Malaysian Open Source Procurement Policy Amended 18
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."
OK, let's do that (Score:2, Interesting)
From a logic viewpoint, this is a smooth move-or not. I say not, YMMV. Call it politics, I call it longer range strategic thinking and business planning.
From a financial viewpoint, a perpetual expense with no way to keep costs under control-or not. I believe the slang term used is extortion with the closed source guys. "We can't move our data unless we use their product, which keeps going up in price!!!" "We can't get to our records, the company quit making that software, their last version is full of security holes now, but we need some our machines to be networked and....this sucks!" See?
From a public benefit viewpoint, using tax monies to do this-is this a good deal for the tax payer-or not. I say-not. Looks like a good deal only for the software purchasing decision maker in company x or government y who walks away with the bag of untraceable cash and for the vendor who has created what is called an artificial scarcity business model in his particular niche.
Re:malaysian politic landscape (Score:2, Interesting)