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."

Comments

Never ignore the license

[Per Abrahamsen]

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.

Re:Bad thing...

[ajs318]

Bollocks.

The moment merely obeying the Law of the Land requires a piece of proprietary technology -- any kind of proprietary technology, be it closed-source software or a patented widget -- then the Law has been privatised via the back door.

You surely don't need telling how and why that's a bad thing.

OK, let's do that

[zogger]

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.

malaysian politic landscape

[starworks5]

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.

Re:malaysian politic landscape

[LinuxLuver]

I've spent some time in Malaysia and live in the A/P region. What you say fits with my own experience. It's a shame that Dr. Mahathir Mohammed had to resign. He was able to think freely and design effective policies while governments in Australia and New Zealand and elsewhere just follow the same consultants who (mis)advise government globally. Dr. Mahathir's handling of the 1998 Asian meltdown by restricting sp[eculative currency flows through exchange controls, was contrary to the "received wisdom" and worked well, while other countries who followed that received wisdom and let their currencies continue to freely float saw their economies seriously impacted for the worse.

Look at my Journal

[Daengbo]

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.