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All of Vietnam's Government Computers To Use Linux, By Fiat
christian.einfeldt writes "The Vietnamese Ministry of Information and Communications has issued an administrative ruling increasing the use of Free Open Source Software products at state agencies, increasing the software's use both in the back office and on the desktop. According to the new rule, 100% of government servers must run Linux by June 30, 2009, and 70% of agencies must use OpenOffice.org, Mozilla Firefox, and Mozilla Thunderbird by the end of 2009. The regulation also sets benchmarks for training and proficiency in the software. Vietnam has a population of 86 million, 4 million larger than that of Germany, and is one of the world's fastest-growing economies."
All of Vietnam's Government Computers To Use Linux
According to the new rule, 100% of government servers must run Linux by June 30, 2009, and 70% of agencies must use OpenOffice.org, Mozilla Firefox, and Mozilla Thunderbird by the end of 2009.
FTA:
by June 30, 2009, 100% of servers of IT divisions of government agencies must be installed with open source software;
I really doubt all of the Vietnam government's computers are servers. Also, Open Source does not neccisarily mean Linux. (not that BSD is a bad alternative)
If you go to any asian country, you find stacks and stacks of CDs and DVDs filled with mislabelled stuff from Microsoft to Universal studios. So, the thought of Vietnam actually paying for a bunch of Windows licenses just seems rather remote to me.
I would be willing to bet that Microsoft has been quietly watching Windows get rolled out all across Vietnam, knowing that, they don't have but a dozen licenses for the entire country, and a million copies of Windows, and just let Vietnam build all of their infrastructure on top of it.
Then, once they see the Vietnamese are hooked, they sent in a salesteam to ask them to pay for it, or they will shut the country down. Vietnam of course issues its edict, but both they know and Microsoft know, that Vietnam now belongs to Steve Ballmer and Bill Gates.
Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon both roll over in their graves, and somewhere, on a dark night, the leaders of Microsoft enjoy a drink to celebrate the triumph with Henry Kissinger, Dick Cheney and the Bushes. "Hey, we might have f--- up in Iraq, but we finally won Vietnam."
This is my sig.
According to the new rule, 100% of government servers must run Linux by June 30, 2009, and 70% of agencies must use OpenOffice.org,
I guess it's time for Steve Ballmer to catch the next flight to Hanoi with cash and incentives in his briefcase. If this approach worked in the past why shouldn't it work one more time?
Go Ballmer go!
Penguins?!? in Vietnam? It's a cold day in hell boys!!!
Black Footed Penguins (also known, according to Wikipedia, as "Jackass Penguins") would likely feel right at home there, seeing as how they are native to Africa. They have a couple in the zoo here, they keep them inside during the winter.
When is somebody going to name a Linux distro "Blackfoot?" It would be HOT!
Free Martian Whores!
This is a growing economy, perhaps they are just deciding to take the hit now rather than dig themselves deeper into the Microsoft dependency trap.
To me this seems like a very sensible call for smaller and growing countries - it frees up resources for other purposes and means they are not caught in the trap in the future.
Linux doesnt have to be 'all that great', it just has to work, and it does. We are not talking about countries that have developed to the fat-and-lazy level of needing everything to be 'managed for them' here.
And if you thin Microsoft bends over backwards to help large customers in 'other' countries, then good luck with that.
I lived and worked in Viet Nam as well (2003), and while I did see some computers running Linux there, they were all in the hands of individuals, except for a couple of LAN servers I did admin work on (one at my employer, another at one of our customers).
At the time I was there, two things about most computers in government office were very noticeable: 1) They were really old, and 2) Many of them were running Windows 9x, not 2000 or XP. Getting from there to modernity is probably easier with Linux, especially considering that licensed copies of Windows aren't exactly thick on the ground in VN. The whole time I was there, I only saw three Windows machines that I was sure had licensed copies, and those were three brand new Compaqs that I installed fresh from the box, paid for by Japanese ODA. Amazing that they weren't Japanese PCs, considering the source of the funds. Even more amazing that the only Japanese products on that project were some wireless routers (802.11B WAN product made for outdoor point to point use; our longest hop was around 5 km IIRC, using parabolic antennas).
Are you familiar with Vietlug? http://www.vnlinux.org/
KPLUG, huh? I'm from San Diego, too, but live in the Bay Area now. I'm from the Montgomery Field area, too, have been to a few KPUG meetings in 2003 before I took a job out of town. Me may have crossed paths in real life at some point.
I've been observing the growth of Vietnamese-language software for the past decade, and I have to say that open-source growth have been outpacing proprietary growth. In a country where the piracy rate tops 90%, major software companies don't see much incentive to support the Vietnamese language. With more than 80 million speakers, the Vietnamese language has about 8 times as many users as Swedish, a commonly supported language. The repertoire of open-source software supporting Vietnamese grew from virtually nothing in 2003 to support in most major Linux applications in 2009. This includes some of the most common Vietnamese-language keyboard drivers such as Unikey and even expanded to the fast-growing Vietnamese-language Wikipedia. At the same time, Vietnamese-language support among proprietary software barely grew; IE still doesn't have a Vietnamese-language version, and Word does not have a Vietnamese spellchecker. The only notable exception to this is Yahoo!, who has a dominant presence in the online market.