Open Malaysia

iPhone to become openPhone ?

A rhetorical question, no doubt, but given the fact that Linux has already been ported over to the iPhone, this may not be too far from reality.

While its still very rough around the edges, (read: no touchscreen drivers, sound, or WiFi / cell radio support), open source ingenuity has shown that it will only be a matter of time before it becomes a full fledged software framework for the iPhone platform.

The iPhone has been plagued by third party developer complaints, many of whom say that with the prolification of free (read: gratis, not open source) and 99-cent applications for it, higher value and more expensive applications are not selling that much. This state of affairs is partly due to the smaller catchment of iPhone developers, thus raising the cost of hiring them and resulting in higher priced applications.

Moving to an open source platform like Linux however would increase the pool of available developers, and serve to drive down these costs, which hopefully will lead to better lower priced third party applications.

Will Apple however ever open source the platform ? Let's not forget that this is a company which even refused to open up its hardware architecture in the 1980s, losing big time to the IBM PC and its clones over the next decade. They've since learnt their lesson by opening up their platform APIs, but have stopped short of open sourcing their code, though the excellent Mac OS X is based in the open source BSD operating system.

Or better yet, why not collaborate with Google and get Android running on the iPhone. That would be a Windows Mobile killer now, wouldn't it ? Early reviews of the Android powered HTC phones are showing promise that it can give the Apple product a strong run for its money, and with Google already open sourcing Android, third party applications will not be a problem. Will we see an exodus of iPhone developers to the Google-driven platform instead ?

After all, with Google's plans in this area, an Android app will have a wider market than handhelds and mobiles, for it could even run on the desktop with Google unveiling their capability to run x86 native code within the browser container.

That thought will make a lot of people drool, open source advocates and the consumer. Nokia's move to open source Symbian is perhaps a maneouvre to head this threat off at the pass, but they too would be well advised to start collaborating on this venture.

Enough brains working on this will lead us to move away from the traditional keypad/keyboard paradigm of communicating with the device. The touch screen interface has been a long time coming, and it takes a new approach to user interface design to make it usable and friendly enough for a lot of people.

And that, my friends, will change how we even use our desktops when it becomes ubiquitous.

An Interview with MyMeeting Senior Developer

MyMeeting (download here) is a web application specifically designed to help better manage meetings in government agencies. Initially developed at the Open Source Competency Center (OSCC), it is the first Malaysian government software to be released publicly under the open source BSD license.

We conducted an email interview with Abdullah Zainul Abidin, the senior developer on this project. The answers are below verbatim (with some minor formatting changes).

0) Tell us the story of how MyMeeting came about being developed. Who's brainchild was this? Who were the key developers? How many developers were allocated to work on MyMeeting? Was there management buy-in before development started? Was the development of MyMeeting conducted in OSS manner (ie open mailing lists, bug tracking software, public access to SVN/CVS/git etc)?

MyMeeting actually started life as a custom system for the management of decisions made in the GITIC committee. GITIC (Government Information Technology And Internet Committee) is a committee chaired by the Chief Secretary Of Malaysia that discusses the implementation of government IT policies and so it has members from every government agency in Malaysia.

Once the GITIC system was complete, MAMPU saw that MyMeeting could actually be useful to other government agencies too thus most of the customized for GITIC portion was taken and turned into settings which could easily be changed by the various agencies for their use. Then it wasn't really open source yet. We were using all the open source technologies (PHP, MySQL, Apache, SVN) but the development wasn't really open for all to see.

It was when we wanted to redo MyMeeting for MyMeeting version 2 that we saw MyMeeting is a perfect candidate for a completely Malaysian Government Open Source Software project. Most probably the first of it's kind. So yes, development of MyMeeting is conducted in OSS manner. You can access the bugtracker at http://trac.oscc.org.my/mymeeting, download it through svn at https://svn.oscc.org.my/mymeeting, register to it's mailing list at http://lists.oscc.org.my/mailman/listinfo/mymeeting-users and also
edit it's wiki at the knowledge bank http://knowledge.oscc.org.my/solution-areas/application/mymeeting.

1) MyMeeting was developed on CakePHP. What was the reasoning to choose CakePHP over other PHP frameworks? Did using an ROR-style framework help speed up development? Were there any problems faced when using CakePHP and how did the developers go about solving the problems?

