Koreans plan giant open-source project

The largest open-source project in the South Korean public sector - the National Education Information System or NEIS - is hitting its stride.

Bearing Point Korea on Friday submitted a final advisory report for NEIS to the Ministry of Education and Human Resource Development (MOE), the organisation managing the project.

The consulting firm recommended Linux for the 'dedicated server' platform of NEIS, and Unix for 'group server' platform. A dedicated server is the system used by each high school and special purpose school, while a group server is used by a group of 15 elementary to middle schools.

Bearing Point also suggested an alternative - using Unix only. In all scenarios in the report, the systems are based on 64-bit processors.

However, it is expected that the MOE will go with the primary proposal because the government of South Korea is strongly promoting open source for all of its agencies.

"It is now on evaluation process. But I can say that open source is likely to be adopted for NEIS," an MOE officer, who requested anonymity, said. The ministry plans to confirm the suggestion by mid September.

If MOE chooses the Linux plan, about 2000 'dedicated' servers of the 2700 servers in NEIS will run Linux.

"We did a bunch of tests in terms of performance, cost, usability, scalability, reliability… through last three months. A conclusion is that Linux can deal with [all the] traffic generated from dedicated servers of NEIS at a lower cost," Jung Yong-Kyun, a NEIS consulting manager of Bearing Point Korea, said.

The remaining 700 'group' servers will run Unix. "Although both Linux and Unix got a passing score, Unix performs slightly better than Linux at group server tests. So we had decided to suggest Unix for those," Jung explained.

Not only because it is expected to be the largest open-source project in South Korea's public sector, but because NEIS concerns education - and therefore requires the highest levels of reliability and security - Linux companies expect it to display 'best Linux practice' and boost market adoption for the open-source operating system.

The concept of 'open source for NEIS' is based on the government's open-source promotion policy. The South Korea government announced in September 2003 that it planned to replace proprietary software with open-source alternatives as well as to promote open source for future public projects.

NEIS is 'to integrate all education administrations' by connecting elementary, middle, and high schools to metropolitan and provincial government offices of education through the Internet. It is now scheduled to start running for the first semester of 2006.