FOSS in the Philippines

I was browsing the net to find any FOSS advocates located here in davao but some article about a Bill in the house of the representative (Bill No. 1716) or FOSS act of 2007 catch my attention. I really didn't know that there was a bill concerning FOSS.

The bill include:

Government’s Principal Obligations

The Philippine government must not only “recognise the legitimacy of FOSS and FOSS licenses,” but will “use only ICT goods and services that comply with open standards,” “encode data intended for public consumption in open standard data format,” and “apply only FOSS or FOSS solutions in all ICT projects and activities, except in extraordinary circumstances.”

“Extraordinary Circumstances”

circumstances” include instances in which there is “no reasonably available ICT good or service supporting open standards and/or FOSS in the field, area, or activity” or a “government agency or office has an existing, widely used and widely implemented proprietary ICT system and there is no reasonably available technology using open standards and/or FOSS.”

Preference to the Philippine ICT Industry

The government must avoid dependence on a single vendor when pursuing ICT investments and preference for procurement must be given to Filipino-owned ICT companies.


There also arise a problem if the government can sustain the said migration from Proprietary standards to FOSS.

Factors frustrating FOSS migration
Notwithstanding the numerous advantages associated with the adoption of FOSS, the following were the factors identified that may frustrate the Philippine government’s migration to FOSS:

(1) Inadequate infrastructure: The Philippines may not yet have sufficient infrastructure, in terms of skilled providers and IT personnel, to sustain the government’s comprehensive migration to FOSS.

(2) Migration costs and resistance: The cost of migrating to FOSS may well exceed the licensing costs of proprietary software, because government users have confidence in existing legacy systems and resist the introduction of new programmes.

(3) Market interference: The government’s adoption of FOSS may deprive the private sector of business opportunities and may in turn distort the market value of software.

(4) Model procurement guidelines: Current government policy indicates that it would prefer to retain a flexible system of software procurement based on the economic standard of total cost of ownership (TOC). If the TOC is less than or equal to that of proprietary software, only then will preference be given to FOSS.

Unfortunately, the said bill was not realized until now. T___T


Source