The reason we choose CakePHP was exactly because it was an ROR-style framework. At the time when we decided to redo MyMeeting, there was a suggestion that we should use ROR especially after we saw Kamal's presentation on ROR at MyGOSSCON.

But I was worried about the learning curve that we would have to face and also considering the limited amount of time we have it was just not realistic to expect all of the OSCC developers to grasp a completely new language (none of us have any kind of experience with Ruby) and a completely new approach to web application development. I mean doing programming with the MVC concept after so long of mixed PHP and HTML hackery it certainly is very different. But I knew that we would not be able to go far with "traditional" way of developing php software. We have to overcome MVC.

So we choose CakePHP because it was marketed as clone of ROR. The initial learning curve of a new approach was pretty steep but once that was all over we find that it did help speed up development as it keeps things clean. Everyone knew where things need to go and where to look if there are problems.

2) Is there any plans to officially support PostgreSQL (and other free databases) in future versions of MyMeeting? Also, why the support for MySQL only in this release?

There is no "official" plans to support PostgreSQL and actually cakephp does support other free and non-free databases. Only there are some queries which we had to hack in as they are too complex for CakePHP. And to be honest we haven't had much experience with other databases. So if someone really needs it, or even gave us the patch to support it (hint,hint ;) we'd be more than glad to implement it into the main tree of MyMeeting.

3) Has there been any patches fed back from the FOSS community? If members of the FOSS community are interested in contributing to this project, where should they go to information on getting involved?

We had one patch submitted by SuMarDi that actually changed the theme of MyMeeting. It was really good. But as of date (11/09/2008) we have not yet put it in because he also changed some tags in the views so we need to make sure we don't break anything if we put it in. Apart from that we've got some good feedback from angch and he even updated the wiki in Trac.

We welcome any contribution and involvement from the community regarding MyMeeting. If anyone is interested they should first register themselves at the OSCC Knowledgebank (http://knowledge.oscc.org.my) and from there they can read up on the latest MyMeeting documentation (http://knowledge.oscc.org.my/solution-areas/application/mymeeting). They should download the source code and try out MyMeeting (the Knowledgebank would have information on how to do that). If they find some bugs or would like to suggest some feature they can do so at the mymeeting trac site (http://trac.oscc.org.my/mymeeting) by logging in with their Knowledgebank account.

They should also register with the mymeeting-users mailing list to keep up with the latest happenings with mymeeting at http://lists.oscc.org.my/mailman/listinfo/mymeeting-users. Apart from that, sometimes the mymeeting developers can be found in the #oscc irc channel on freenode. We'd be glad to help in any way we can so that the community can contribute.

4) Are there plans to integrate into existing legacy calendaring systems? Are there plans to integrate into FOSS calendaring software? How about integrating into existing proprietary calendaring software?

We have a vague plan of exporting the meeting calendars with iCal or something. But that is still a long way to go in the pipeline.

5) What is the roadmap for future releases of MyMeeting?

We haven't got a lot of feedback from the community yet as of where we should be heading. So most of it is only in the developers head of what next we should do. Yeah.. we're still very new at managing an open source project. It should be in trac.. :P

6) Why was the decision to keep MyMeeting development within OSCC before version 1.0 ?

That was actually the default way of doing things here at OSCC. We're actually trying to introduce something new with MyMeeting version 2 with it being completely open source and all.

7) Will future projects appear to the public prior to v1.0?

That would have to depend on the management.. :)

8) How is the team adapting to releasing the code?

We were pretty nervous at first. Not knowing whether our codes were any good and all. But we're okay now. Still got a long way to go to be fully disciplined in the open source way thought (release control and all) but insyaAllah we'll get there.

9) Management must be well educated to have the source code released. Was this an issue, and did you need advocacy sessions?

We are supposed to be the Open Source COMPETENCY Centre. :) So management should already know about the advantages of doing it in open source. We didn't need advocacy sessions.

10) How does your team / Management / OSCC / MAMPU rationalise the sharing of Intellectual Right of copyright and software patents?

We want Malaysia to be seen as a contributor of knowledge and technology to the global community.

