Right time for China to use open source as alternative

Sun Microsystems' chairman and co-founder Scott McNealy, told the BBC he had been asked by the new U.S. administration to prepare a paper on how the use of open source software within government, can improve both security and the cost-effective use of technology. President Barack Obama has already been positioned as a friend of open source, starting with his support for universally accessible format.

Well, during China's national science and technology conference on Feb. 9, the Chinese government started a new plan to accelerate the local economy through science and technology. In the next coming 11 years, the Chinese government will invest US$85 billion on technology innovation, including information industry, equipment manufacturing, energy, water, medicine and agriculture. The director of software and service division at MIIT (Ministry of Industry and IT) also mentioned that some of projects will be related to open source software in the China Open Source development summit hosted just one month ago in Beijing.

How is the current situation of open source in China? Let's take a closer look at a survey report about open source in China from IT168 in 2008:

1) Desktop is the king: Desktop OS adoption is at 69.5 percent; Server OS at 68.2 percent; Database at 50.1 percent; Web browser at 47.2 percent; Programing language at 46 percent

2) Who's using open source software? SMB (small and midsize business) adoption stands at 42.7 percent; Large enterprise at 26.4 percent; Education at 19.4 percent; Individuals at 10 percent

3) Industry adoption of open source: Internet at 78.8 percent; Enterprise at 52.5 percent; Telecom at 30 percent; e-government at 27.3 perent

4) Where do people get their open source software? Network downloads 94.6 percent; Free CDs at 35.1 percent; Purchased CDs from resellers at 12.4 percent

5) Where do people access open source information? Open source community at 87.1 percent; Search engine at 65.7 percent; Open source companies at 38.7 percent

6) Who is the best sponsor of open source? IBM at 64.7 percent; Sun Microsystems at 63.1 percent; Google at 61.2 percent; Intel at 15.3 percent

From the data, you will find that desktops account for the largest adoption of open source, and it is the strongest part of Microsoft. SMBs will still be the mainstream user of open source. Most users gather open source software and information from the open source community, which means community is core of open source. The biggest commercial player of open source is IT company who benefit from it.

It's really a good time for China to realize the benefit of open source software during the global economic crisis, and take good control of TCO (total cost of ownership), and emerge the winner!

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Peter Cheng

Peter Cheng is a community strategist and open source evangelist, who is based in Beijing, China. In 2003, he initiated the Open Source University program to gather industry experts and help spread open source technology and culture to over 100 universities. In 2007, he organized the Open Source Camp in five Chinese cities, with the aim to enable the open source community to share and exchange ideas and to promote the technology in China. Peter currently runs TargetSource Tech, a company he founded to provide consulting services on enterprise open source software.