Philrice jumps into Open Source bandwagon

This is my after-travel report for my attendance to the Philippine Open Source Conference:

With open source moving towards the mainstream of information technology, the Philippine Open Source Conference 2004 was a fitting event to highlight viable and relevant solutions not only for technology-inclined individuals, but for enterprise applications as well.

Organized by Media G8way Corporation and Imperium Technology, Inc., the Open Source Conference, held from August 17 to 19 at the Shangri-la Edsa Plaza, featured seminar tracks on business applications; telecommunications, networking and security; and programming and advocacy. Open source experts and advocates discussed topics and issues on enterprise Linux, open source migration, interoperability, mobile solutions like virtual private networks and SMS, and high availability and clustering.

Open source, in a nutshell, is a philosophy and a movement that puts forward the premise that software should be free for use, to be modified, and to be shared with the community, as opposed to proprietary software that have restrictions on use, sharing and modification.

In the Philippines, open source has gained popularity in industry and government, with its features like little (or no) costs, technically superior performance, and inherent community support. It has increasingly become an attractive value proposition for businesses that are looking for solutions with lower costs and high technological value. For government, it offers a way to rationalize enhancement of IT services while keeping the funding footprint at a minimum.

The Conference was also the venue for establishing links and contacts with IT vendors and professionals. It carried big-name product exhibits like Novell, Intel, and even Microsoft, an outspoken critic of open source. There were birds-of-a-feather sessions where individuals with similar objectives discussed special issues like LAMP (Linux-Apache-MySQL-PHP/Perl/Python), security, open source in government, enterprise hardware, SMS gateway, training and certification, and Linux-Windows interoperability and migration.

With the ongoing reconfiguration of the Philrice information network, the lessons and tools gleaned from the Conference become even more relevant. For interoperability, Active Directory can be integrated with OpenLDAP (an open source implementation of the Lightweight Directory Access Protocol) for single-sign-on of network services (Web access, messaging, file services, etc.). Open source network management tools like MRTG (multi-router traffic generator) and the ASTI-packaged NetMon can be used to monitor server hardware and services. Kannel, an open source SMS gateway software, is a likely solution for the SMS facility for Philrice and the Open Academy.

Solutions derived from the Conference open possible venues to enhance services and lower the total cost of ownership of network resources. Philrice can explore the viability of migration to open source desktops, for example, or the implementation of Linux-based thin clients for office-productivity-intensive workstations. Other services, such as voice-over-IP and VPNs, can be explored for intra-office and interbranch communications. The Philrice experience on open source solutions can serve as a model and possibly provide benchmarks on open source implementations for other government agencies and institutions in their IT efforts.