11) How many seats has this been rolled out to (#Agencies / #Seats) and how much would this have cost for an equivalent commercial product?

There is at least around 6 agencies that is actively engaged with us to use MyMeeting. And since MyMeeting is freely downloadable there could be more out there that we don't even know of that's using it. Our current estimate is that it would cost at least RM 100K per agency to get something like MyMeeting commercially. So that's RM 600K at least already. :)

12) How much would your team foresee saving the Govt over the next 5 to 10 years from MyMeeting, and other OSCC products?

For MyMeeting? In 5 years maybe more than RM 15 million. If we can get all (and we mean ALL) of the government agencies and bodies to use MyMeeting. Not sure about the other products though.

13) Govt is cutting back on spending generally. Do you foresee that it will cut back on OSS investments?

Actually I think the right way to go is to put in more on OSS investments if they want to cut back. So I don't think they will.

14) Any new projects from OSCC labs we should look out for?

MySurveillance is rolling out soon. It is a HIDS system based on Prelude.

15) Can the private sector make use of the applications from OSCC?

Yes of course. But we won't be able to officially provide support though. We're more focused on government bodies.

16) Will OSCC provide support, or do they have recommended partners?

We would recommend partners wherever possible.

17) There have been cases where proprietary software vendors have opposed OSS initiatives by the government. Has there been any negative feedback from these vendors on the release of MyMeeting code, and if so, what has happened thus far?

No problems so far.

We would like to thank Abdullah Zainul Abidin for his time in answering the many questions. We are encouraged by the fact that the Malaysian goverment is moving so far as to open source its software projects. Indeed, the incredible interest from other government agencies clearly proves that the open sourcing of MyMeeting was a far-reaching wise investment. It has clearly allowed for efficient use of ICT resources by all, not to mention many millions of tax ringgits that are being saved through the choice of liberal OSS licensing. With their efforts leading to the promotion of OSS innovation and creativity, this initiative will surely lead to increased and sustained growth of the local ICT ecosystem.

Happy 2nd. birthday, Open Malaysia blog!

May 17, 2008 is Open Malaysia blog's 2nd. birthday!
HAPPY BIRTHDAY!

The first post 2 years ago declared, "This is a blog
about openness, saying that the changing times call for innovation through open collaboration." Open innovation, ODF, open standards and open source were what we championed then and what we still champion today.

Malaysia had voted Approval of ODF as an ISO standard just before this blog started 2 years ago. OOXML came into the picture since then, but in the last one year, Malaysia cannot be considered to have officially accepted OOXML -- the Malaysian National Body committees  (TC4, then ISC G) voted Disapproval of OOXML, and the Malaysia final vote of Abstention decided by the Minister is at best non-committal to OOXML.

On the blog's 1st. birthday on May 17, 2007, there were 194 posts and 163 comments. In the one year after that, we added 111 posts but the number of comments tripled to 512 comments within the same one year! The worldwide dialog created by this blog was awesome.

In the 1st. year, we had 32,000 visits (by Sitemeter). In the 2nd. year, the month of March 2008 alone had 32,000 visits, with a total of 100,000 visits in the whole of this 2nd. year. The most popular post was definitely The Last Lap on the OOXML results which attracted thousands of visits every day.

Yes, the times they are a-changing. I leave it to you to recount the changes you have seen in "openness" in Malaysia and elsewhere over the last year -- do write your comments below.

All for open standards

My article on All for open standards was published in the Tech&U section of the New Straits Times newspaper yesterday (22 October 2007).

Not too long a writeup, so check it out by clicking on the image on the left to view its full size. See what you think of the article.

The only inaccurate part of the article is my pic -- should have sent them an updated one with my now shaved hairdo....

:-)

[Update 29 October 2007: Full text of article transcribed below.]

Bob Sutor (IBM VP for Open Source and Standards) speaking in Malaysia

Headsup!

Bob Sutor, the IBM Vice President for Open Source and  Standards, will be speaking in Malaysia on open source and open standards. He will be speaking in two places, first at the Federation of Malaysian Manufacturers on the 19th April 2007 on "Opening Up Your Business Software: Why and When". This talk would be of interest to CEOs in the non-technical industries, or in other words, business owners. Do note that registration is mandatory. Click here for more information and to register. The abstract of the talk is as follows:

Businesses today will be using both forms of software to deploy the most cost-effective and flexible solutions to serve their customers and to maintain their competitive edge and more importantly, to differentiate. The only way to get true interoperability and these potential cost savings inside your company and with your partners and customers is to use true open standards. Your new office applications will depend on them. Your businesses will depend on them. So will your competitors.

