The Thai Software Industry Promotion Agency (SIPA) wants to encourage governments and organizations to start using open source software for server communication applications and for desktop office productivity applications, and to migrate to other applications later. Currently less than 1 per cent of software on PCs in Thailand is open source, while open source software makes up 20 to 30 per cent of software in large projects.
SIPA also recommended that schools and universities should run introductory open source computer courses and that a Linux professional certification programme should be set up, to ensure that more people have open source skills.
Thailand is not the only Asian country encouraging the adoption of open source software. The Chinese, Japanese and South Korean governments are working together to research and develop open-source systems.
Some Asian government agencies have already migrated from Windows to Linux, including Singapore's Ministry of Defence, which has installed OpenOffice.org on over 5000 PCs and is planning to deploy it on a further 15,000.
Quelle: Public Sector Technology & Management, 24.02.2005
