Today, Dinesh pointed us out to the fact that MAMPU/OSCC saves RM40 million with open source. That’s about USD$12 million dollars!

I quote, from the report:

Savings on licensing fee alone by adopting OpenOffice.org have already exceeded RM12 million, which is based on the total installed seats of 12,760 at public sector agencies.

Also, from the same report:

The top three applications being considered by most Public Sector Agencies are:
1. OpenOffice.org – Office Suite
2. Firefox – Web Browser
3. MySQL – Database using Open Source Technology

That is impressive. OpenOffice.org and MySQL both come from Sun Microsystems Inc. Of course I’ve known this for a long time coming, but seeing it in B&W (ok, a colour report!) is of course, most useful. Go …

Old Town White Coffee is a place we’ve been hanging out a lot at. Its got wifi, power sockets, couches, good food and drink, great eye candy (bonus!), and is open till late.

Today, we found out that all their PCs that hold the orders (order{1,2,3,4}) have Samba shares. Open to all, naturally.

They use Crystal Reports. Have a custom front-end, with appropriate touch screen drivers, but the back-end is pretty stock. They use MySQL, Connector/ODBC 3.51.12 and also use SQLyog 5.30. I know the system is designed and deployed by NIT, it looks like their F&B POS.

Their use of MySQL (schema wise), includes using VIEWs, stored procedures and triggers (on UPDATE and DELETE).

I wonder how many point of sales systems are powered by open source software. This one runs Windows, but at least within the …

Malaysian Airlines has impressed me, yet again. Last week, in The Star, they reported that Sharul Isahak, a MAS employee, has helped save the airlines close to RM70 million (about USD$21 million), thanks to his use of open source software.

The software is meant to help airline maintenance, i.e. to keep track of parts and records of maintenance works. The web-based solution, is E-Promis (read the blog entry, its pretty interesting, as he takes you through the planning stages - it also seems like he’s still the only developer).

?This meant looking at open-source solutions. Instead of platforms such as Microsoft or Sun, we chose LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP)?

I couldn’t help but grin …