Open Source in RP: Ready for Primetime

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Wednesday, 10 December 2008 00:38

By Jenalyn Rubio
Published in the September 2008 print edition of Computerworld Philippines
October 08, 2008

Open source has, undoubtedly, been gaining ground across the globe—and the Philippines, like its Asian neighbors, is no exception to this trend. As individuals and organizations in the country become more technology-savvy, open source is increasingly getting a second glance either as an alternative or a complement to proprietary systems.

Winston Damarillo, executive chairman of Exist Global, a Philippine-based software engineering services firm that promotes widespread adoption of open source across the region, believes reception toward open source technology has been very positive across Asia, following accelerated deployment of open source technology worldwide as almost half of all Web sites in the world (approximately 49.12%) are currently running on the Apache Web server.

“Consumer perception and preference for open source products such as the Apache Web Server, Linux Operating System, PHP, Apache Tomcat, and Eclipse IDE, have been on an upswing,” Damarillo says, adding that these indicators show that “open source is ready for primetime,” especially since such open source products have already become models for collaboration and drivers of software entrepreneurship.

“We see a lot of entrepreneurs creating business models in the field of open source. Hopefully, these entrepreneurs would succeed in creating a local Filipino brand for software solutions powered by open source products. If this happens, particularly in the application space, more companies would adopt open source software,” says Anson Uy, president of Touch solutions Inc., a value-added distributor of enterprise Linux and various open source products.

Over the past decade, the adoption of open source technology has rapidly increased in Asia Pacific, with national governments and small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) increasingly turning to these solutions. "Government agencies, nonprofit organizations, and SMEs are increasingly embracing open source because they operate on very tight budgets," says Damarillo, who is also chairman for international marketing at the Philippine Software Industry Association (PSIA).

In the Philippines, open source initiatives have been gaining momentum for the past two years, at least, as more individuals, private organizations, and government entities are taking more than a second look at open source.

OPEN SOURCE IN GOV’T
In support of open source systems, the government has initiated a number of ICT projects, one of which is the eLGU project, an ongoing initiative which assists LGUs in computerization to promote better and faster delivery of government services.

Originally funded by the Department of Science and Technology in 2002, the projectintends to upgrade these LGUs’ capabilities in ICT through open source technology. Under the project, revenue-generating e-government application systems were developed based on the open source platform, namely: the real property tax system (RPTS), the business permit and licensing system (BPLS), and the Treasury Operations Management System (TOMS).

Aside from the development of the three systems, the e-government applications component also involved the development and hosting of LGU websites; out of the 1,694 LGUs nationwide, 1,527 are with NCC-hosted websites, and 1,516 or 99% of which were developed using the Website Content Management System (WCMS) developed by NCC. The WCMS was developed using open source web development tools. Several national government agencies (NGA) and state universities and colleges were also developed using the WCMS.

Another open source project initiated by the CICT’s human capital development group in partnership with the Department of Education (DepEd) is the iSchools or eEskwela program. Under the project, 360 public high schools were each provided with 20 desktop PCs, a server, wireless networking equipment, LCD projector, a multifunction printer and two air conditioning units. The PCs are loaded with several open-source tools including EdUbuntu (a version of Ubuntu designed for schools), OpenOffice, Apache, MySQL and Mozilla Firefox, among others.

According to CICT commissioner diaz de Rivera, the commission is looking at completing another 320 schools this year and another 300 next year—totaling to around 1000 computer laboratories. CICT chairman Chua said they decided to use open source software for the project because of its “cost effectiveness relative to proprietary solutions.” “Put simply, cheaper computer labs means more computer labs that we can roll out,” he says.

NCC and CICT have also been constantly partnering with private firms in establishing “eGovernance Center of Excellence” facilities in the country, aiming to develop a network of open systems independent software vendors and ICT service providers and have a venue for sharing best practices in the implementation of government applications.

Also an active advocate of open source use is the Advanced Science and Technology Institute (ASTI), one of the research and development institutes under the Department of Science and Technology (DOST). ASTI is an early adopter of open source systems and has been actively undertaking various development projects in line with open source, one of which is the Bayanihan Linux—an alternative desktop Linux solution. Also an ASTI project is the Bayanihan Linux Terminal Server Project which aims to provide a low-cost network computing environment that makes use of a centralized computing technology whereby administration and control are done on the server rather than on the individual workstations.

ASTI has been deploying LTSP solutions in several public elementary and secondary schools as well as colleges.

However, although the government promotes the use of open source, it does not require government agencies to purely use open source systems. According to Commission on Information and Communications Technology (CICT) chairman Ray Anthony Roxas-Chua, the policy of CICT has always been to let the marketplace decide the use of proprietary versus open source software. “We just need to make sure that there exists a fair marketplace and that the consumer is fully informed of the available choices,” he says.

