Vietnam to spend $20M to push open-source software
Government aims to cut costs, boost domestic development, alleviate copyright infringement
Vietnam's Ministry of Science and Technology (MOST) will spend $20 million over the next four years to speed up development and deployment of open-source software in the country. This will enable Vietnam to cut software buying costs, boost its domestic software industry and alleviate copyright infringement, a government report said Tuesday. The announcement coincides with the holding of the Third Asia Open Source Software Symposium in Hanoi.
One of the goals of the plan is to develop localized application software based on open-source code for use by private businesses, state-owned companies and the government sector, according to the report. This will also help boost the domestic software development market, which has been identified as a key economic sector for the country. The aim is to gain experience in open-source to enable Vietnam to "apply open-source software to replace all commercial software" and "to make very effort to replace Windows with Linux," according to the report.
Open source will be the basis for government applications in areas such as national defense and security, and computers in the state and education sectors plus all big databases should be based on open-source software, the report said. The plan, for the period from 2004 to 2008, also emphasized the need to create a pool of IT specialists to drive the development and deployment of open-source applications.
Vietnam has traditionally been one of the worst offenders in the area of pirating commercial software, according to the Business Software Alliance (BSA), a consortium of software vendors which includes Microsoft Corp., Sybase Inc., Borland Software Corp., and Adobe Systems Inc. Vietnam's piracy rate remains above 90 percent -- more than 10 illegal copies are made for each legitimate copy purchased -- costing vendors around $32 million in 2001, according to BSA.
By David Legard, IDG News Service - March 10, 2004
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