MANILA, Philippines -- Microsoft is now preaching interoperability, announcing it will open its first open-source lab in Asia Pacific in the country.
The lab will be located at the National Computer Center (NCC) headquarters in Diliman, Quezon City. It will be stocked with hardware and software and will serve as a test and evaluation facility for open source developers who want to make their applications interoperable on the Microsoft platform.
D3 Systems, a local firm that develops mobile applications running on Java (an open source programming language), will be the first to use facility, Microsoft announced in a briefing Thursday.
"There is always a great potential in the Philippines in terms of the skills of developers here," said Ken Wye Saw, Microsoft's vice president for sales and marketing in Asia Pacific, when asked why the software firm decided to create an open source lab in the country.
Microsoft earlier this year announced its interoperability initiative, geared toward the open source community.
Among others, Microsoft said it will open APIs (application programming interfaces) on some of its core products like Windows and Microsoft Office to allow developers to more freely run their software on its products.
This is a significant move for Microsoft, a software juggernaut that has always been portrayed as the anti-thesis of the open-source movement.
An upcoming update to Microsoft Office, for example, will enable support for the Open Document Format (ODF), which rivals Microsoft's Open Office XML.
Abet Dela Cruz, Microsoft Philippines platform strategy manager, said Microsoft now recognizes open source as a "first class" citizen, alluding to the movement's growth and adoption.
To support this claim, he noted SourceForge, an online repository of applications built by the open source community. Out of 147,000 projects, he said 77,000 of these applications run on the Windows platform, which far outnumbers those built for Windows alone.
"People don't buy Vista or run Linux for the sake of having an OS," Dela Cruz said. "At the end of the day, it's the applications that matter."
Locating the lab at NCC, meanwhile, is geared towards aiding the government's computerization efforts. NCC, in particular, has designed open-source applications such as tax systems meant for use by smaller local government agencies.
"But we've done an inventory of existing infrastructure and we found that most government servers are running on Windows," said NCC director general Tim Diaz de Rivera.
Thus, NCC is hoping that Microsoft's interoperability stance will encourage open source developers to create applications for the government that can run on existing resources.
"We've always had a pro-choice position," Diaz de Rivera said, commenting on open source. "Our advocacy has always been to build enough skills that will benefit the government regardless of what platform is used."
source: http://newsinfo.inquirer.net/breakingnews/infotech/view/20080807-153256/Microsoft-creates-open-source-lab-in-RP
3 comments:
I hope that this investment of Microsoft would benefit the people, especially the electronics and computer industry. I also hope that it would attract other foreign investments.
I hope these investments and applications from Microsoft will benefit all the Filipinos, and be an improvement to what we have already with our computers/laptops and other devices that uses the operation systems. I can see the Philippines to start moving up the ladder.
Very good! Foreign investments like this one can really help us with our economic problems.
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