The Korea Times : Korea Plans to Build Linux City, University

The Korea Times : Korea Plans to Build Linux City, University is a report which says:

The Korean government plans to select a city and a university late next month where open-source software like Linux will become the mainstream operating programs. The Ministry of Information and Communication (MIC) Wednesday revealed the scheme of building up the city and university, which will operate as test beds for the open-source programs.

Interesting!

Some more figures:

In fact, Korea is not a world leader in adopting Linux and other open-source programs. Currently, less than 1 percent of desktop PCs are based on Linux in Korea, much lower than the global median 3 percent. For servers, Linux accounts for about a fifth of the market here. The Korea IT Industry Promotion Agency wants to increase the rate to 5 percent for desktop PCs and 40 percent for servers by 2010.

And, this is inteesting:

``In order to become a genuine software powerhouse, Korea has no choice but to secure source technologies. We cannot achieve the goal under the command of dominant closed-source programs,’’ said Ko Hyun-jin, president at the state-backed agency. To do so, the government will stage a campaign to use Linux. Korea Post, the nation’s postal service provider, last year embarked on a four-year program to install a Linux-based operating system on 4,748 PCs in its 2,800 branches. The Ministry of Planning and Budget plans to launch 37 state informatization projects with Linux this year, which would cost approximately 80 billion won. A new online information system for schools, dubbed the National Education Information System (NEIS), also fixed Linux-empowered platform on its 2,331 servers.