exactly what drives me toward OSS. I want to see the change because, as it stands now, we can plot our futures on the corporate roadmaps and that sucks.
Personally, I strongly agree with you.
Blogging because I can...
Havent seen much IBM Power4 and Power5 boxes, have you?
I'm not sure about that particular concern. But you're entirely right to be worried.
When Linux and other Free (and Open Source) software becomes mainstream, it will be swamped by capitalists using and abusing it. The people who understand and believe in Free Software will be a minority. Even the majority of people contributing code to the Linux kernel will have different motivations from what we're used to.
Eventually, this will lead to code forks. The mainstream folks will be disatisfied that their wiz-bang DRM etc didn't make it into the software, so they'll all agree to make their own version. And they'll have the marketing to sell it. Sure, it will still be Open Source. And it will still be popular. But it won't be Free.
That's precisely why RMS is worried about the term Open Source subverting the term Free Software: the fundamental point is lost. And, hence, Open Source is destined to be nothing more than a brief break between this Microsoft, and the next one.
Of course. Look at the kernel changelog. Search for SuSE. They got many people on their paylists that do kernelwork and quite a bunch of KDE staff. Other distributor should so as well and there are also other firms (big players and small fishes) that allow OpS developers to spend a part of their worktime to GPL/...-Projects.
But I don't kno about Gouvernments. Many people only see the cost free but not the code free in the OpS Movement.
... in the Islamic countries to try and create their own economies not based on pure interaction with the west. The World Islamic Trading Organisation is partly behind these trends in a way. They are seeking to develop sustainable economies not so directly tied to non Islamic nations and concepts, such as fiat(phoney) currency and usury based banking. Free software would naturally fit into this goal, as it can be "theirs" without a single legal hassle and it's just as good and freer to use, along with eventually replacing the US dollar as the worlds reserve currency,and especially in the Islamic nations as "the" currency. They created and are starting to use the Islamic gold Dinar and the silver Dirham for this purpose. They need software, and wanting to just divest themselves from the necessity of shipping cash to redmond and other closed source places in the west, plus to encourage local production and identity, it just makes sense for them to discourage (eventually) even the use of pirated software and just go open source. It follows their goals exactly in other words. There is a transition period that will occur,of course, but eventually it will happen almost completely. MS= USA in their minds, so they know it's not in their best interests to fund them. they will take what they will take, but they have no overwhelming desitre to keep paying the west for all the "things" they need, now that they can see the non western nations are really where all the "stuff" comes from, and that they the Islamics own the bulk of the worlds recoverable energy in the form of oil reserves. You are watching what in essence is a huge divorce in progress, that is occurring in many nations. It's just now really starting to take off, I expect it to increase exponentially in the coming years.
The poster asks:
Does that make Open Source unpatriotic?
In large part, that depends on your definition of patrriotism.
The US was born from and originally dedicated to rebellion against undue authority. Now, on a global basis, the US government attempts (somewhat successfully) to BE the undue authority. This course of action is not in the interests of the typical American, so there's a compelling case that anything frustrating those aims of the US government is, in fact, far more profoundly and genuinely patriotic than the mindless drive for Empire.
-- I could tell right away that she was impressed with my HUGE Slashdot Karma.
... themselves-and others, under orders, and under the influence of societal and religious and governmental brainwashing. Hmm, Seems like I have seen that before... hmm, did they speak arabic?? Lemme see if I can remember... oh ya, I do!
Nope. They spoke 'merkin near as I recall.
What you are implying is over simplistic and not exactly what I was saying. I will attempt clarification. They are adopting open source for all the same reasons anyone else is, PLUS, by adopting it, it helps them to get independent.
In-dependent, they are tired of being de-pendent.
