Linux, not piracy
THE recent pledges to build a digital Bangladesh are heartening. A huge quantity of government data exists which could provide much better transparency and efficiency if it were available on-line. This includes basic information to protect the rights of individuals, such as computerised land records, which anyone can verify over the web.
Such a system would make it harder for local hooligans to take over land by forcefully occupying it. The police and other local authorities could simply look up an on-line database to see who the rightful owners are, and protect them from encroachment. Currently, verification of land ownership is impossible, and requires a decade-long legal case, a million of which are already clogging up the courts.
However, a question, which has not been addressed is the operating system and software on which a digital Bangladesh can run. Up till now, almost all the software used in Bangladesh have been pirated copies of Microsoft Windows and Office. It is even common for large database servers to be set up with pirated Microsoft and Oracle software.
This situation is not sustainable. Our software piracy has been overlooked because of the small size of our PC market; but as soon as the government gets serious about providing hundreds of thousands of computers to rural schools and colleges packed with educational software to help overcome the shortage of English and Math teachers (for example), Microsoft and US trade officials will notice.
The time is coming when the price for widespread piracy will have to be paid. With the combined price of MS Windows and MS Office easily totalling $500, and each Oracle server database license costing a thousand dollars, the price payable by the government alone would be many millions of dollars. There is a simple path out of this mess. The government needs to have a software-use policy, which encourages the use of open-source software.
Open-source software such as the Linux operating system and the OpenOffice word processor and spreadsheet programs provide perfect replacements for Microsoft Windows and Office. And they are produced by a worldwide community of software engineers and are available for download free of charge. Likewise, open-source databases such as MySQL and PostgreSQL can replace pirated Microsoft and Oracle databases.
Bangladesh is not the only developing nation facing a software piracy problem. Software piracy is common in all developing countries. Vietnam, in a case of real forward-thinking IT policy, recently decided to replace all of its pirated copies of Microsoft Windows, MS Office and Oracle databases with free software equivalents. The Vietnamese government has given all government departments a year or two to implement the software changes as well as to re-train users.
In addition to eliminating piracy, open-source software provides a big dividend to the local software industry. Currently, whenever a government office buys an Oracle database, almost all the money goes to Oracle in the US. If an open source database such as MySQL were used, all the money would go to a local software company.
Open-source also carries a political message. With the current situation in the Middle East, we as a nation should consider whether or not we want to commit to paying American corporations for all of our software, since part of our money will go to US income taxes and ultimately pay for more Israeli bombs.
Bangadesh urgently needs to follow the lead of Vietnam, China, India and other countries which have used open-source software to both eliminate their dependence on pirated American products as well as to give a boost to their local software industry. The question is whether our government officials will be sufficiently forward thinking to take such a step.