The just concluded Philippines Open Source Conference and exhibits held here in Manila at Edsa Shangrila Hotel (August 17 - 19, 2004) is a success. It has been attended by different business companies, systems integrators, computer resellers and distributors, application systems developers, Linux solutions and training providers, educational sectors/universities, health sectors from government and private and as well as some people from different government sectors and agencies. This event has aired the need for the open source solutions that are readily and freely available and has raised once again the level of awareness of the now mature presence of Linux and open source solutions and the open source communities' initiatives.

This event I'm sure has very well informed the attendees why they should
consider Linux and open source. The topic that was curiously attended (most definitely the one with the most attendance) is the Linux and Windows Interoperability - Samba and Cups. The presenter highlighted the many capabilities of Linux as a server and how it can inter-operate with Windows network.

It also featured real life migrations from a proprietary server OS to open
source Linux. One such example that I have attended is a large shipping
company here named WG&A Philippines. In order to better serve and meet the demands of their clients and to be able to deliver business transactions on time and lessens their cost of ownership, they completely migrated their Oracle database application to Linux (Red Hat Advance Server). Now they are a satisfied beneficiary of open source (www.wgasuperferry.com).

One noted open source project initiative that was presented is a health
information project called Philippine National Health Information
Infrastructure being spearheaded by Alvin B. Marcelo, M.D., of Medical
Infrastructure Unit of University of the Philippines College of Medicine.
They are developing this application under GNU general public license and it
can be downloaded from sourceforge.net by searching this key words:
"game-engine".

Microsoft was also present on the event not just as one of the diamond
sponsors but as well as introduced their msdn connection developers program (www.msdn.connection.com) and as well as presented a topic entitled Security in a Connected World.

Intel also highlighted the most noted migrations of large multinational and
other organizations from UNIX/Unix Boxes and large expensive computers to less expensive Linux/Intel platform and their continued compatibility
support for GNU/Linux.

Other and among the topics discussed are: The Mono project, Java, VoIP Open Source Solutions, Open Source Network Management, Parallel Computing and Clustering, Data Base Clustering, VPN, Enterprise Databases: - (MySQL, Postgres, DB2, MaxDB, Oracle), LAMP, Open Source Security and SMS Gateway.

Government agencies worth mentioning here are the Department of Science and Technology (DOST) Advanced Science and Technology Institute (ASTI) (www.asti.dost.gov.ph) for working hand and hand for developing open source applications. Their Linux project being undertaken is the Bayanihan Linux desktop that can be downloaded from www.bayanihan.gov.ph.

For more information please visit www.philosc.com.