14 DAY TRIAL // After successfully deploying 13,000 Fedora Linux systems, the government from the Philippines is planning to provide another 10,000 Ubuntu-based computers.
Ricardo Gonzales, independent open source consultant, said that there are several reasons why Linux was chosen over Windows. Linux became popular in Philippines after the 1997 Asian financial crisis. Gonzales said that "open source was a viable business alternative because no one was doing it commercially."
At the time when Gonzales was teaching the IT dealer network how to profit from open source, Microsoft launched its anti-piracy policy in Philippines, while the Department of Trade and Industry and the Department of Education launched the PCPS (PCs for Public Schools) program. This had the aim of providing one PC for each of the 10,000 public high schools all over the country. Receiving funds from the Japanese government, it started somewhere around the year 2000, when the contractors installed Windows PCs. Five years later, it was discovered that most of the computers were not used because nobody had the necessary knowledge to operate them.
Advanced Solutions Inc (ASI) took Gonzales as a consultant, because the company wanted to do bids for 1,000 schools, offering one server, 10 desktops and Internet connectivity in every school.
After encountering some problems, ASI got the contract and 10,000 computers were delivered at the end of December 2007.
Gonzales stated: "Because we saved so much we gave the government 3000 additional units, so now another 300 schools have Linux networks." Now, the company got the contract for doing 1,000 high schools over this year. He added: "The flavour this time is Kubuntu and Edubuntu. They have also asked us to install the Joomla! and Drupal content systems on the server so students can create content."
Because of the large number of islands in the Philippines (7000 islands), the deployment of the systems was no easy task for ASI's team. They had to install the systems, test them, do integration work, provide training to the schools' principal and head of IT and much more.