CICT Commissioner Angelo Timoteo diaz de River agrees, adding that CICT’s stand is “pro-choice” even for government use. The commissioner explains that what they want is for each government CIO to have the capability to determine and decide what platform will work best for their applications. The commissioner explains that the bill espousing the creation of a Department on ICT will also require every government office to have a CIO reporting to the head of the agency.

“We promote open source but what we are really promoting is that open source should be a choice and neither open source nor proprietary should be left out as an option. Both of them should be evaluated as choice, a good CIO will evaluate both and determine what is the best choice or the proper mix,” the commissioner adds.

THE OPEN ECOSYSTEM
“Homogenous will be a tough position to maintain if you want to be competitive in the marketplace,” says Michel Gambier, general manager for Microsoft Information Worker,
Asia Pacific region. Microsoft, like most IT giants, has been opening up to interoperability with open source systems and other platforms.

"The reality is open source is not something you can fight. It is something that you learn to adopt and extend and adapt to," says Matt Thompson, Sun's senior director for technology outreach & Sun developer network group, "For Sun's part, we've gone the open source route. Every piece of software Sun produces is, or will be, open source. For us it's a simple argument that the more people who get access to our software, the better off we are. It makes economic sense."

Thompson has been heading Sun Microsystems’ Java Education and Development Initiative (JEDI) project- an open source skills training program initiated by Sun together with several universities and colleges in the Philippines. The Philippines has the eighth largest development community for open source in the world. According to Thompson, the Philippines actually has the largest development community for open source in the world and JEDI aims to make IT and computer science course materials available for “free” to colleges and universities to contribute to the goal of making the Philippines the center for software development in Asia.

Microsoft, for its part, has been continuously enhancing its technologies to support the Open Document Format (ODF) and collaborating with non-profit open source group, Apache Software, indicating how the company is working to be a partner, rather than a threat to open source initiatives.

Microsoft also recently announced its partnership with the Commission on Information and Communications Technology (CICT) and the National Computer Center (NCC) for the establishment of the first Microsoft open source Interoperability laboratory in Asia-Pacific.

Targeted at students, IT professionals, software developers and organizations interested in testing the performance of their open source applications on the Microsoft platform, the laboratory will be located inside the CICT-NCC building at the University of the Philippines campus in Quezon City.

According to Ken Wye Saw, vice president for sales and marketing at Microsoft Asia Pacific, the company opted to open its first Interoperability laboratory in the Philippines because of the potential and opportunity that they saw in the country’s developer community. “There is great potential in the Philippines in terms of the skills of developers here,” Saw said.

Advocates of free and open source software (FOSS) in the Philippines are, in fact, aspiring for a larger and active local community and this is one of the objectives that they had hoped to achieve with the first Philippine Open Source Summit (POSS) held in the country earlier this year.

"We want to make sure there is a vibrant open source community in the Philippines because that's what open source is all about. It is something that's real but we've got to work on it. We need to invest our time, money, effort, and skills," said Jerry Rapes, general manager of Exist Global.

Dubbed "Understanding the Business Value of Open Source," the POSS event hosted host analysts, open source proponents, and other IT industry players.

GOING FOR THE MIX
With many local companies either in the process of deploying open source systems or seriously looking into it, the prevalent practice seems to be to mix both proprietary and open source. Such a trend could primarily be due to several factors, which includes the perception that fully migrating to open source may be too complicated and, to some extent, risky for some businesses, while, at the same time, these companies realize the potential benefits and cost savings that open source systems offer and they want to be able to take advantage of this.

“As the open source ecosystem becomes more mature, both on the technical and sales side, more companies are adopting open source products and services. The trend is to mix both proprietary and open source components in an enterprise architecture to maximize the strength of both products,” says Touch Solution’s Uy.

“I personally see that mixing proprietary and open source will continue to be a trend. Definitely open source will be stronger, its share of the pie will be bigger compared to what it has today and there will be more people attracted to open source, still primarily because of cost savings,” agrees CICT’s diaz de Rivera, adding that some people will choose to run applications on proprietary software simply because they think it runs better there while some applications may also work better on open source.

“Definitely, the usage is still primarily on the back-end or server side of the infrastructure. Linux is designed and optimize to process more transactions per processor than any other OS platform. On the front end side, user friendliness and availability of applications are the primary drivers for adoption. Until we see a huge improvement on the user friendliness and availability of productivity applications, the adoption on Linux on the desktop will be slow,” explains Uy.

While open source may have already inched beyond the infancy stage as the local IT market is increasingly becoming mature, there are still some setbacks hindering open source from achieving its full potential. There is no doubt, however, that the local market is slowly but surely becoming more mature in evaluating available technology options and knowing what would work best for their respective needs.

According to Uy, support, training, hardware and software certification are the keys to open source adoption. He further says that virtualization will be a key technology driver for Linux on the server while the user friendliness of the GUI systems in Linux is the key technology driver for Linux on the desktop.

“Our company currently has a total count of 800 customers big and small that have adopted and bought open source. I would say that there is still room for improvement, however, I also must say that the adoption rate has been very good,” Uy says.