Open Source saves Malaysian Government RM40 million

Today, Dinesh pointed us out to the fact that MAMPU/OSCC saves RM40 million with open source. That’s about USD$12 million dollars!

I quote, from the report:

Savings on licensing fee alone by adopting OpenOffice.org have already exceeded RM12 million, which is based on the total installed seats of 12,760 at public sector agencies.

Also, from the same report:

The top three applications being considered by most Public Sector Agencies are:
1. OpenOffice.org — Office Suite
2. Firefox — Web Browser
3. MySQL — Database using Open Source Technology

That is impressive. OpenOffice.org and MySQL both come from Sun Microsystems Inc. Of course I’ve known this for a long time coming, but seeing it in B&W (ok, a colour report!) is of course, most useful. Go on, and read their first quarterly newsletter. More savings to come, I’m certain in 2009.

4 Comments

  1. Swan says:

    But, do they do any open source development? Do they get any of their constituents (taxpayers) to contribute code to an open source IT development project?

  2. byte says:

    They do, open source development. They have contributed one large package called MyMeeting back. I understand there are patches going back to things like spamassassin, et al, as they have “products” around it called MySpamGuard.

    They have to work more on contributions, but I think they’re doing a fairly good job of it, so far.

  3. drizad says:

    yeah… Hopefully they manage the 12mils that they save properly…

  4. […] Colin Charles discusses the issue in his post “Open Source Saves Malaysian Government RM40 Million.” […]


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