Tuesday, March 13, 2007 | MANILA, PHILIPPINES
News
Advocates press FOSS use in government
A cyber battle has been going on in recent years, with neither side willing to surrender. The battleground is virtual, but the preparation for the war is very real and arduous.
The war is between commercial software companies and advocates of open source software, in which the source code is available to users royalty-free and can be modified, developed and redistributed.
Commercial or proprietary software, on the other hand, is typically sold or licensed, with a company providing support and updates to efficiently use the software. The source code is normally not publicly distributed and may not be copied or modified. In fact, source codes of commercial software are also the subject of frequent intellectual property rights battles.
In an effort to promote open source in the Philippines, the Institute for Popular Democracy (IPD) and open source advocates from the European Union held a national conference on free and open source software (FOSS) and e-Governance on March 7 and 8 at the Edsa Shangri-La Hotel in Ortigas.
The conference is the culmination of IPD's one-year project with the European Commission-Philippine Delegation under the Small Projects Facility, said IPD, a nonprofit research and advocacy institute, on its Web site.
The conference, organized by project manager and IPD deputy director for operations Gregorio Luis Igaya, put together information technology (IT) professionals and local government unit (LGU) officials, and demonstrated open source applications designed to help LGUs perform tasks such as resource mapping, revenue collection and local legislation.
Proprietary software provides all of these already, but open source advocates claim two distinct advantages to their open source: they are free, and they are more reliable.
"All systems have flaws. With proprietary software, all you need is a lazy system administrator to allow others to take advantage of them. Some companies don't even inform users about flaws even when the word is out. But with open source, since the code is visible, people can submit patches to correct flaws instantly," said Johan Janssens, lead developer of Belgian open source system Joomla.
He noted that open source software also give programmers the ability to share their knowledge with one another with the free distribution of products.
But Mr. Igaya said the lack of a clear government policy on open source is preventing faster proliferation of FOSS.
"Open source has a grass-roots character to it, since it's cost-free and it's developed and improved by the community. The Philippines is rich in human capital to develop software, but we need to build a curriculum for our schools that teaches students how to develop open source software.
"We want to have it as a default option for people or at least to speak with members of the Congress to put it on the agenda," said Mr. Igaya.
House bill
In Congress, party-list Rep. Teodoro A. Casiño (Bayan Muna) is currently pushing a bill to promote FOSS by recognizing the legitimacy of their licenses and mandating government communication and public data to be encoded in open standard formats.
Commission on Information and Communication Technology (CICT) Chairman Ramon Sales has expressed support for the bill, saying that it could contribute to lessening the cost and risk in government systems.
The CICT is even now talking with technology providers to test and deploy computers worth P10,000 or less to government agencies and schools nationwide. The computers use open source software such as Linux, Mozilla Firefox and OpenOffice to cut down on costs.
But commercial software companies have long denied that open source software is more secure than licensed products.
"Software security is an industry-wide concern, and vulnerabilities are not more or less prevalent for software developed under either an open source or commercial software model," said Business Software Alliance (BSA) director of software policy for Asia Seow Hiong Goh.
Meanwhile, the Philippine Software Industry Association (PSIA) said the government cannot order the use of a single technology over another since its role should be to form ties with the private sector in creating a business environment that promotes innovation and creativity.
"The bill [of Mr. Casiño] will limit the development and skills [of users] if the government will use only one technology," it said in its position paper.
In Brazil, it's the government, with no less than President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva himself, openly promoting Linux.
Nevertheless, both sides to the war continue to promote the relative strengths of their respective products. While some proprietary software companies such as Microsoft maintain the upper hand in market share, it remains to be seen how far open source software will eventually go.
No comments:
Post a Comment