Open Source Foundation of Pakistan organizes Open Source Summit ’15

Open Source Foundation of Pakistan (OSFP) held a summit in Islamabad dubbed Open Source Summit (OSS15) to bring together IT experts, business executives and academia of the country to advocate the development and use open source software in Pakistan.

Based in Islamabad, OSFP is a non-profit organization that is advocating the use of Open Technologies in Pakistan. It believes Pakistan can become the hub of Open Source in Asia by 2020.

Open source software is a software which has made its source code public. And anyone can change and redistribute the software to anyone for any purpose. This kind of technology has many advantages over its counterpart licensed software. It is usually of better quality because of the many tweaks made by numerous developers over time, it is cheaper, and has better support and documentation.

OSFP advocates that by using more and more open source technologies we can not only save millions of dollars in importing licensed software annually but also create opportunities for youth in the IT industry in the country. It advocates a decrease in software imports and wants Pakistani freelance software developers to help create a local development ecosystem. Which would result in exponential increase in the use of Open technologies in IT and entrepreneurship a reality.

OSFP held a summit in Islamabad dubbed Open Source Summit (OSS15) to bring together IT experts, business executives and academia of the country. The summit was attended by chairman Higher Education Commission (HEC) Mukhtar Ahmed who highlighted the need to develop an annual plan and issuing a publication to advocate open source technology. He also offered to sponsor the first two years’ publication cost.

Another distinguished attendee Niaz Malik, Deputy CEO of Zong Pakistan, highlighted Zong’s readiness to provide a platform to develop, promote and innovate Open Source technologies in the country. Other honorable attendees included Mr. Asim Hussain, MD Pakistan Software Export Board and Saleem Rafique, DG NADRA Technologies.

Hussain, MD PSEB highlighted that his organization was targeting an increase in production and export of local software and a drastic decrease in foreign licensed software.

Image Credits: Computing