This survey examines the current state of South-South Cooperation in
Software Technology. Results from the survey show that there has been
a surge in South-South Cooperation in Software Technology (SSC-ST) in
general since 2003, with significant increase in regional, in addition
to bilateral cooperation. A significant increase has also occurred in
the contributions of UN organizations (e.g. UNCTAD, UNDP and UNU-IIST)
as well as donor OECD countries (particularly Japan, South Korea and a
few EU countries) to both the development of software technology
capacities and their applications in the areas like agriculture,
e-governance, transportation and the Information Society in general.
SSC-ST in the areas of e-governance and e-learning is particularly
high. However, there is a pronounced divide even among the countries
of the South in the area of software technology, with India, China and
a few South-East Asian countries providing almost all capacities of
the South. So far, not much inter-regional cooperation was documented.
SSC-ST cooperation in the area of Open Source Software (OSS) has been
growing rapidly in the past three to five years. This has been
strongly supported by UN organizations primarily as a means to
affordable access, catalyst for capacity acquisition, and a possible
solution to reducing the scale of the Intellectual Property Rights
(IPR) problem.