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Published on July 25, 2007

Nectec's director Pansak Siriruchatapong said the collaboration would utilise the strength of open-source users and developers and encourage more local development in the area. OSSN will focus on four pillars of development - open source software research and development, creation of awareness, policy development and building markets.

Pansak said Nectec, as the initiator and a facilitator, would feed money to the network. The centre plans to allocate Bt6 million to open-source activities throughout this year.

Pansak said the goal was to increase the number of open-source software users by 500 per cent. Open-source users now account for only 0.01 per cent of software users in the country.

The term ''user'' means all kinds of open-source software - those who use Open Office, open-source operating systems for servers, and all applications that run on top of an open-source operating system.

He said the network also planned to increase the number of open-source software firms from 10 to 50 in the next three years and then 100 in the next five years. Open-source software is an alternative for the country to save the cost of importing licensed software while creating more jobs for Thai developers, he said.

Danupol Siamwalla, managing director of ICE Solution and the president of the subcommittee for open-source software development in OSSN, said that to encourage open-source software in Thailand, OSSN had set a development plan with the establishment of what he called Software Bank.

He said Software Bank would be a place where local software developers could put their software developments on show. This would allow other developers as well as students or researchers in universities to use the software and source code to make further developments for the open-source community.

"We hope to push Software Bank to be the country's open-source centre and it will eventually link with the international open-source software community as well," he said.

Software Bank, meanwhile, will be a mechanism to encourage the local open-source community to turn to the business community.

Apichai Sakulsureeyadej, managing director of MSL Software as part of OSSN, said that OSSN hoped Software Bank would eventually be developed into a virtual marketplace where demand could meet supply.

"We believe that once we have a centre where local open-source software developers can gather, it will build new business opportunities," he said.

Each software developer, for example, can create synergy with others by integrating their software products and offering a complete package to customers.

He said this initiative would strengthen local open-source software development on both supply and demand sides.

In the meantime, training in the area is also required. Pansak said Nectec and OSSN would push open-source software curricula in universities in order to create a new generation of quality software staff.

Initially, it aims to build three curricula for open-source training in universities. The network will integrate the existing curricula in many universities into the same standard.

Asina Pornwasin

The Nation