•    HOME   
•    NEWS   
•    BUSINESS   
•    INTERNATIONAL   
•    TECH   
•    SPORTS   
•    LIFE & TIMES   
•    OPINION   
•    MY JAKARTA   
•    BLOGS   

Jakarta. A government campaign to migrate to open source software instead of paying for proprietary products could save the state as much as Rp 3.6 trillion ($400 million), the State Ministry for Research and Technology said on Wednesday.

The campaign, introduced in 2004, called “Indonesia, Go Open Source,” was fueled in part by the obligatory use of legal software, as defined in the 2002 Law on Intellectual Property Rights. 

In 2005, then-Communications and Information Technology Minister Sofyan Djalil, issued a regulation calling for the increased use of open source software in order to curb software piracy.

The IGOS campaign has set Dec. 2011 as the deadline for all government institutions to adopt open source software.

“We estimate that by that time, we would have saved as much as Rp 3.6 trillion,” said Kemal Prihatman, the Research and Technology Ministry’s assistant deputy for information technology development, after the opening ceremony of the Indonesian Open Source Award.

Kemal said that the estimated cost saving for the state was calculated from the approximate number of computer users at government institutions, one million people, multiplied by the $400 price of licensed software.

He added that the move to open source could also reduce dependence on certain software vendors, encouraging spending on locally-developed software.

The ministry in 2009 conducted a survey of about 490 government institutions and regional administrations across the country to evaluate the implementation of the IGOS campaign, and found that about 20 percent had already migrated to open source software.

“But we predict the actual number could be more because during the survey, we also found out that there were many which had migrated on their own initiative, such as the local administrations of Sragen and Pekalongan,” Kemal said.

An organizing committee member for the Open Source Award said the survey only revealed the tip of the iceberg because migrating to open source software did not need to be facilitated by the central government.

Kemal said there were also 27 government institutions that had high rates of open source migration. However, the Communications Ministry has acknowledged that a 100 percent rate of migration to open source would be unrealistic.

The ministry’s director general for telematics application, Ashwin Sasongko, said some software applications were still unavailable in open source.

“In that case, it is acceptable to use the proprietary ones,” Ashwin said, adding that copyrighted software was also still used in some government-sponsored programs to introduce computers and the Internet in villages across the archipelago.

The current communications minister, Tifatul Sembiring, said in his opening remarks at the Open Source Award that it was aimed at rewarding the implementation of open source software at government and educational institutions and would result in greater use of the free software. 

“One thing that users will find appealing is that open source software requires a low budget,” he said.