Open Source Saves Malaysian Government RM188 Million
Back in January 2009, we found out that the Malaysian Government had saved about RM40 million using open source. In a little over a year, that number has been topped: over the past six years, the total costs savings are now quoted to be RM188.39 million (USD$58.54 million)! That’s a hell of a lot of money for software licenses, don’t you think?
Worth noting is that before the OSS Master Plan started, there were zero companies supporting OSS registered with the Ministry of Finance. Now more than half of the 4,000 companies do (53% is the quoted number). For more information, read the latest newsletter from MAMPU’s OSCC. Key takeaways:
- Saved RM188.39 million on software licenses over six years
- Successful OSS adoption in 691 government agencies by the end of 2009 (till April 1 2010, the number looks like it has increased to 699 agencies).
- In total, 95% of agencies are adopting some form of OSS solution, 87% are using it for back-end infrastructure (here its clear there’s Linux, MySQL in use), and 66% are using OSS on the desktop! (via OpenOffice.org and Firefox)*
* – Software use extrapolated from the actual OSS Master plan, and what was in the report in January 2009. I’m sure Joomla! is also used quite heavily, but never recall seeing it as the choice for CMS in the plan.
188 million is alot but I strongly believe that the figure could more.
Some government websites are still running HTML 0.001 from dunno which stone age and haven't been updated since 3 years ago.
Some using Joomla, which probably being charged millions of ringgit just to configure, implement and deploy… by a single webmaster.
great news. i just hope they dont use joomla but a real cms, like drupal. joomla is just a toy. a bad one.
The Australian Government spends $500 million each and every year on proprietary software licenses, so it would be interesting to see what savings that would equate to if it were to switch to free software. Won't happen any time soon though, even with the Government trying to save money left, front and centre.
-c