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Malaysian Open Source Procurement Policy Amended
Ditesh writes "The Malaysian Open Source Masterplan, which favoured open source over proprietary public sector procurements when all other evaluations are equal, has been reversed to a purely 'neutral technology platform' policy due to 'negative reaction towards open source (from the IT market)'. This comes after months of hard lobbying by Microsoft Malaysia. This reversal is certainly unfortunate, as the policy has helped raise comfort levels of other policy makers worldwide in pursuing similar goals. The Malaysian Open Source Alliance has published a position statement asking for clarification of the term 'neutrality', and has received support from MNC's, local companies and free software developers in Malaysia."
Currently Microsoft is playing whack a mole with Open Source, they try to stop it wherever it crops up. Thing is, it's cropping up more and more frequently.
In related news, Ballmer plays punch the monkey.
It takes a man to suffer ignorance and smile
Be yourself no matter what they say
What to use Linuz? Or Windows? Use them, but please let the politics out. Think for your self. And think logically. And technically.
It's time to realise that Abble's products are the biggest abomination these days. Just say NO to the dumb iAbble way!!
Obviously the license needs to be considered when making purchases. Who has the right to use the software? At home or at work? For what purposes? And are we at the mercy of a single vendor for service and upgrades?
There is nothing "ideological" about preferring a license that gives your organization the freedom to optimize the deployment and maintenance of the software for both current and (unforeseeable) future needs, over a license that put limitations on use and/or the future evolution of the product.
It is simply due diligence on the part of the decision makers.
MS plays dirty, but in many ways, they are helping OSS win. As it is, they have no real innovations so they "borrow" heavily from the OSS and other commercial (see apple) world. The one nice thing about this, is that MS tends to show what tech. is pretty good. In particular, I greatly admire that MS's research for years was to reverse engineer their competitor products and then re-implement it with improvements. They are doing the same for OSS and such tech. as Java and even Macs.
As to their illegal actions, do not worry about it. A lot of other nations will be moving towards OSS esp. EU. China, Russia, and India are moving quickly towards OSS. The smaller nations will have choice again very shortly.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Let's look at it from a tech standpoint, and a logic standpoint. From a tech standpoint, closed source means you have just signed up for having someone keep their hands on your wallet forever, and have turned over long term control of your data to some for-profit vendor who can hold you up for more money down the road, and should they go out of business, you are then screwed as your application gets less and less useful, but your data stays locked in their format and system. Security issues? Too bad, now you have to run your business *plus* take on the burden of running the business of the now out of business closed source software vendor-what a deal! Functionality issues? Too bad, you can't do anything about it, legally anyway, plus see the preceding scenario.
From a logic viewpoint, this is a smooth move-or not. I say not, YMMV. Call it politics, I call it longer range strategic thinking and business planning.
From a financial viewpoint, a perpetual expense with no way to keep costs under control-or not. I believe the slang term used is extortion with the closed source guys. "We can't move our data unless we use their product, which keeps going up in price!!!" "We can't get to our records, the company quit making that software, their last version is full of security holes now, but we need some our machines to be networked and....this sucks!" See?
From a public benefit viewpoint, using tax monies to do this-is this a good deal for the tax payer-or not. I say-not. Looks like a good deal only for the software purchasing decision maker in company x or government y who walks away with the bag of untraceable cash and for the vendor who has created what is called an artificial scarcity business model in his particular niche.
i, having lived in asia have a bit of prospective about why this is happening.
Basically the IT market is telling malaysia, hey this sorta thing is going to put your workers out of business. This is being as a disportionate amount of IT firms, programming farms, and support centers are locate in these asian former brittish colonies for their language profeciency, and low wages. whilst open source as a hole, is dominated by other reigons. this has brought malaysia to question wheather free software is good for their bottom line.
this and there are accuasations from the old prime minster (for almost 3 decades) Mahathir muhammed, that the current PM abdullah badawi is corrupt, and should resign.
Take a look at the article I translated in my journal showing how the ICT Minister of Thailand reversed the FLOSS policy recently. There's also a translation of the open-letter response from the Thai IT community in there.
Put identity in the browser.
Anything to try and retain business. Of course any other company would do the same, but then again any other company isn't Microsoft .
Malaysia....for this policy to change, something was traded. No doubt about that. :-)
Only boring people are ever bored.