Philippine open source community takes on Microsoft

The local open source community, long engaged in a simmering cold war with Microsoft Corp., the world's biggest champion of proprietary software, has come out with guns blazing to publicly dispute the statements made by officials of the software giant on open source software (OSS) early this month. This formal declaration of war has kept the country's electronic groups and mailing lists abuzz with the expected Microsoft-bashing reactions from OSS advocates.

Microsoft officials fired the first salvo when they said the government can benefit from commercial software from a total cost of ownership standpoint since deploying their products is more cost-effective than using Linux, one of the most popular open source operating systems.

"Linux is a collection of different technologies from a broad range of different organizations that doesn't have a support mechanism or the technology direction or commitment from an R&D perspective," said Michael Rawding, Microsoft president for the Asia-Pacific region including Japan.

"Repeatedly, when people use it, they find that they have to spend a lot more time in the underlying plumbing of the technology." Ahmed Chami, Microsoft director for the South Asia region, added fuel to the fire by saying that putting its faith on OSS alone would be dangerous for the government to do since it is not a proven model and cannot guarantee success in the future.

OSS advocates and Linux users were also irked by the implication that open source software would stifle the growth of the local software development industry and discourage the generation of jobs as well as the establishment of new software companies in the country.

"Open source software is the intelligent alternative," said Emmanuel Amador of Distributed Development Network, an open source-based development service company.

"It is enterprise-ready and will help jumpstart the local software development industry. Linux is free, mature, stable and secure, and can be freely modified.

"In contrast, Microsoft's Windows operating system is prone to crash, susceptible to viruses, cannot be modified by users, and is very insecure."

Amador said Microsoft is the one holding back the progress of the local software development community by locking developers out of the development process through its closed, proprietary software model.

"Also, its licensing and intellectual copyright restrictions make it almost impossible to examine and reuse existing proprietary software code to produce derivative or customized software or to improve existing proprietary software, forcing developers to spend valuable time and resources "reinventing the wheel," added Amador.

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