Open source and sufficiency economy

Rampa Manoonsin, managing director of Sun Microsystems Thailand

Although investing in IT is a way to help improve business efficiency, there are still costs involved.

New alternatives are now being explored to help businesses not only save costs on IT investment, but also to move forward with higher growth in the long term. Among these, the adoption of open-source technology is one of the bigger options.

The model for open source was built on collaborative development and giving users a free licence for its use, so this model really offers no barriers for business adoption.

With its "free-to-take" and "free-to-share" philosophy, it is believed that open source could be a key mechanism to helping the country drive its business progress with cost savings, enabling industries to improve their working efficiency and lifting the country's development as a whole.

Technology gaps could also be eliminated. Open source technology - like nothing before it - allows people at all levels to use the software freely, to improve their IT literacy, develop skills through education and even create new businesses.

The software industry, meanwhile, will benefit from participating in an open-source community where they can exchange and share knowledge resources, access intellectual property and, importantly, find software source codes to further develop their products.

I would say that the arrival of open source opens up new opportunities for the Thai software industry, allowing it to step up into the global market.

Currently, many governments, including those in Malaysia, India and South Africa, are embracing open-source software, especially the OpenOffice suite, to bring their costs down and to ensure that all citizens have equal access to important materials under the open-document formats.

Open source dominates among business organisations in India, China, Eastern Europe, South and Central America, while software developers in China and India - which have more than a million software developers between them - are also committed to joining the open-source development community.

According to research firm Gartner, it's predicted that by 2012, around 90 per cent of companies all over the world will be using open-source software.

Open source is expected to play an important role in building up Thailand's sufficiency economy. While many states are moving towards new open-source technology, it's good news that Thailand is catching up on this trend by planning to transform the country into a leading open-source development centre by 2011.

The plan has a mission to lift the number of local open-source software companies from 20 to at least 100, while encouraging open-source software development to reach 30 to 50 per cent of the total.

New business opportunities are emerging. It's certain that those who realise the immense economic value of open-source technology will discover ways to build up a new sufficiency economy - a key approach to overcoming all adversity.