The world celebrated Software Freedom Day last September 15 and I saw that Chin Wong attended the event that was held in ASTI. In any case, his blog gives us a glimpse of Rep. Teddy Casino’s efforts in making open source software more widely-adopted in our country. To quote:
For example, it gives government agencies three years to build up staff expertise in open source systems to 90 percent of their IT professionals. The bill also says 65 percent of the country’s IT professionals must be proficient in free and open source systems by this time, but it’s not clear how this will be achieved, since the law only compels public sector use of such systems.
Within five years, the bill says, 75 percent of all existing government systems should be open standards compliant and all government communication and research data intended for public consumption and access will be in open standard data format.
At the same time, 75 percent of all government systems should use free and open source software.
Right now, with the limited information I gleaned from Chin’s blog entry, I’m more curious as to the details of the new bill. Personally, I prefer this slower pace because of practical considerations when it comes to migration. Also, this is more focused on how the government will be applying it to their workplaces not really including the private sector so for businesses that prefer to run on proprietary software, there’s that option and nobody needs to quickly figure out how to adapt.
What happens next? Will this actually be approved? I do believe that the government must allocate the funds properly for operations. There are many schools which need to be repaired and sick people to be healed, and so on. We could only help but speculate at this point.
Edit: Abe blogged about the Roundtable Discussion on the FOSS Act of 2007 to be held on September 26 in UP Diliman’s Malcolm Hall.
3 comments
nice post! pinoys are globally competitive