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The scheme was announced last week by the country's Ministry of Information and Communication (MIC) which invited existing universities and local governments to apply to host the Linux enclaves.

'Already many universities and local governments have shown interest in the project,' said MIC director Lee Do-kyu. 'We expect big-sized entities will join it.'

The MIC will provide funding for

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the project - totalling 4.1bn won (about £2.4mn) in the first year.

The city and university will be required to run most of their computers on Linux.

'The test beds will prompt other cities and universities to follow suit through the showcasing of Linux as the major operating system without any technical glitches and security issues,' Lee told the Korea Times.

Currently, fewer than one per cent of PCs in Korea run Linux, lower than the global median of three per cent. The Korea IT Industry Promotion Agency wants to raise this figure to five per cent, and to 40 per cent on servers, around a fifth of which currently run the open source OS.

It believes that the country cannot become a global software power if it does not have access to secure source code.

'We cannot achieve the goal under the command of dominant closed-source programs,' said Ko Hyun-jin, the Agency's president.

Germany was the first country to experiment with Linux, when Munich announced that it planned to migrate from Windows to the open source OS.