Need more open source software applications

In an effort to keep up the promise of intellectual property with the WTO, Vietnamese IT industry leaders have urged people to apply open source software.

Tuoi Tre talked to Professor Ngo Thanh Nhan at New York University (USA) this issue. He is an expert in natural language processing in the US health sector; one of the first participants in bringing Nom script into multilingual fonts (Unicode) and was awarded the Information Technology Knight award by eCHIP for this dedication.

* Could you explain the concept of open source software?

- The main ability of a computer is to do regular and sequential operations faster and with higher reliability than manual operation. Source (source) is a programming text that people can read and edit; The software is an installation (binary code) translated from the source code. It does not fix and is close to the hardware and operating system of a computer. Author of open source software OSS (Open Source Software) for others to use their source. We distinguish FLOSS (Free / Libre Open Source Software) as free open source software.

We distinguish popular software and specialized software. Often, users must install FLOSS on their own company or personal computer. Companies need specialized software such as hospital text processing, processing systems, and advanced databases. The software is not free, but users need to have the resources to develop their own data to be able to change (or hire a changed service) in accordance with the company's physical and technical conditions. .

* Have you used any popular open source software, GS?

- Some open source software can include Unix / Linux operating system, OpenOffice (with Vietnamese OpenOffice Writer text processing), Java, PHP, Pascal, mySQL. Unikey Vietnamese marking software is also an open source software for three popular operating systems . Open source software is present in many software of different types of computers and operating systems. Our natural language processing team is currently placing its Medical Language Processing project on the open source software website Sourceforge (http://www.sourceforge.net)

* Some people still think that OSS is free software, but in fact some OSS software is sold, not for free.

Professor Ngo Thanh Nhan.Photo: TL

- OSS does not say that open source software is free, just say that the software has the source (programmable, editable part) open to users or promote.

Normally, in capital, the source is more expensive because it is usually only sold once, the free user is entitled to do more or redo. Open source software is sometimes more likely to lose to commercial software with the same function. Open source software is often said to be losing, because it lacks advertising, scrambling to market.

* How will a different open source software and commercial software have the same functionality?

- If talking about quality, Microsoft is in charge, Microsoft Word is the best, but Excel, PowerPoint, Access still have many errors, not synchronized with Word. The difference here is how Microsoft dominates the market, making buyers think that PC and Microsoft Windows are a good thing or think Microsoft is the company that created the Internet.

Microsoft named Internet Explorer and installed it on every PC sold, sometimes Microsoft Windows banned users from installing Netscape and Microsoft lost the case. The European Union has sued Microsoft and the US government keeps track of Microsoft for antitrust violations.

Trade issues and beliefs and feelings (possibly wrong) of users. For example, Vietnamese people with Honda cars. Honda cars have stopped production since 1975, but because Vietnamese consumers think Honda is good, it produced them in Vietnam in the late 1980s.

Everyone knows Microsoft is less secure, prone to viruses, but in Vietnam users only know Microsoft - the market and feel distorted and hard to cure. People say Microsoft Word is the best, but with Vietnamese, there are many problems, such as users have to install free open source software to manipulate Vietnamese in Unicode standard. Free open source systems, like Linux, Unikey, have fewer bugs, but few know it. This is due to advertising and how to dominate the market, less related to technical or bad.

* Could you please tell us in addition to price, what is open source software for Vietnam?

- Basically, information technology is a strategic technology of each country, on par with the strategy of food and culture. Each country must build its own information technology (database, knowledge base, map, soil, geology, meteorology, economy, population, education, health, etc.) according to demand. live on its own in the trend of globalization of technology, something that no personal computer can do.

Using closed source software will turn the country into a consumer market and there is no room for self-development, but open source software creates an environment to unleash this potential.

* Suppose the Vietnamese government awards 100 prizes to domestic software companies for 5 consecutive years to write the office system in accordance with government regulations and international standards based on the Linux operating system for free. So what do we get?

- People will have a complete office system free of charge and Vietnam is understood by a variety of software companies with international standards (now I think it is weak), able to meet domestic IT needs, and began to be able to compete with foreign countries. The reason is that open source allows Vietnam to build its software industry, ending the state of the country as a passive and passive market.

I think that Vietnam is right to carry out two IT strategy programs in early 1990 and the software strategy program in 2000. Thanks to the Unicode multi-language standard, internet development, development of technologies. software service company. As a result, domestic IT use and development has increased rapidly.

I think we need at least some strategic programs like that to promote information technology, first to strengthen institutions, administrative, civil databases .

Minh Huy