Conducted by independent research company Ipsos Public Affairs, the study only covered IT professionals from the private sector, with 100 respondents each from China, Malaysia, Singapore, South Korea, Thailand, Vietnam, Indonesia, and the Philippines. The Philippine statistics turned out to be very close to the average Asian view, said Seow Hiong Goh, BSA's director for software policy in Asia.
According to the study, 94 percent of the respondents from the Philippines believe that developing a domestic software industry is important to the IT industry, while 97 percent believe it is important to the overall economy. The top three benefits the Filipino respondents see in developing a local software industry are: increased competitiveness in the global economy, boosting the national domestic and export economy, and greater innovation through research and development.
The study revealed that 98 percent of the Filipino respondents agree that free competition is essential in spurring a healthy domestic software industry, where 87 percent of the respondents agree that the government should have an active role in competition. A great majority also said government role is important to the success of the industry in general.
One notable survey result, however, is that although 37 percent of the Filipino IT professionals cited government support as a key issue to industry development, more than 60 percent of the respondents believe that regulation should be industry-led and not government-led. Goh, for his part, said that there are, in fact, some sectors where the government needs to regulate like the telecommunications sector, but the BSA official said the government should know in what cases and sectors they should be the ones to regulate -- whether in competition policies and standards, among others.
'For the industry to grow, competition is vital; the government should therefore create as little restriction as possible in terms of competition,' said Goh. What the government should instead focus on to contribute to the local software industry is education and training, especially since the industry seems to prefer self-regulation, Goh said.
With governments often in between debates of promoting open source and commercial software, Goh said that governments should remain neutral and should have no reason to prefer one over the other. 'What the government should do is to give the public the ability to choose,' he said.
'In the end, the consumer is the one that chooses the product and the better product will always win in the long run; so let the industry innovate, encourage competition, because this is how the industry could find a niche and do well,' said Goh.
In the study, 99 percent of the Filipino respondents agree that freedom of choice is important, while 92 percent said that there currently is freedom of choice in the software market. Across Asia and in the Philippines, Goh said there appears to be sufficient awareness on open source software (OSS) and most respondents agree that having OSS in the market, in fact, provides more choice to the customers. 'The people should realize that they have a choice; this is not a question of which is the better product but having a choice to choose whichever fits your purpose,' he added.
According to Goh, this is the first time that BSA has released the Domestic Software Industry Development Study. 'There is often a lack of information necessary for making policies and regulations in Asia, so with this study, we hope various government bodies can study what the implications are and what policies to move forward with,' he said.
'I hope to share this study with the CICT (Commission on Information and Communication Technology) because what we really want is to disseminate information to better guide them in making policies,' Goh added.