“Seventy-five percent of e-government code created in this region is redundant,” says McNealy. “Collaborating around these kinds of architectures would be hugely advantageous, much more secure and provide some regional interoperability.”
Although McNealy acknowledges open source adoption in the Middle East is “creeping in” – citing successful OSS projects carried out by Dubai Municipality, the RTA and Qatar Airways – he claims more firms in the region should be assessing how open source can improve their IT efficiencies.
“Other geographies are very excited about open source and are taking advantage of the intellectual property,” says McNealy. “We are making that non-exclusive invitation to the Middle East too.”
Sun has been one of the pioneers of open source. The vendor’s Java software and Solaris technology code is freely available, while McNealy says its MySQL database management systems receives 70,000 downloads a day and remains the preferred choice of start-ups.
“We want to make the written and spoken language of the internet readily available and our strategy to make that happen is sharing,” he says.
“We want people speaking a common language of computers and that should be available to everyone in a fair and equitable way.”
