Summary: The government of Vietnam fails to follow its own policies after heavy lobbying/bullying from Microsoft, its insidious front groups, and lobbyists/politicians that covertly work for Microsoft's agenda (domination over foreigners using back doors and accusations of 'piracy') to be fulfilled

CHINA is officially moving away from Microsoft, along with other proprietary software vendors (especially those from the United States, where the NSA reigns over datacentres and engages in espionage against China). The Indian software policy is commendable [1] and it continues to impress (affecting the world's second largest population, largest bar China and together accounting to about a third of the world's total population), but in Vietnam the software policy continues to be tweaked by Microsoft in the same way that Monsanto tweaked government policy to avoid liabilities for potentially millions of deaths (over the decades after Agent Orange contaminations).

Thanks to a pile of leaks from Chelsea Manning, we now know and have hard evidence of we what the Vietnamese people suffered from due to Microsoft's intervention in Vietnam along with US officials (the US government seems to be moving away from Microsoft, little by little [2] and owing to geeks). Vietnam is not in a good state right now. The country is now infamous for surveillance and an Internet crackdown which is very much facilitated by Windows. A new article sheds some light on the legacy of Microsoft lobbying [3], but it hardly provides any reference to Microsoft interference, as everything we have found in Wikileaks material. More context and background is needed for the article to be complete and paint an accurate picture.

There are many news stories these days about Asian governments moving to Free software (see our daily links), including today's report about South Korea [4]. Vietnam has been rather unique in the way Microsoft was combating FOSS there. That's why we covered it a lot. Wikileaks provided more leaked material to support these claims of ours. ⬆

Related/contextual items from the news:

1. Indian state’s agencies ordered to use open source by month’s end due to Microsoft's XP changes

   The government of the Indian state of Kerala has ordered all of its public sector agencies using Windows XP to migrate to free and open source (FOSS) operating systems by 30 June.





2. Will New York City Embrace Open Source Code?

   A new proposal by Council Member Benjamin Kallos would require city agencies consider open source software for projects, and establish a code-sharing portal for the city.





3. Open source software ignored by state agencies

   Closed-source software products, mostly Microsoft’s, have been dominating Vietnam’s software market, despite the government’s encouragement to develop and use open-source software.





4. Seoul Government developing open source, open standards cloud platform

   The cloud platform will be based on open source technologies and open standards. This will free the agencies from being dependent on just a single vendor and their technologies, the Ministry of Security and Public Administration said. External parties can improve or use the platform since it will be built on open source, the Ministry added.