Malaysian Government has reached 97% OSS Adoption — WOW!
When I started working on GNU C++ in 1987, I could almost feel the course of history changing with every line of code I wrote. When I started Cygnus Support in 1989, I was convinced that it was only a matter of time before companies began to realize that proprietary software restrictions did nothing to help their competitive advantage and everything to harm it. And though early funding for my work came from government agencies (US DARPA in 1987 and French INRIA in 1988), I never quite expected to be visiting and promoting open source in Malaysia [short version] [longer version]. Yet such is the reach of open source software! Now the Government of Malaysia proudly reports an astonishing 97% adoption rate for open source software in this new report:
Search for the line “Agencies Adopting OSS” from this link, which shows:
| Implementation | Target | Actual | Variance | Target Hit | ||||||||||||
| Abs | % | Abs | % | Abs | % | F/A | ||||||||||
| Agencies Adopting OSS | 724 | 100 | 703 | 97.1 | -21 | -2.9 | A | No | ||||||||
| Agencies Using Back-end Infrastructure | 580 | 80 | 632 | 87.29 | 52 | 7.29 | F | Yes | ||||||||
| Agencies Using OSS Desktop Solutions | 218 | 30 | 490 | 67.68 | 272 | 37.68 | F | Yes | ||||||||
This report is linked from the Malaysian government’s OSS Agency Adoption Charts and Tables.
But the work is not done yet. While the 80% target for back-end infrastructure has been met, and the 30% target for Desktop usage has been met, the 100% target for at least some OSS usage across all Malaysian government agencies has not been met. 21 of 724 agencies have yet to deploy either OpenOffice on the desktop, Linux as an operating system, MySQL as a database, Apache as a web server, or JBoss as an application server. Nevertheless, I believe this represents an historic achievement, and the world should congratulate Malaysia on its outstanding leadership and accomplishments in the past five years of effort.
Recently, Open Source for America launched a report card for US government agencies to rate their “openness” score. I wonder how the usage of open source software in US government agencies (or any other governments) compares with that of Malaysia. Next month I will attend the CONSEGI conference in Brasília, Brasil. There I am sure the Brazilian government will be touting its progress in becoming another true leader in the adoption of open source. I look forward to seeing their reports!
In the mean time, if you know of any similar reports, please comment on this page so we can collect and compare them. Thanks!