Vietnamese delegation visits Spain’s Free Software leader region to take ideas
A Vietnamese governement delegation represented by Mr. Nguyen Trung Quynh, Mrs. Nguyen Thuy Nhi y Mr. Luu Van Khang has arrived to Badajoz, city of the province of Extremadura, Spain, the most advanced city involving Free Software in my country. In the photo we can see how Julio Fuster, town councillor of Merida (Extremadura’s capital) is gonna be their tour leader these days :-). I’m sure he will show them the beauties of that Region.
The interest of VietNam in this province is to see the initiatives of the Information Society and Free Software started in Extremadura.
Extremadura was one of the poorest region of Spain involving technology, but when in 2002 they took officially the decision of migrating everything to Free Software , the environment changed completely. Now all the eyes pay attention to this province and make very jealous the others(which still have price-agreements with Microsoft). Regions in Malaysia, UE, and now VietNam try to follow their steps. How to make a poor region become one of the leaders in Information Society and Software development, quickly answer: Free Software Open Source.
Extremadura created an linux distribution called gnuLinEx installed in all the governement computers, schools, etc. With the money saved in licenses, it has been possible to have more computers per student (2 per each) than any region in Europe.
During two days they will be discussing about strategies to be followed, agreements, etc. We’ll keep an eye on them. I hope VietNam governement will reinforce their bet for the OpenSource and decide to migrate all their minds to OpenSource. Let’s remind them than there are a lot of local Linux Distributions to be taken (Ubuntu-vi, Vubuntu, etc) available in Vietnamese language.