Bob will also be speaking at a talk organized by the "Malaysian Free and Open Source Society" on Friday, 20th April 2007 at the Open University Malaysia Campus in Angkasa Raya building (beside KLCC -- Kuala Lumpur City Centre) on "The Shift to 'Open': Boost or Brakes for Innovation and Business". This talk would be of interest to those involved in the ICT industries (CEO, CTO's, software developers, technical managers and technology entrepreneurs should attend the talk). A panel discussion will follow after this talk. There is no registration required for this talk and more information is available here.

Leading ICT companies worldwide are moving towards open standards and open source. Open source is making significant headway into areas that were once the stronghold of proprietary software. Is this a fad or a genuine change in the IT industry? How will this affect your development practices and the skills that you need to acquire? Will we see more or less innovation as a result of greater cross-company and cross-border sharing of information formats and software source code? This talk will discuss the background motivating these questions and provide options as to their answers, as well as how things will shake out over the next five years.

Both talks are free so come early and enjoy yourself!

Why OpenDocument Format matters to Texans

Yoon Kit wrote on Why OpenDocument Format matters to Malaysians in The Edge on 19 March 2007. In Texas, USA on Monday, 26 March 2007 Bob Sutor delivered a testimony to the Texas House and Senate regarding the open document format legislation being discussed in the state.

Bob gave simple, clear and strong messages in the testimony. Although they are addressed to Texans, I feel that they are universal enough. Click here to read it. I also transcribed it below.

The ODF ISO/IEC 26300 International Standard adoption -- Malaysia, let's grab the opportunities!

While the effort to recognize ODF, the international standard ISO/IEC 26300 as a Malaysian Standard is in progress, there may be concerns that Malaysia is "rushing too fast" as a country into adopting this international standard and that there won't be any support if we were to deploy it locally. This fortunately is not the case, as there has  been a large market share of ODF-implemented products in governmental bodies to date.

If you were to follow this link, you see a list of decisions by government bodies around the world to adopt office software supporting the ISO/IEC 26300 standard. The list is far from comprehensive and is only the tip of a very large iceberg.

The link also says that the Yankee Group in October 2005 put the OpenOffice.org market share among small and medium businesses at 19 per cent, up from the 6 per cent figure reported by Jupiter Research less than two years previously. One might suspect that software supporting the ISO/IEC 26300 today has a larger market share in government offices than among small and medium businesses.

The link describes the following countries/states/regions/cities which have adopted the international standard:

Australia

Austria

Belgium

Brazil

Canada

British Columbia

Manitoba

Ontario

China

Croatia

Czech Republic

Denmark

European Union

France

Germany

Hong Kong

India

Haryana

Kerala

Macau

Macedonia

Netherlands

Pakistan

Philippines

Poland

Portugal

Singapore

Spain

Andalucia

Catalonia

Extremadura

Switzerland

Turkey

United Kingdom

U.S.A.

Colorado

Florida

Georgia

Indiana

Maryland

Massachusetts

Montana

Nebraska

Nevada

New York

These nations are already enjoying the benefits of sovereignty, cost savings and increased choice in their applications to use.

Is Malaysia rushing? Or are we refusing delay, expediting opportunities? Leader or follower, we are certainly not alone!

Making a case for open source

If you haven't yet read the feature in yesterday's The Star newspaper, a letter written by Dinesh, here is the online version.

Here is the full text:

=======================================

Tuesday October 31, 2006

Making a case for open source

REFERRING to your Oct 17 article on Making Microsoft More Malaysian:

Like all things coming from Redmond these days regarding open-source software, Yasmin Mahmood was quick to latch on to the Mampu Open Source Masterplan and complain about "Malaysia favouring open-source software."

The truth of the matter is this is just a fallacy.

The Mampu Open Source Masterplan clearly states that all government procurement will still be done based on technical and financial merit, without preference for either open-source or proprietary software. 

