The certificate of appointment was presented to Dr. Hj. Ramli Saad, the Director of AMDI, USM by Dato’ Dr. Nor Aliah Mohd Zahri, Deputy Director-General (ICT) of MAMPU in a special ceremony held at AMDI, USM.
With this recognition, USM, through AMDI will function as a training and guidance provider for the public sector in the use of open source software.
Dato Dr. Nor Aliah, in her speech, said that besides USM, 10 other training centres have been identified and appointed as Certified Training Providers since 13 August 2010.
MAMPU has observed that AMDI, USM is prepared and has the potential to carry out training in the open source software to the staff in the public sector, particularly in the northern region and MAMPU believes that USM will be able to shoulder this responsibility,” she said.
The use of open source software started with the ‘Open Source Software’ Public Sector Master Plan that was launched on 16 July 2004 to reduce total ownership, increase freedom of choice of software use, increase level of operations between systems and software and increase the growth of the ICT industry.
Among the well-known open source software are OpenOffice.org, Fundamental Linux, Vitualisation for System Administrator using OSS, MySQL for System Developer, Joomla! and others.
At the same function, the Director of AMDI, Dr. Hj. Ramli Saad said that AMDI through the AMDI Open Source Software initiative have conducted training and open source software development since three years ago under the Bio-ICT Centre.
“We are very serious in supporting the aspirations of the government and we are extremely pleased with our appointment. We have also taken proactive measures by organizing the first course on open source software, which commences today and ends on 25 August 2010. A total of 15 participants from various government departments are attending ths course. This makes AMDI, USM the first centre to conduct the couse since receiving the appointment,” he said.
Also present at the function were Hj. Mohamad Rosli Abd. Razak, Director of the ICT Policy and Planning Division, MAMPU and Puan Tan King Ing, the Deputy Director of the Open Source & Open Standard, ICT Policy and Planning Division, MAMPU.
