Dear Editor,
The National Data Management Authority (NDMA) and the Ministry of Legal Affairs have issued calls for procurement of proprietary software. NDMA is very explicit in that it intends to go with Microsoft products. It seems that the burgeoning oil economy will be tying bundle tightly with one software company whose products and services have been rejected by Governments and other agencies around the world for various reasons. The problem with the Government committing to proprietary software which has a cost attached is that there is a ripple effect throughout the country when people who have not received the oil money as yet, and cannot afford to pay for the licenses, end up using pirated software so as to participate in the national ICT projects.
Free and open source software refers to software which has a different licensing model which encourages sharing, and could be available free of cost. LibreOffice (available at https://www.libreoffice.org/) for example is free and open source software which allows users to perform word processing and other tasks. LibreOffice is available free of cost. In 2016, the precursor to the new NDMA had commissioned a policy to encourage the use of free and open source software in the public sector. Technocrats from the different agencies participated in the development of this policy. Software use is not exclusively a PNC or PPP issue as all voters have to make software choices and benefit from wise software choices which do not bind Guyanese to any monopoly. The policy for those who are interested is available at https://github.com/Vidyaratha/FinalDraftFOSSPolicy. The IT professionals in the public sector should continue to explore ways of ensuring Guyana is not bound to any one software vendor.
Sincerely,
Vidyaratha Kissoon
