More and more countries are embracing the collaborative model of open source on a national level to fend off caged IT models. The Infocomm Development Authority of Singapore’s (IDA) Technology Group has positioned Linux as a medium term technology bet, which means one to three years to mass adoption. According to IDA, software procurement decisions in the public sector continue to be based on value-for-money and fit-for-purpose, and do not prefer nor exclude open source software in their tender specifications and evaluations. The public sector currently has a heterogeneous environment and Linux Server operating system is widely used in the government. Government agencies such as the Ministry of Defence are already using open source software.

An alliance dedicated to accelerating the growth and adoption of commercially supported open source systems in Singapore, the Singapore Open Source Alliance (SOSA), has also been formed. SOSA is a consortium of leading global and local IT vendors, with founding members like Apple, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Intel, Novell, Oracle, Red Hat, Resolvo Systems and Sun Microsystems.

The line-up indicates that the global IT industry – with one notable exception – acknowledges that commercially supported open source systems are ready for enterprise adoption and are able to coexist with many proprietary systems in the market today.

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