Recent years have seen governments in the Asia-Pacific actively encouraging the adoption of open systems as an alternative or complementary operating system environment for e-government initiatives, said Mr Rick Sewell, business manager (Linux, Enterprise Storage and Servers) at HP Asia-Pacific and Japan, adding that the growth opportunities for Linux in the region are massive. "Almost all Asian governments have a stated policy - or are developing one - for Linux. These governments have set aside significant funding for projects to assist open source," he told Today.
He noted within the region, China, South Korea, Malaysia, Taiwan and Australia - among others - have made a commitment to move towards open systems.
Many governments, he added, are "strongly encouraging" their educational institutions to teach and adopt open source.
The region uses its own versions of Linux, not just the popular distributions from established players such as Red Hat, SuSe and Mandrake.
"There are quite a few strong Linux distributions thriving, such as Red Flag in China, Miracle Linux in Japan and LinuxTLE in Thailand. Generally, these distributors have been most successful where there are strong localisation needs," Mr Sewell observed.
The emergence of industry-standards Intel-based processors, such as Itanium 2, has enabled Linux to enter the 64-bit market. This helps government agencies and companies that want the flexibility and cost advantage of Linux software, plus the high performance of 64-bit systems as an option.
Last year, Oracle and Red Hat established the Linux Enterprise Application Porting Centre in Singapore to help independent software vendors (ISVs) and systems integrators to port and certify their applications on the Linux platform. According to Mr Sewell, many local ISVs have signed up.
"As Singaporean companies move ahead in the global economy, they are looking for a technology platform that can offer independence across the board," Mr Sewell said.
"The bottomline is that Asia is moving fast on open source, with countries having the public sector, community and industry pushing together to make open source solutions more widely available, applicable and preferred."
Autor: Ariel Tam
Quelle: Channel NewsAsia, 24.05.2005
