YEREVAN. – Open source can slash software costs for business by as much as 80%, Mr Jan Wildeboer, Open source affairs advocate (aka “evangelist”), told Armenia News – NEWS.am at the BarCamp IT forum in Yerevan.

Mr Wildeboer, who is in charge for the EMEA (Europe, Middle East, Africa) at Red Hat (one of the largest Linux distributive developers), remarked that this logic proved true not only in developed countries. African mobile banking revolution is a well-known phenomenon by now, and its supporting software has been entirely open source.

Banks realized they cannot always afford licenses from software giants. But each of them was unable to order the whole bundle of its own software. So they shared parts of it which don’t affect competition.

Around 80% of software is generic: databases, operating and storage systems typically don’t bring added value, so there’s no problem in sharing it with competitors. Just the opposite: the more eyes examine the code for bugs, the better.

“Banks in Africa had arrived to that long ago. They had systems of SMS payments long before smartphones existed. That was all with open source. They were small, and they had to be creative. And now banks in Europe fear this trend because their African peers think: ‘It works in Africa why not take it to Europe?’” Wildeboer said.

Linux developers, including Red Hat, have customers in Armenia too. The most typical market is the financial sector. Government is a big customer too, especially in cooperation with European partners on border control systems.

“You actually have quite a few good developers, too. It means they are demanded”, he added.

BarCamp forum is sponsored by Ucom, one of the largest telecom operators in Armenia.