By Ong Boon Kiat, CNETAsia
May 19, 2005
Forget hard figures, the return of investment calculations and the list of new application features. These factors count for little as organizations deciding whether a move to a new IT platform is viable seek a different comfort level. This new level of comfort requires sufficient evidence of successful adoption by others in the industry. It also requires that the move be seen to inspire confidence among partners and customers.
In Asia, one can now argue that both prerequisites have been met when it comes to moving to an open-source platform. It may be hard to state a defining moment when that happened, since comfort is an intangible measure, but it is not hard to sense the optimism that now resonates on the ground with open-source software (OSS).
This confidence stems from the abundant anecdotal evidence that OSS benefits both government and commercial organizations. In Asia, Singapore's Ministry of Defence (Mindef), for instance, saved S$15 million (US$9.3 million) by deciding to let its existing licenses for Office 97 software lapse and to migrate to OpenOffice instead.
Thailand's National Electronics and Computer Technology Center (NECTEC), the nation's IT development agency, has been replacing its fleet of proprietary software with freeware and open-source applications such as GIMP, OpenOffice and Irfanview. NECTEC director Dr. Thaweesak Koanantakool reckons that at a nationwide level, using OSS saved Thailand US$45 million in 2003.
The state-owned Central Bank of India saved US$4 million a year, or reduced 30 percent of its IT expenses, when it adopted Linux to run Oracle applications last year.
