Kota Kinabalu - Credit: angela7 on Flickr (CC BY)
In Malaysia, it is estimated that the number of companies opting for Linux-based solutions will experience about a 15% compounded average growth rate between now and 2012, said Daniel Ng, director of marketing for Red Hat Asia Pacific.
“Even now, there is a total of 936 implementations of open-source solutions in Malaysian Government agencies,” he said in a press briefing in Kuala Lumpur recently. Government support
In a country where pirated software is still rampant, buying a copy of an open source distribution like Fedora Core (4CDs) could cost more than the average commercial OS that comes on 1CD! Pressure is being added to protect intellectual property and reduce piracy, which all seem to point in the direction of a boon to the FOSS world in Malaysia as more companies take it up on the desktop.
In developing countries, piracy is very common. And piracy is well supported (ignored) by these big (closed-source) giants, because forcing IP laws will mean that people will think of cheaper substitutes. And hence comes Open Source.