1 Published by the United Nations Development Programme’s Asia-Pacific Development Information Programme (UNDP-APDIP) Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia www.apdip.net Email:
[email protected] © UNDP-APDIP 2004 The material in this book may be reproduced, republished and incorporated into further works provided acknowledgement is given to UNDP-APDIP. For full details on the license governing this publication, please see the relevant Annex. ISBN: 983-3094-00-7 Design, layout and cover illustrations by: Rezonanze www.rezonanze.com PREFACE 6 INTRODUCTION 6 What is Free/Open Source Software? 6 The FOSS philosophy 6 The FOSS development method 7 What is the history of FOSS? 8 A Brief History of Free/Open Source Software Movement 8 WHY FOSS? 10 Is FOSS free? 10 How large are the savings from FOSS? 10 Direct Cost Savings - An Example 11 What are the benefits of using FOSS? 12 Security 13 Reliability/Stability 14 Open standards and vendor independence 14 Reduced reliance on imports 15 Developing local software capacity 15 Piracy, IPR, and the WTO 16 Localization 16 What are the shortcomings of FOSS? 17 Lack of business applications 17 Interoperability with proprietary systems 17 Documentation and “polish” 18 FOSS SUCCESS STORIES 19 What are governments doing with FOSS? 19 Europe 19 Americas 20 Brazil 21 Asia Pacific 22 Other Regions 24 What are some successful FOSS projects? 25 BIND (DNS Server) 25 Apache (Web Server) 25 Sendmail (Email Server) 25 OpenSSH (Secure Network Administration Tool) 26 Open Office (Office Productivity Suite) 26 LINUX 27 What is Linux?