POSS President University represented by one of its member Rosalina, attended the 2nd ASEAN Workshop on Open Source Software which was held on 20 -21 August 2008 at PUSPITEK, Serpong, Tangerang, Indonesia.
It’s been so late to write this article tough but for sharing information and knowledge I’m sure that there’s no word late for that.
This workshop was attended by our fellow friends from Vietnam and Myanmar. The committee said there were no response from other ASEAN countries, I don’t know exactly what made it happened. Coz I see that this was such a good opportunity for us to build a network so that we can easily share knowledge in OSS.
As usual the first list on the agenda was welcome remark by the ASEAN secretary followed by the minister’s advisor for information technology and communication of Rep. of Indonesia.
The main discussion on this workshop was the Implementation of Open Document Format (ODF). As we know that now a day we produce and consume millions of document everyday. Can you imagine if one day we can’t open our document just because of Microsoft doesn’t continue to sell Ms. Office or in extreme way what if one day Microsoft collapse….
In Belgium effective on September 2007 all agencies must be able to read ODF format, where In South Africa and Netherlands on 2009 open documents must be used whenever possible.
The good news is that the government of Indonesia will choose the standard of the document format and perhaps will be adopted on 2009 or 2010. Well, let us pray for it…. Coz it will become another support from the government for strengthening the distribution of OSS in Indonesia.
From this workshop we may conclude some of the constraints related with the OS movement: People lack of knowledge on Open Source, OSS not user friendly, Difficulty of searching open source software regarding with bandwidth issue, last is lack of public concern for OSS.
