And so it begins...

It's official: the Philippine Rice Research Institute has finally issued a policy for adopting open source.

The adoption will mainly be for units that can't afford the licensing costs of proprietary software. While the policy leaves the choice to the particular unit, it encourages and promotes the use of open source software that has similar, if not superior, functionality compared with proprietary ones.

For now, the shift will be in the office productivity suites, with almost 95% of desktop workstations already migrated from Microsoft Office to OpenOffice.org.

Soon, it will move on to the desktop OS. A few units have already been installed with Ubuntu or Bayanihan Linux. The tech support staff has set up a lab environment to test interoperability with the existing predominantly MS environment, and results have been encouraging, so far.

The policy was borne out of the Institute's thrust to look for alternatives to costly solutions in line with the government's cost-cutting measures, and a long-standing commitment of the Institute's information and communications technology division to adopting open source applications.