[ossig] Govt ICT infrastructure

[Seah Hong Yee <hongyee@polyscientific.com.my>]

	I just came back from a meeting with Royal Malaysian Custom on the 
implementation of the e-declare for declaration of goods for export and 
import.  The vendor was www.dagangnet.com From what I can gather from the 
meeting : 

	1) You have to have at least IE 5.5 as your browser
	2) You need a Pentium 4 as your minimal requirement

	I voice out during the meeting that my company don't have windows desktop and 
I would be using something like mozilla for accessing the service. From the 
information I can obtain, this would be something that they have not tried 
and would have to get back to me sometime in future.  When enquire about the 
rationale behind IE, the reason given was, IE has stronger encryption. 

	The really bad thing about this is 

1) Given government's drive towards open source/linux, going for something 
like this is definitely against the policy outline thus far. 
2) It doesn't make too much sense to have a pentium 4 as an absolute minimum 
for accessing something like an encrypted web-based application. Notice, 
there was no mention of AMD on the list. This is like endorsing one processor 
vendor over the other. I am quite sure that if  I deploy something like C3 or 
Geode, the application would probably work. 

This is the same problem with e-perolehan. E-perolehan also asked for IE 5.5 
with 128bit encryption as the requirement. There are no attempts to cater for 
user of other browser such as mozilla, konqueror or safari.  Worse yet, there 
was no instruction on how to get the card reader to work with other browser. 
Does anyone know of anyway to make the application to work with a card reader 
on linux ?

What I am getting at is, local OSS community should really lobby the govt and 
tell them to develop application that are multi-platform instead of working 
with a specific platform/browser.  It make no sense of whatsoever to have 
application develop for a single platform and people ended up stuck with it. 





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