ISLAMABAD, June 6: Federal Secretary Information Technology Farrukh Qayyum on Wednesday said the government was committed to enforcing intellectual property rights (IPR) and projects being approved by the IT ministry had allocation for software licenses.

“We feel that this would reduce the need for piracy,” he said while speaking at the inaugural ceremony of an open source resource centre set up by the IBM Pakistan at the Nust Institute of Information Technology.

Mr Qayyum said establishment of the centre at the Nust was a big step which would provide training and help companies shift form proprietary systems to the open source.

The secretary pointed out that while there was a debate on the total cost of ownership of the open source systems, it is clear that a large percentage of the cost for open source goes into maintenance and upkeep which in turn goes to the IT professionals in Pakistan.

He said the IT ministry’s policy on open source and proprietary systems is that each has its own application. He stressed that both open source and proprietary systems must support standard open interfaces for interoperability.

Mr Qayyum noted that there were situations where open source technology was still nascent and one had to rely on proprietary systems.

“However, where such constraints do not exist we should strive to use open source for reducing cost and enhancing our indigenous capabilities,” he said.

The IT secretary said that small and medium enterprises (SMEs) could get this application software free of cost to increase business for local companies.

He said the government had launched major initiatives in the research and development sector to bridge the gap between academia and the industry.

“We have already several projects through the national ICT research and development fund to provide financial support to research projects while hundreds of scholarships, internships and apprenticeships are also being given to the IT graduates to place them in the industry,” he added.

Speaking on the occasion, Humayun Bashir, IBM’s country general manager, said the centre at Nust would help customers, students, developers and business partners in Pakistan to explore the benefits of open standards-based computing.

He said a teachers training programme would also be launched by the IBM to cover several universities while a parallel scholars’ programme would also be initiated to offer free software, course material and access to the company portals to leading universities.