South Korea pushes forward with Linux for schools

The South Korean government is moving forward with a program to roll out servers running the Linux operating system that will handle student data for 10,000 of the nation’s schools by 2006, the Korea IT Industry Promotion Agency (KIPA) said Monday.

Under a program that was started last October, Linux servers have so far been deployed to handle student data for 132 schools in Seoul, the nation’s capital, according to Yang Sungha, vice president of KIPA’s Open Source Software Promotion Center, a nonprofit government-backed agency based in Seoul.

The program, which will replace Unix servers handling students’ academic and medical records with a local distribution of Linux called Booyo, was started by South Korea’s Ministry of Education and Human Resources Development to cut IT costs. The project, which is called the National Education Information System (NEIS), will ultimately involve the installation of 2,288 servers to handle student records for 10,000 schools, Yang said.

The project’s cost was not disclosed.

Booyo was introduced last year and was developed by the Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute, a government laboratory, and seven South Korean software companies, including Linux software vendor Haansoft Inc., Yang said.

A growing number of government and government-affiliated organizations in South Korea are using Linux, but overall the operating system still has a small share of the market compared to Unix and Microsoft’s Windows operating system, according to KIPA.

Major Linux users in South Korea include the National Institute of Agricultural Biotechnology, where Linux accounts for 95 percent of the institute’s servers, and the Korea Center for Disease Control and Prevention, where Linux is used on more than half of the center’s servers, according to figures provided by Yang.

By 2007, KIPA hopes to see Linux used on 30 percent of servers operated by central and local government in South Korea, he said. By 2010, the agency wants to range this to rise to 40 percent, he said.

At present, Linux is used on 6 percent of the South Korean government’s servers, Yang said.