… but in the Republic of China this time:
Software giants Microsoft face more opposition in future adoption of their software applications. Now, the parliament of Taiwan has voted and passed a resolution, which would lessen the government’s reliance on software products developed by Microsoft. The government has been told to reduce purchases from the software giant by 25 percent this year.
This resolution was passed on Friday and is aimed to end the domination of Microsoft products in the software application used by the government bodies in the country. However, experts have claimed that the decision might not be effective in the real world as it runs against fair trade regulations in Taiwan.
As for the People’s Republic, the article reminds us that the Mainland is still promoting open-source alternatives such as Linux.
Technorati Tags: asia, east asia, northeast asia, taiwan
January 17th, 2006 at 11:15 pm
I’ve seen these reports too, and I think they’ve got completely the wrong end of the stick.
The whole budget for 2006 had big cuts imposed by the pan-Blues on the pan-Green government - purely due to the political fighting between the two camps. A 25% reduction of Microsoft purchases is completely in line with this … note that the article doesn’t say that the budget for non-Microsft software has increased.
Here are a couple of posts on the 2006 budget cuts:
http://michaelturton.blogspot.com/2006/01/kmt-paralyzes-beautiful-island.html
http://jujuflop.yule.org/2006/01/17/destroying-the-government
January 17th, 2006 at 11:21 pm
Thanks David!
Actually I’m with MS on this one. I’m not a fan of the company (Mac user) but it does strke me that this could be argued as a trade issue (though if the law said “cheaper” software should be sought rather than specifing “non-MS software,” it would favor the open-source Linux without creating an issue).