Singapore, are we open-sourced yet?
March 4th, 2008 | by David C |Colin Charles in his blog, posted a very interesting tidbit. He notices that the current ruling political party in Malaysia as well as an official website created to bolster communication between the Malaysian electorate and current PM Badawi, are running on proprietary software.
I thought it was quite interesting to find out that PM Badawi and his ruling party are both running on Windows Server 2003 and IIS 6.0, while opposition like the DAP, PKR and PAS are running on Open-source software like Linux and Apache. DAP seems to be the most tech savvy of them all by adopting lighttpd, a very lightweight web server.
So I did a little quick research of our own local political parties, and it turns out, PAP, SDP, NSP and WP is actually running on OpenBSD/Linux and Apache, while SPP is running on Windows.
What surprises me the most is that while PAP as a party, is using open-source technologies to power their webpresence while PAP as a government is not doing the same for governmental websites.
The Government of Singapore website and MHA are running on Windows Server 2003. I haven’t had time to look through the whole list of ministries, but so far I’ve only found MINDEF running on Linux/Apache.
Why haven’t the government migrated all its servers to use open-source technology? Why use taxpayers’ money to pay Microsoft when there are readily available alternatives that does the same job for little or free? I think its time. The government should start to look into cutting costs and using the money saved to help alleviate the suffering due to higher inflation for the poor.
5 Responses to “Singapore, are we open-sourced yet?”
By GaMerZ on Mar 4, 2008 | Reply
LAMP FTW!
By David C on Mar 4, 2008 | Reply
Wow, that was fast. I just published this, and went downstairs to get a drink, and you’ve posted while I was gone for a few minutes.
By Nel on Mar 5, 2008 | Reply
Nice to see a group who at least know OpenBSD’s easy and reasonably secure for webserving. Most people don’t even know what it is.
By Rob on Mar 5, 2008 | Reply
Come on, there’s so many factors influencing why an enterprise chooses one platform over another, it is not just a matter of upfront license cost. The reasons maybe good or bad for all we know, but without at least considering their infrastructure, you are jumping to conclusion about their choices.
By twasher on Mar 5, 2008 | Reply
It’s not just their websites. All civil servants have to apply for leave, file claims for expenses, etc. through an online interface that requires IE with ActiveX enabled. I use Linux exclusively for my work but I have to boot into Windows to perform simple administrative tasks.