There is a considerable gap between world information-technology literacy levels and Middle Eastern involvement in the field, said experts at a forum on industry-university collaboration on IT which was held yesterday.
The opening keynote address was made by Minister of Industry Dr Hassan Fakhro and Dr Diem Ho, IBM university relations manager for Europe, the Middle East and Africa.
At the forum, Dr Ho announced a grant for establishing of a Linux cluster laboratory for research purposes at the University of Bahrain.
At last! They’re doing something worthwhile and teaching students real skills to benefit the community rather than just feeding them Microsoft Office crap.
I know that there is a growing Linux user base in Bahrain and the Arab world, but that needs to expand a lot more to reap the benefit Linux offers. There needs to be some forums and symposiums to discuss alternatives to the choking Microsoft prevalence in this part of the world. The government last year signed an almost exclusive contract with Microsoft to provide Office and their operating system worth at least BD1m ($2.65m), when virtually all of those products could have been replaced – even in a small part – with OpenOffice, MySQL and the various other tools available in Open Source.
The greatest deterrent of adopting open source in the Arab world I think is the absence of Arabised products, and the second is simply unfamiliarity.
If just the government of Bahrain dedicated even 10% of the Microsoft contract to fund research into Arabising some OS products, it will have not only served itself, but the whole Arab world.
OpenOffice 1.1 beta now support Arabic beautifully, so it must be evaluated by the government and private sectors as a replacement to MS Office. I’m sure too that they can easily replace MS Access with MySQL and PHP. I’m not saying that this is easily done, but it is high time that they at least seriously investigate these solutions.
Adopting and adapting open source tools will go a long way in wiping out the pirate culture we have. The thinking from “normal” people and even some businesses is if they can get Microsoft Office XP professional for next to nothing (the pirated CD package is available for about $10 or so) and our staff are already familiar with it, why bother going to even something for free that we have to spend a lot of time, effort and money to retrain them on open source tools?
