I’ve been thinking about this for years.

Literally the first thing I did as the Digital Minister is to change the procurement rules.

We’ve been making some changes.

Yeah...

OK, maybe not... [laughs]

The want to sell the data?

That was the picture, but these are two different terms on the procurement sheet.

What I’m saying is that currently in Taiwan’s IT procurement, everything that’s SaaS is counted differently than the spec‑and‑deliver. We’re trying to convert the spec‑and‑deliver line here.

No, it’s not.

Which is pay‑on‑use.

What we have now is if it’s SaaS, then we call it the cloud procurement, which is the top part.

What I’m saying is the development needs to piggyback on subscriptions, because it’s the same cycle. We renew annually. This option is to renew annually, because conceptually it’s the same deliverable.

It’s an open alternative to the model of SaaS, basically.

Yeah, all of the cost, mostly.

People who come up with WordPress or Drupal in their stacks automatically gets a better seat in the bidding.

Well, we have a time frame. We put out a budget. We can still outsource standard-compliant solutions and welcome bidding.

Which is what we’re doing in PDIS.tw.

But I do see your point.

Yeah, we don’t have spec-free procurements here either.

Down to operating system level.

We’ve been through this many, many times. [laughs]

Yes. We’re all painfully familiar with this phenomenon.

It’s a section called intellectual property ownership. We just revamped that section.

We do.

No. It’s fine.

That was also because the standard was set by a single vendor. It’s a very old debate.

...they’re still bad chairs. [laughs]

Except they have the same API.

[laughs]

Not since the Bauhaus.

The stock of the common procurement doesn’t run dry when you buy software.

You probably want to run Let’s Encrypt on your website.

That is what it is. [laughs]

I don’t think it’s personal. It’s insecure, not HTTPS, and embedded from a HTTPS site.

They have heard of this argument a lot.

I’m pretty sure the IT decision makers know about this, but they don’t usually consider it practical. [laughs]

The main argument was that we can save this much amount on licensing cost, which I was trying to find but couldn’t.

I couldn’t quite find the report, but the original justification was very close to what you have said, which is to promote a local community around the then OpenOffice, now LibreOffice community and for people to get in touch with the Chinese text processing part of it instead of waiting ...

There was a huge push around OpenOffice in 2013, which is what I was trying to find, because there was this justification paper that says how much licensing cost it saves over Microsoft Office subscriptions and so on.

Just a second. Let me double‑check before I say anything silly.

Yeah. There’s a fixed SME portion.

There’s a fixed portion that goes to SMEs.

It will vary depending whether it’s a generic or it’s a label drug.

It’s mostly hiring services, it’s building, it’s maintaining, and very little on licensing actually.

We do have a breakdown.

Actually, when I’m look at the raw numbers now, a lot of it is in services. It’s in building an IT system or maintaining an IT system, not on software licensing.

Exactly. No one bothered counting.

It’s got to be less that 0.1 percent, so I don’t think anyone...

This shouldn’t take long to find; it’s between $2-3 billion TWD per year.

Of course. It’s our basic procurement data.