Not military in nature, but related in a way.
--
A bid farewell to Singapore's open source advocate
By Eileen Yu
Friday, September 21 2007 11:59 AM
He wasn't one who went with the flow, and was widely regarded as an
outspoken advocate of the open source movement in Singapore. Cheok
Beng Teck, CIO of the country's Ministry of Defense (Mindef),
chartered the way that saw the government body embrace--almost
unabashedly--an open source strategy that few in the public sector
would have been as comfortable adopting.
Cheok Beng Teck
Sadly, Cheok passed away last Sunday, apparently after suffering a
heart attack whilst trekking on a mountain in China. He had only
recently retired, making his sudden demise all the more poignant.
He was 52.
Under Cheok's guidance, Mindef became synonymous with open source,
whether it had intended to be or not, and an agency that was at the
forefront of testing and adopting new technology.
It was highly uncharacteristic for a government entity in Singapore
to adopt a technology that--at the time--went against the grain and
deemed to be somewhat controversial. More so, it was unusual for a
civil servant to be so candid and unafraid to discuss his reasons
for choosing one platform over another, much less one that was
attracting much attention from the global and local IT
community.
Cheok's involvement in open source went as far back as 2001, when
he was then the director for planning and strategic development at
Singapore's Institute of High Performance Computing (IHPC). In June
that year, he helped the R&D institute--alongside partner
Singapore/MIT Alliance--establish a Linux competency center in a
bid to help companies set up clusters for engineering and product
design work on the open source platform.
Cheok joined Mindef the following year as director of the
ministry's CIO office, where he headed the team in supporting and
introducing changes regarding IT matters.
At Mindef, Cheok was often quoted by various major media houses
including ZDNet Asia, for his contribution to the open source
movement, including the ministry's decision to install OpenOffice
and support for the Open Document Format.
But Cheok was never overly religious about his support for open
source. Instead, he took the time to explain the rationale behind
Mindef's decision to embrace the platform, noting that it was still
about saving millions of dollars and a desire not to be tied down
by proprietary standards and to obtain "true" ownership of one's
intellectual property.
Cheok's strong voice of authority will be sorely missed not just
amongst the open source community, but also in the general IT
industry. In him, we had a visionary, a man who was willing to dive
into unchartered waters and then stand up to support his
beliefs.
He leaves behind a legacy that I hope will be preserved in
Mindef.
http://www.zdnetasia.com/blog/btw/0,39056810,63000611,00.htm