Malaysian Open Source Procurement Policy Amended

Ditesh writes "The Malaysian Open Source Masterplan, which favoured open source over proprietary public sector procurements when all other evaluations are equal, has been reversed to a purely 'neutral technology platform' policy due to 'negative reaction towards open source (from the IT market)'. This comes after months of hard lobbying by Microsoft Malaysia. This reversal is certainly unfortunate, as the policy has helped raise comfort levels of other policy makers worldwide in pursuing similar goals. The Malaysian Open Source Alliance has published a position statement asking for clarification of the term 'neutrality', and has received support from MNC's, local companies and free software developers in Malaysia."

malaysian politic landscape

[starworks5]

i, having lived in asia have a bit of prospective about why this is happening.

Basically the IT market is telling malaysia, hey this sorta thing is going to put your workers out of business. This is being as a disportionate amount of IT firms, programming farms, and support centers are locate in these asian former brittish colonies for their language profeciency, and low wages. whilst open source as a hole, is dominated by other reigons. this has brought malaysia to question wheather free software is good for their bottom line.

this and there are accuasations from the old prime minster (for almost 3 decades) Mahathir muhammed, that the current PM abdullah badawi is corrupt, and should resign.

Look at my Journal

[Daengbo]

Take a look at the article I translated in my journal showing how the ICT Minister of Thailand reversed the FLOSS policy recently. There's also a translation of the open-letter response from the Thai IT community in there.