2004.01_Vietnam, Malaysia, Amsterdam.pdf

NEWS

World

World News

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Vietnam on the Road to Open Source

In late October, when the Silicon Valley

daily newspaper, the “San Jose Mercury

News”, published a story about the Viet-

namese government’s plans to eliminate

Microsoft software in an effort to bring

down the piracy rate of more than 95

percent, the news immediately hit the

international newswires.

The paper reported that this had hap-

pened in response to a trade agreement

with the USA in 2001, and to the coun-

try’s effort to join the World Trade

Organisation by 2005.

In fact, the story itself wasn’t as new

as it seemed: As early as October 2002,

Tran Luu Chuong, the IT adviser to the

Vietnam Ministry of

Science and Technol-

ogy, presented a

ten-point Open Source

policy for the country

at the “Open Source: A

Case for e-Govern-

ment” conference in

Washington, DC, arranged by the Infor-

mation for Development program of the

World Bank. The university professor

and Unicode specialist had held a similar

talk at the Asia Open Source Software

Symposium, Phuket, Thailand, March

3–6 2003 (see Issue 30, p11).

In early summer 2003, the Vietnamese

government formed an Open

Source software task force

with the aim of developing a

master plan to start replacing

proprietary software. A mem-

ber of the Ho Chi Minh city

Linux users group claims that

this is probably a response to

Microsoft’s anti-piracy cam-

paign which hit the country’s

largest bakery and an impor-

tant banking systems com-

pany in May 2003. Still the

government hasn’t yet

decided which Open Source software

exactly it will be inroducing to state

offices by 2005 at the latest.

One hot contender is Vietkey Linux, a

commercially developed distribution

based on Red Hat Linux that took five

years to translate into Vietnamese. The

latest version, 3.0, was launched in Octo-

ber. It is based on Red Hat Linux 8.0 and

includes localized versions of KDE,

Mozilla and OpenOffice.

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http://www.siliconvalley.com/mld/

siliconvalley/7139304.htm

http://h0lug.sourceforge.net/00.viet/fl0@

vnisbiz/02flohow/tl-chuong_infodev/html/

http://www.asiaosc.org/uploads/

20030313_1/downloads/TranLuuChuong/

Slide/html/

http://h0lug.sourceforge.net/pn/print.

php?sid=8

http://linux.vietkey.net/Gioithieusanpham

/Download/vietkey_linux/vietkey.iso

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Malaysian Teachers Embrace Open Source

During the September break, a dozen

teachers from nearly as many schools in

Malaysia underwent a six-day intensive

training course on basic Linux and Open

Source software (OSS) tools as part of a

national plan to promote Open Source

technology to schools in the country.

In a pilot project sponsored by local

businessman Datuk Siew Nim Chee, the

Malaysian National Computer Confeder-

ation (MNCC) used the recent break to

join forces with the Advanced Technol-

ogy Studies Centre (atSC) to teach the

teachers from 11 schools in the Klang

Valley area how to run and use OSS,

including the Open Office suite. The OSS

for Schools (OSS/S) project hopes to get

these teachers to pass on their newly

acquired skills to their students as part of

computer club activities, using the train-

ing materials, slides and workbooks

distributed at the course.

atSC’s chief operating officer How Eng

Keong told the ECT News Network,

“This technology is reliable, easy to use

and manage, secure and less expensive.

On top of this, it can run on older

machines, and schools do not have to

constantly upgrade their hardware.”

The genesis of the OSS/S can be traced

to the OSS 101 Seminar and Workshop

for school teachers and non-governmen-

tal organizations (NGOs) organized by

MNCC and atSC last December. “The

MNCC and atSC had received numerous

requests from the public, particularly

from schools, to provide Open Source

seminars to teachers and students” said

How.

atSC will be monitoring the teachers’

progress and helping them implement

OSS in their schools. atSC also plans to

translate the training courseware into the

Malay and Chinese languages so as to

benefit all school communities in the

country.

The continuity of the project, as well

as its expansion to a national scale, will,

however, depend crucially on sponsor-

ship from local businesses and

establishments.

January 2004

www.linux-magazine.com

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World

NEWS

Fresh Water Open Source

Representatives from 18 countries gath-

ered at the second Asia OSS Symposium

held in Singapore, November 3 to 4. Its

aim was to share resources among Asian

countries and to support IT innovations

and economies.

