Achieving balance and harmony, or "the middle way", is the core philosophy behind the religion of Buddhism. And it is this way of life that applies to the deployment of software in Thailand, home to 59 million Buddhists or 95 percent of the population.

The nation has been one of the most vocal supporters of the open-source movement in Asia, alongside countries such as China and Malaysia. But the Thai government has noted that it is not choosing camps. It prefers instead to use "the best from both worlds".

According to Dr. Thaweesak Koanantakool, director of the National Electronics and Computer Technology Center (NECTEC), the country's open-source initiative stemmed from a nationwide directive for all government agencies to use legitimate software. The NECTEC is a statutory organization under the Thai Ministry of Science and Technology's National Science and Technology Development Agency.

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"Obviously, we don't have enough budget to do that," he said. "There was an opportunity for (us to use) another type of legal software at a very low cost. So instead of paying, for example, a $1 for the license, we can pay 20 cents for the use of the software and keep the rest of the money for something else, such as provide training or set up a helpdesk."

Front-office employees also typically need only software tools with basic functionality, and usually have no use for extra features that commercial software offer, he added.

Open-source software(OSS), such as Mozilla and OpenOffice, are well-suited to cater for these needs and priced at a low cost, he said.

Government agencies across Thailand now use a combination of OSS and freeware, according to Dr. Thaweesak. "We’ve replaced (Adobe) Photoshop with GIMP (GNU Image Manipulation Program) and ACDSee with Irfanview." The NECTEC also runs OpenOffice TLE, an extension of the open-source office productivity suite which comes with support for the Thai language, on all its Windows-based desktops.

According to him, about 40 percent of his staff at the NECTEC exchange documents using open source. He plans to increase this number to 80 percent by the end of this year.

"We found that the key to open-source adoption is for the organization to declare such documents as the official standard (of practice). If you don't do this officially, then these users will be penalized when they send e-mail with attachments to another user who does not have open-source on his system."

Most of the country's government Web sites are hosted on servers which run either Linux or Apache. In fact, the Thai public sector has been using OSS for more than five years, revealed Dr. Thaweesak. It also employs engineers to help maintain the infrastructure, and has a team that develops OSS and Thai-centric releases, such as OpenOffice TLE which was jointly developed with Sun Microsystems, he said.

Thailand's open-source movement extends beyond the government body, where schools and the general public have been educated on the benefits of using open source, he added.

"We introduced (the OpenOffice TLE) to most government agencies, schools and the general public. It was a big campaign (for us)," he noted. "In 2003, the Thai government announced a budget computer (US$250 per unit including monitor) based on a Linux and OpenOffice software package. About 150,000 units of these machines were sold that year."

The Thai government estimated that in 2003, the country saved US$45 million by simply deploying open-source software, he said.

NECTEC also assembled a range of popular freeware and OSS, then downloaded and distributed them on a single CD. These CDs are given out as door gifts or gift tokens at public seminars and road shows.

He noted that the country's campaign not only helped its citizens get on the open-source bandwagon, it also pushed Microsoft to remain competitively priced by drastically reducing the price of its software products in Thailand.

Seeking a balance
Despite the benefits of OSS, Dr. Thaweesak stressed that the Thai government has no plans to replace all proprietary software and would be "happy" with a 50 percent penetration rate in terms of open-source deployment.

"We are not making war with Microsoft, but we want to find a way to work with them and not inhibit others by forcing them to use open-source software," he noted. "There are mixed feelings about using open-source software. There are many advocates that want us (to adopt open source) 100 percent, while there's also resistance from those who don't have experience with such software.There are two extremes.

"What I'm trying to promise is a middle ground, mixing the best of both worlds. If there are shortcomings in open-source software that you can't live with, then buy the alterative."

He noted that security and the lack of local language support could potentially be issues that Thailand might be concerned with in its open-source adoption.

Currently, there are fewer viruses and other malicious attacks targeted at open-source environments, compared to those aimed at Microsoft platforms and applications, he said. But this could change as the former increases in popularity, he added. "Still, the open-source community and developers will be there to help patch any security holes," he said.

Manoo Aoradeedolchet, director of Software Industry Promotion Agency (SIPA), noted: "Security, right now, is not a real problem…but it will become a serious one when usage (of open-source applications) goes up in one to two. Then, it will become an important issue to support." Operating under the Thai Ministry of Information Communication and Technology, SIPA is responsible for promoting all software--commercial and open-source--in the country, and works with vendors such as Sun, Novell and IBM to drive the open source practice.

The lack of localized features and content is also an area that has to be addressed, he said. For example, the Thai font selection that is currently available in OpenOffice still needs to be improved, he said.

Dr. Thaweesak added that the current version of OpenOffice also does not support the Thai language, resulting in the deployment of the OpenOffice TLE module. However, development work is already underway to incorporate this support internationally in the next version of OpenOffice.

The Thai government is now looking to promote the use of open-source e-mail client ThunderBird and Web browser FireFox.

It is also pushing ahead with more training and awareness campaigns to get users in the government sector more comfortable with open source.

In fact, Dr. Thaweesak only permits his users to purchase Microsoft licenses under one condition. "They need to prove to me that their work is so complicated that it can't be run on open-source software, and that they need Microsoft Office," he explained. To date, he has approved only two of 600 such requests. The two employees were from the finance and accounting department who had to work with complex spreadsheets, he said.

"We would like to achieve a higher penetration rate, and the way any government can do that is to use the principle of living happily with licensed software (along with open source)," he said. "We recommend users to keep Windows but to use OpenOffice on top of the OS. That's the most optimum option for now, because there's no threat of (having to cope with) a big change from Windows to Linux."

According to Manoo, there are also plans to identify other distributions of Linux, specifically Debian, as a more affordable alternative to RedHat, which he noted is costly to support in Thailand. SIPA is now looking to rope in service providers with the ability to support Debian, he said.

"The open-source (developer) community is still small in Thailand," he noted. "That's one of the things we're now looking at as well." He added that he hopes to lower the total cost of ownership of open source by publicizing the importance of open source.