Following the trend of open source adaptation in major cities worldwide, one of the major Korean cities, Gwangju Metropolitan City, successfully jumped onto the open source transition, receiving spotlight from related industry.

The Korean government after installing open source systems into fields of education administration network and street number designation project among other agencies now designated Kwangju City as OSS (open-source software) city to promote regional software development. The city of Kwangju, with population of 1.4 million, five counties and 91 cities is the 5th largest city in Korea. Its major industries include auto manufacturing, IA: Information Appliance, and opto-electronics.

The Three Development Phases of OSS City
Gwangju was designated as OSS City by Korea IT Industry Promotion Agency (KIPA) to bring up its economy and competitiveness through IT industry using open source to construct improved infrastructures in city's key industries like opto-electronics, automobile, mobile, and semiconductor.

The project with total cost of $45.7 million in three phases will run from 2006 to 2010. The first phase began in 2006 has completed Information Strategy Planning, surveying applicable open-source areas for the city to install open-source software as a main operating system of their infrastructures. Basing from the findings the open-source solutions were applied to Gwangju Information & Culture Industry Promotion Agency and Jeonnam girl's commercial high school giving channel to produce specialists through education sector.

Second phase of the project includes implementation of correction and updating from the initial case study ran from Gwangju Information & Culture Industry Promotion Agency, migrate to Linux based open-source system by year 2008, and develop, modify needed business programs for the Linux platform.

The third and last phase in 2009 involves replacing main electronics systems to open-source platform and improving user-friendly open-source desktop environment. Also by coordinating with industrial, education sectors and government agencies to base open-source clusters for the pilot runs.

Unified open-source solution most ideal case
The first phase completed in this December, successfully applied various open source solutions on web server, DB server, groupware server, mail server, hard disk web server, file server, DNS, VOD, monitoring, LMS server, update server, and migrated government business and its public desktop computers.

"In overseas cases, open source is implemented around specially selected areas like on DB server or web server but in Kwangju's case, it is being applied in many sectors, using various solutions, became a good model of open-source unification for future considerations," said, Ki-Bong Youn, Director, Information Management Division for the Gwangju city.

With the OSS City designation, the city of Kwangju will establish embedded software R&D center with Haansoft, will continue to erect related industries, telematics, database, and e-learning.

The Kwangju metropolitan city will petition the Korean administration to support the OSS City project as mid to long term project like that of administration's current ongoing u-City development and other national project , A Culture Hub City of Asia. And with soon to be placed second national central computing center there, accordingly the city will build OSS tech support centers to attract major domestic and global IT firms, increase support to policy and administration.

Youngmin Yoo of KIPA who is overseeing the current project said, "The OSS City project should lay solid foundation and opportunity for development of unique software and help the software industry continue to thrive."