Sufyan's update from Pakistan

From Pakistan come the plans for promoting FLOSS in that part of South Asia. Under their Open Source Resource Centre, the team there plans to start migrating government departments to FLOSS.

Said Sufyan, discussing this issue online: "We have kicked off with one. Following is the action plan. Phase I -- Linux and other OSS for users who don't think their work may get disturb by switching to Linux. Two, Open Source Software on Windows for those who are using any software whose exact replacement is not available with open source (though there is hardly any, but there are people who can't absorb this change at once)."

In Phase II, Pakistan is looking at financing FLOSS replacements for proprietary software, and "migrating all left-overs".

Says Sufyan: "This plan is for client side only. 90% of the server side of the first organization is already on open source (Apache, Squid, sendmail, Samba). Those who are using windows and dont want to shift to Linux at once are provided with Firefox, Openoffice, AMSN and Thunderbird (with the scheduler). We want them to get used to these OSS tools before their systems are migrated. There is a good response. People are inspired by tab based browsing of Mozilla, font control and in-built pdf writer of OpenOffice.