Open Malaysia

The Business Software Alliance, both in Malaysia and internationally, has been active in lobbying for greater anti-piracy efforts focus by the governments of the world. With high fines and jail terms for directors of companies found to be using unlicensed software, the Domestic Trade and Consumer Affairs ministry has been busy playing its part with its anti-piracy measures. They must be commended for dropping Malaysia's piracy rates from 70% in 2001 to 60% in 2005.

These measures however are enforcement measures, and while it may serve as a deterrent it does not fully eradicate the problem at the source. We would need to suggest solutions that would not require raids by the ministry and the BSA.

One manner of doing this is to address the root cause of piracy in Malaysia. As I noted above, it's all about the money needed to fully load a PC for normal office or home use. A good way of addressing this is to utilize open source software as drop-in replacements for commercially licensed software. Due to the nature of open source software licensing, software can be distributed and used without one needing to worry about being raided by the ministry or contravening the law.

The onus for this lies with the many companies and individuals who assemble clone PCs or manufacturers dsitributing PCs in Malaysia. By ensuring that the PCs they sell are preloaded with all the necessary software which would make the PC useful to the customer when he takes it home and unpacks it, they can play a major role in eradicating piracy. If a customer found all the software he needed to get started when the PC boots up for the first time, he's less likely to schedule a trip to buy a CDROM with unlicensed software.

Common software needed out of the box by a customer today would include at the very least a fully functional office suite and a web browser. While web browsers[1] are provided out of the box as part of the platform operating system, office suites usually are not. Preloading an office suite into every PC assembled or manufactured would make a lot of sense and ease the pain for a customer who'd need to fully utilize his PC upon purchase.

There are many options here which are both cost effective and standards compliant. One could choose to preinstall OpenOffice.Org, KOffice or Abiword. All three of these applications are free, both in a sense of freedom of licensing and distribution and cost. It goes without saying that they're open source software. What's notable is that both OpenOffice.Org and Abiword run on a number of platforms including MS Windows, Linux derivatives and FreeBSD.

What's more important than that, however, is that all three support the new ISO/IEC Open Document Format standard, making documents created with any of these office suites interoperable and readable by the other office suites. It wouldn't really matter if you were using OpenOffice.Org and created a document which needed to be worked on by another colleague using Abiword.

As an office suite is perhaps the most common requirement for someone purchasing a PC, it does follow that the most pirated piece of software would be commercially licensed office suites. By utilizing open source software as a drop-in replacement for these offices suites for all shipped PCs, we would go a long way towards dropping our current piracy rate of 60%.

The Ministry of Domestic Trade and Consumer Affairs, along with the Business Software Alliance should be concentrating their efforts at the source of the piracy bogeyman where they would have a greater impact. This would reduce the need for after-the-fact enforcement and has the potential to save taxpayer funds in funding these raiding parties. These bodies, especially the ministry itself, should note this in its anti-piracy efforts and in its roadshows as it goes out to speak to manufacturers and PC assemblers on the need to comply with the Copyright Act.

[1] If you didn't like the web browser which came with your PC, I'd suggest taking a look at Firefox.  Firefox has a lot of features other browsers don't have and has the added benefit of being freely distributable.