What you said, is true of them to a certain degree in the past, but now they know there is no future in remaining dependent and as economic colony states of the west. Of course they will do their best to trade to their advantage now, who wouldn't?, because they have been taken advantage of for a long time. Most of the nations in the muslim world have had weird rulers foisted on them going back to the turn of the last century, they are just annoyed with the western influences on their culture and on their lands and in their economies. They see no need any longer to just sell their raw resources for piddling low profit, when they can trade it for a lot more, and develop domestic industries. And all their populations need real employment as well, you expect them to ignore that? They can also look at geopolitical reality, they just saw the US take over the second largest oil fields in the world, and the largest concentration of fresh water in the middle east(do NOT forget that part in the iraq war, even though hardly anyone ever mentions it), both critical for nation building and for advancing their own nations. And they can add the sums same as everyone (except for most lusers who depend on the 6 o clock news and their brokers for data),and they know the oil will run out soon for all practical purposes,within the next generation, they can see as oil drops below peak and as demand quadruples in the next 15 years they need to do something about that reality, so they are entering a crash program of modernization, all over. any nation that doesn't will either suffer greatly or be forced into becomeing a looter nation, same as the US has become. For most purposes, that's what the US is now, a looter nation, we are dropping any pretense of manufacturing anything except for war and police/paramilitary *things*. These other nations can clearly see what's coming for them.
Now they have the internet in all those nations now, and travel is common. Whether that will mitigate some of the more radical islamic tenets remains to be seen. You would hope so, but I think the US invading iraq set that back-completely borked it- for another generation, if it ever comes back at all. The young people in those nations were gradually becoming more secular and westernised, now they are returning to islamic fundamentalism, because they see no practical future for them with the anglo/us/israeli axis of maximum profits and command and control as their future-and who would? There's nothing in it for them other than what they have had for a long time, a 1-2% ultra rich transnational based series of puppet governments, or rule by nutjob fundies. The best they can do is to try something different, and that would revolve around developing their own economies, starting with more practical use and savvier trading of their oil and national labor pool, and developing their own currencies based on what they value-gold and silver instead of western bankers created out of thin air pieces of debt paper, and to use their oil better, which they are starting to do. For instance, saudi arabi is still the big dog with oil, but also is putting the most into solar energy and in advanced water desalinization. Malaysia is heavy into developing industry and manufacturing. Pakistan is developing a huge engineering base, and so on.
Don't expect them to live in the past any more than you do in other words, they may be different from you, but collectively they aren'
Malaysia had (perhaps still has, too lazy to google) a white elephant project called the "Super Multimedia Corridor" that was suppossed to be a hub of High Tech development and innovation (with things like housing for higtech employess with broadband internet, nevermind Malaysia is a country with stringent censoship).
One of the advisors for this project was a certain Bill Gates. That they are turning around like this has a huge impact since they must be ignoring "advice" (i.e. FUD) from Gates whose opinions just 5 years ago were regarded as gospel.
This my friend, is BIG news in Malaysia for sure, one of the biggest exporters of computer related stuff in the world.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Our company is heavily adopting open source software as I believe many others are, we are using SAMBA 3.x as our PDC/File Server, FreeBSD as our Firewall/NAT/Router/Traffic Shaper, Another *nix machine in the DMZ as Tomcat/mail server, OpenOffice.org as the productivity suite for the Windows machine, Thunderbird as the mail client and so on.
As mentioned above piracy is predominant here, the main reason being cost, as a poster above explained the cost for many things here is higher than Europe or America (if you use economies of scale not a direct currency conversion). Cars are expensive, housing is reasonable, food is cheap, technology stuff is average, software is EXPENSIVE. Most SME's here don't have domains, they are still using workgroups as the cost of Win2k server is prohibitive (The salary per annum for an average employee). Pirated software is easy to get (within every decent sized housing area there is 2-3 places you can go) and cheap ($1-2USD per CD). People do buy orginal software, but usally only larger companies and people who want to play online games (for example Warcraft III you need an original, unique CD key to play on Battle.net).
People are finally realising using pirated software is bad, and that licenced software is too expensive to be economically viable and as open source awareness spreads these are becoming more realistic alternatives. As far as I know many small companies are adopting Linux and OSS software packages or at least conducting some kind of testing/integration. There are quite a few Open Source advocates and groups/mailing lists here:
- OSSIG
- MyOSS
- Planet MyOSS Community
- ASIAOSC
- Alphaque
- IOSN
From what I know the state of OSS looks good here, there are regular conferences, meetings and things going on towards the advancement of open source usage in the Malaysia I.T. community. (P.S. frist psot as a non-AC)-------------
Share your Knowlege - Kung-Fu Geekery