However, should two competing proposals be exactly equal in both financial and technical merit, then as a tie-breaker, open-source software would be preferred due to its inherent nature of providing the source code to the customer, in this case the government of Malaysia.

The benefits of being able to modify the software would swing the decision, when both financial and technical considerations are equal. However, this is a far cry from the assertion that Malaysia favours open-source, since it is only relevant in tie-breaker situations.

It must also be noted that Malaysia has joined a growing list of national, state and municipal governments worldwide who have such a policy in place and that we have also been held up by the United Nations as a case study in this policy.

Yasmin then goes on to imply that this has an adverse effect on intellectual property rights for software and that it will affect innovation.

 

Open-source software licensing is firmly based on an established intellectual property framework through copyrights. It is only through copyrighted intellectual property that open-source software licences hold their value and are possible. 

As such, open-source software firmly believes in intellectual property copyright laws on software and thus contributes to the national intellectual property bank. 

To imply that open-source software denies the IP rights of software developers and denies them economic value is misleading.

Furthermore, open-source software developers JBoss recent acquisition by Redhat for US$420mil (RM1.6bil) in addition to Oracle’s acquisition of Sleepycat Software certainly show that there is clear economic value in open-source companies.

For a developing nation like Malaysia, it is critical that we augment our national software capacity by getting involved in high end (and high value) software development. 

Open-source software development gives us that opportunity by allowing us to participate and benefit from international and world leading software technologies like the Apache webserver, the Linux and FreeBSD operating systems as well as middleware and enterprise technologies like
PHP, JBoss, MySQL and PostgreSQL.

Dinesh Nair
www.openmalaysiablog.com

=======================================

Wasting millions

It's not often that you read about something truly inspiring in the Malaysian civil service. Though they are a bunch of hardworking folk who run the engine of government, they sometimes are befuddled by technology and usually fall into the trap of believing what they vendor tells them. This is not always the case, though.

In these times, it is heartening to note the following snippet,

In a recent audit, he said it was found that the government was exposed to losses running into hundreds of millions of ringgit simply because civil servants did not peruse purchase agreements signed with vendors.

One example was the case where officers failed to understand the need for "source code" ownership, a computer program written by the programmer in a formal programming language such as Pascal, Basic, C++ and Java.

Without correctly interpreting this code, the computer system cannot be used to the maximum.

This also means that if the buyer is not thorough when reading the provisions of the purchase agreement, the system would still "belong" to the vendor under the copyright laws.

The buyer would also be unable to expand the program without paying millions of ringgit more for it in the form of proprietary licence fees.

He said it was therefore pertinent that all source codes and the relevant documents drafted in the various stages in the development of the government’s application system are owned by the government.

I did a short double take when I read that news article, published in the New Sunday Times on October 29, 2006. I fully expected the he in the article to be one of the more vocal members of the open source community, and was pleasantly surprised when I found out his identity.

He is none other than Tan Sri Ambrin Buang, Malaysia's Auditor-General.

Tan Sri Ambrin correctly identified why the MAMPU Open Source Masterplan exists. The ability to freely modify software from government procurement efforts leads to a lower cost of doing business and breaking the chains of vendor dependence.  He further goes on to say,

If the source code belongs to the government, the development cost would only be one off when the pilot project is launched.

When there is a need to extend it to other government departments or agencies, the extra cost would only be for additional equipment, installation and testing.

As the man who's in charge of making sure our taxpayer funds are well spent, Tan Sri Ambrin's opinions are well taken. And if that's not enough, he goes on to prove that he really does get it right when he elaborates on the benefits of open source and having access to the source code,

• an integrated system between all ministries and departments

• the creation of an inter-operable system which could be upgraded as and when required

• doing away with monopoly —  ministries and departments need not rely on the same vendor

• civil servants would be more adept at handling such systems.

I don't normally have a habit of cutting-n-pasting content without adding any of my own, but Tan Sri Ambrin Buang just said it all. Syabas, Tan Sri !

Read the full article in the NST.

