Chinese govt invests $350M on original software

The Chinese government, both at the central and local levels, have been making efforts to eradicate pirated software in the various organizations. This resulted in an investment of some 2.16 billion yuan (US$350 million) worth of software in the past three years.

Xinhua reported Thursday that since the Chinese government launched an anti-piracy campaign among its agencies in 2010 up till its conclusion this April, it had purchased 3.23 million units of office software, according to the National Copyright Administration (NCA).

Besides investing in legal copies of software, the inter-ministry NCA also inspected government agencies in 16 provinces and 14 central government agencies to root out software piracy. By end-April, it had looked into 62.15 percent of municipal governments and 32.85 percent of county governments and corrected their malpractices regarding software procurement.

The NCA added all government agencies should be inspected by the end of the year, and regulations would be introduced to encourage them to buy original software, the report added.

It was reported last July that more than 1 billion yuan (US$156.9 million) was spent by the Chinese government to buy licensed software. The amount was spent on 158,823 operating system (OS) licenses, 506,693 copies of office software, as well as antivirus and other special-purpose software by the end of June last year.