The 3rd Public-Open Source Conference organized by TÜBİTAK UKALBİM and held with a great number of participants has been completed.
Prof. Dr. A. Arif Ergin, President of TÜRBİTAK, gave a speech during the conference and stated the issue of open source corresponded to the one-eight of an iceberg that was above water and the real issue was “digital agenda”. Ergin pointed out Turkey welcomed the digital agenda very well with its human resources, government and public willingness, which carried Turkey one “click” further compared to other countries.
Ergin said the issue was not limited to the license dependency, but the real issue was about security, and “That is because we are talking about a space where our data, information, photos, private and official lives, applications of any kind, and signatures are stored. It is a space to store all the personal data and information thanks to the new identity cards, so it is not merely about 3 or 5 photos. If we fail to keep this space secure or try to manage all the above by means of some software with contents we have no control over, then we will obviously be very negligent and in great error. As such, we have faced with rejection of entrusting our security to someone else’s management. This is not just a matter of software migration, but it also needs to be addressed as an issue of national independence,” he said.
Ergin indicated they had offered various solutions under Pardus and would continue their work in the same direction, and “The Pardus construction in TÜBİTAK completely collapsed as a result of the efforts made by the well-known organization in 2011 to 2013. Having been triggered by the instructions given by the President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan regarding Pardus, a number of firm actions were taken and a great effort was shown in 2014 to revive Pardus, which, after 3 years, has been made available for use in various areas – in the armed forces in particular,” he told.
He also explained any digital document and file had a specific format, which required specific software for any processing of the document or file.
He highlighted a piece of work prepared by using Microsoft Office, for example, with the format “doc” or “docx” might lead to some difficulties if one wanted to open the same piece with LibreOffice, OpenOffice, which were open-source developments, or software developed by other developers. Ergin added as follows:
“This causes us such a dependency that we have to buy and pay a yearly license fee if we want to open a document that has been created in Microsoft Office. However, there are also worldwide standards, such as Open Document Format (ODF), available for slideshows, spreadsheets or other documents for presentation. Once we switch to such standards, we will minimize our dependency to Microsoft or Mac software.”
“We will first adopt the open document format for our internal practices. Those who use Microsoft or Mac software will not be affected, and those who will share documents with us or receive documents from us using open source software will benefit – provided we internally switch to open source formats. Once we internally establish it in 6 months’ time, we will not accept any Office formats for TÜBİTAK’s correspondences and information formats starting from the mid-2018. We will also require any project applications, reports by those who referee or evaluate on behalf of TÜBİTAK, or presentations of those who attend our conferences to be submitted in open document format.”