The summit, to be held at the HCMC-based Quang Trung Software City from November 20 to 22, will be among the top FOSS events in Asia attracting many contributors from free and open source projects from around the world.

The event is organized by the GNOME Foundation, an organization committed to supporting the advancement of GNOME and comprising hundreds of volunteer developers and industry-leading companies such as Access, Hewlett- Packard, IBM, Intel and Mozilla.

GNOME is a standard part of all leading GNU/Linux and Unix distributions and is popular with both large existing corporate deployments and small business and home users.

According to the organizers, more than 500 participants from ten countries are expected to join the summit, which is the first international community event of its kind in Vietnam.

Mario Behling, chairman of the summit in Vietnam, said in a statement that FOSS and cost efficient open development models were becoming more and more interesting for both local and global businesses and that many IT companies had flocked to the country to seek new opportunities.

Stormy Peters, president of the GNOME Foundation, said in a statement that FOSS was used in just about every commercial or non-commercial organization and that everyone was looking at FOSS to create new business opportunities.

According to the GNOME Foundation, Asia, including Vietnam, will be a destination to develop more FOSS projects because many countries in the region have policies to encourage the use of FOSS in business and in Government agencies.

In 2004, the Government endorsed a decision to encourage State-owned agencies to apply open source software in their operations. Today, 14,000 computers in State agencies and 3,000 main servers are using open source software.