Participants also discussed Linux

coordination and standardization in

preparation of the next meeting to be

held in Tokyo in February. To illustrate

the importance of free and Open Source

software (F/OSS), Dr. Ho from the Acad-

emia Sinica in Taiwan compared human

knowledge to water and went on to say

that F/OSS provided the kind of flow

needed to clear out the grime from a cur-

rently stagnant water tank. To continue

this analogy, one could compare the

symposium to an Open Source fountain

capable of providing a continual flow of

fresh water, in contrast to a closed

source washtub with concrete plugs.

Though many Asian countries have

shown a great deal of interest in hosting

the next symposium, its initiators from

Japan opted to leave this task to a multi-

national organisation. In so doing, they

hope to create ideal conditions for the

idea of sharing knowledge, human

resources, hardware devices and soft-

ware code among the symposium

members to thrive in the long run.

Life Insurance Corporation

of India Shifts to Linux

India’s largest insurance company, the

Life Insurance Corporation of India

(LIC), employing over a million agents,

has abandoned SCO Unix in favor of

Linux as the operating system for net-

working its branches throughout the

country. The decision was taken after

experiencing unspecified problems with

the SCO Unix operating system.

According to R R Nair, Additional

Zonal Manager, LIC, almost 75 percent of

the corporation’s branches have already

shifted to Linux. All the branches in

LIC’s South Zone (comprising the States

of Tamil Nadu, Kerala and Pondicherry)

completed the transition to Linux by

July, while the other zones are currently

in the process of doing so.

Previously, the life insurance company

had installed more than 6000 SCO

UnixWare 7 servers to manage its records

and operations across the country. LIC

used UnixWare 7 to link over 2000

branch offices, serving approximately

11.6 million customers. UnixWare 7

linked LIC’s local area networks, metro-

politan area networks, wide area

networks and the interactive voice

response system. These tasks will now

be performed by a customized version of

Linux supplied by a local vendor.

GNOME Conference to

Norway

Any idea where Kristiansand is? Well, if

not, and if you are a GNOME user or

developer, it’s worth digging out an atlas

and looking up the south coast of Nor-

way, because Kristiansand has been

chosen to host next year’s “GNOME

Users and Developers European Confer-

ence”, GUADEC for short.

From June 28 to 30 2004, Agder Uni-

versity College “Høgskolen i Agder”

(with about 8000 students and faculties

in three cities of the Agder region – Kris-

tiansand, Grimstad and Arendal – one of

the largest university colleges in Nor-

way) together with local Linux user

groups (see p92) and the national Unix

users group NUUG hope to provide an

atmosphere in which it is possible to

“develop free software of at least equally

good quality as proprietary software” as

Mikael Snaprud of the faculty of technol-

ogy in Grimstad puts it. Mikael is one of

the driving forces behind free software

development at the college.

After the successful Debian conference

last July in Oslo (see Issue 35, p87), it

looks like Norwegian Linux and free soft-

ware proponents are trying hard to

establish Norway’s reputation for Open

Source project conferences.

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http://www.guadec.org/

Amsterdam Flirts with

Open Source

Against all expectations, the adoption of

Open Source within the Dutch govern-

ment is making only gradual progress. So

far, only a few initiatives have been

forthcoming. But hope remains as the

City of Amsterdam is evaluating OpenOf-

fice on Red Hat Linux.

One major question needs to be

answered: How easy would the transi-

tion be for the employees? To do this, 36

desktops have been connected to a Linux

server, featuring Samba to integrate with

other servers. The city will also be test-

ing with MS Exchange integration.

If the evaluation works out, a transi-

tion to OpenOffice will soon follow;

Linux will be deployed later. To draw

media attention, this announcement was

made the same day that Bill Gates hit

town to fight Open Source.

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The World’s First Arabic Linux Live-CD

The league of Linux Live CDs has a new

member: Arabixx, an Arabized Morphix-

clone hopes to attract new Linux users in

the Arab world. October 19 the Arabeyes

project announced the beta release 0.8 of

its Linux system which will run from CD.

Arabixx contains localized versions of

GNOME, Mozilla

and OpenOffice 1.1,

and lots of other

software packages

like WINE and the

new Gimp 1.3 which

now supports Ara-

bic.

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