It is encouraging to see that the Department of Information Technology (DIT) Bhutan is taking an initiative to inculcate the practice of using open source software. However, despites the effort taken by the department, the practice of using an open source software in Bhutan will not occur on a large scale for next 10 years. Following are some of my personal reasons.
1. Considering the prior domain knowledge of the subject, at this stage users have a notion that when a better user friendly pirated program can be downloaded from the Internet or with a minimum cost as low as few hundred ngultrum from our neighbouring countries, they always wonder why they have to use unfriendly incompatible programs.
2. Bhutanese individuals or small-scale organisation cannot afford to purchase any authentic program. As the result some rich organisation will spend thousands of dollars on software procurement while others rely on pirated.
3. DIT initiated and spent millions of dollar on developing the open source programme Dzongkha Linux which was a big failure.
4. It has been observed that people don’t practise what they preach. You will not be surprised to find the responsible persons using pirated software in their office.
