I agree 100%.
Trouble is, the 'government's drive towards open source/linux' is
currently only various statements from ministers' speeches coupled with
various initiatives that are not co-ordinated nationally. Until
there's a proper national OSS policy, different bits of Government can
use what software they want.
MIMOS is one of the parties requesting that a national OSS policy is
drawn up.
Imran
Seah Hong Yee wrote:
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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--
Imran William Smith
Project Manager, Open Source Development,
MIMOS Berhad, Malaysia
Asian Open Source Centre : http://www.asiaosc.org
MIMOS Open Source : http://opensource.mimos.my
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