It appears that this year will be the year of the penguin, at least for the Vietnamese Government where the Ministry of Information and Communications has issued instruction that “by June 30, 2009, 100% of servers of IT divisions of government agencies must be installed with open source software; 100% of staffs at these IT divisions must be trained in the use of these software products and at least 50% use them proficiently.”
The instruction also said that by December 31, 2009, 70% of servers of ministries’ agencies and local state agencies must be installed with the above open source software products and 70% of IT staff trained in using this software; and at least 40% able to use the software in their work.
There’s not much talk about what systems they are going to use, other than “OpenOffice, email software for servers of Mozilla ThunderBird, Mozilla FireFox web browser and the Vietnamese typing software Unikey.”
I wonder how much research has gone into this and whether they will release information on cost savings, planning, etc. If so, it could be a good catalyst for other nations in the area to follow suit. Hello, Mr Rudd?
I would also be interested to hear some official word about file formats and whether they have a digital archive!
Chúc mừng năm mới! (Happy new year!)