 

Everyone should read this. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/james-love/when-standards-are-politi_b_32192.html

Everyone should read this. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/james-love/when-standards-are-politi_b_32192.html

One key comment in this article:-

"Next year Microsoft will try to sell the public on it's latest file format -- "Open XML", which they are marketing as a "competitor" to ODF as an "open" data format. Open XML was described by one expert as a standard that only Microsoft could implement - similar to a job description custom made for a single job applicant."

Malaysia does not it seems have a significant creative and innovative developer community like that say in San Francisco and elsewhere so I suppose we are not up in arms over this issue. However most of the governments of the world are beginning to be aware of the major issue of being beholden to a single vendor for critical data. Consider historically, this particular vendor's track record in the legal space and the way it treats its competitors. It is not our intention to resort to the same tactics but in the interest of fair play, priority should be given to truly open standards. And here we need the Malaysian government's help. One must consider not just the technical aspects alone (which with proper motivation and participation can be developed - technically nothing is really impossible - within reason) but to support fundamental principles of good governance, equality and fair play.

This has to be good for aspiring Malaysian Technopreneurs as well. For one the ODF format will be much more portable from the perspective of cross platform availability in terms of applications from the many distros of Linux to even Windows based systems and will work consistently. Any one can create their own application either open or proprietary (not just Office suites but workflow apps as well as numerous others) and write to this format for transmittal to other systems without fearing that some arbitrary changes in the future that will affect the functionality of their applications in a detrimental and non competitive way. This does not happen because there is the OASIS governance process and the specifications for ODF is part of an open process involving many parties.

Adopting ODF is part of a strategy. The definition of a strategy is: having a vision of where you want to be and a step by step implementation plan on how get there. Can you see how ODF fits in Malaysia's ICT agenda? If you can't, well, then we (Malaysians) are in deep trouble.....

Mansur

Spanking Peter's Monkey

Fox the fox
Rat the rat
You can ape the ape
I know about that
There is one thing you must be sure of
I cant take any more
Darling, dont you monkey with the monkey
Monkey, monkey, monkey
Dont you know you're going to shock the monkey

So goes Peter Gabriel's seminal 1982 classic, Shock the Monkey. He's now done something even more revolutionary, Gabriel has released the separate musical components of the song and invited the Internet to remix it into anything they'd like. He's even running a contest to pick the best remix, of which 700 entries have already been submitted.

By essentially open sourcing Shock The Monkey, Gabriel and his record label intend to tap on to the collective creativity of the planet, inviting both fans and musical manipulators to innovate on something which was by itself a revolution. This worldview is a far cry from the established music industry which is lobbying hard for the inclusion of barriers in the form of Digital Rights Management (DRM) into software and settop boxes as well as working just as hard to shut down P2P networks.

Inviting collaboration and participation for creative works is something the Internet was designed to do, just as Sir Tim Berners-Lee gave us HTTP because he wanted to share research documents. The spirit of openness inherent within the structure of the Internet is deeply embedded within the culture of the Internet generation. In spite of the efforts of some to close down on openness and sharing, folk like Peter go a long way towards letting us know that embracing the technological and cultural changes are much more fruitful than denying them.

Well done for your Sledgehammer move, Peter !

I want to be your sledgehammer
Why dont you call my name
Oh let me be your sledgehammer
This will be my testimony
Show me round your fruitcage
cos I will be your honey bee
Open up your fruitcage
Where the fruit is as sweet as can be

"Open Malaysia Campaign"?

Image: One of the Tak Nak campaign posters (click image to view full size)

Last month I presented ODF - Towards True Open Standards (in ODF .odp format - right click and save) at the MNCC-CICC-OUM Asia OSS Training 2006 in Kuala Lumpur. During Q&A, a participant gave me a very interesting suggestion.

He said since I am promoting ODF, open standards and everything "open", why don't I get the Malaysian Government to run a national campaign on "open"?

After all, he reminded the participants and I, the Ministry of Health and the Ministry of Arts, Culture and Heritage have spent millions running the Tak Nak (Don't Want) anti-smoking campaign (hmm... women smokers I know don't have teeth that bad -- no wonder the campaign flopped) and the Budi Bahasa Budaya Kita (Courtesy Our Culture) campaign.

Yeah, I responded. Why not? Possibly something I will bring up to the Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation.

For ODF, perhaps it will be along the line of the ODF T-shirt design that cafepress.com is selling. Like the one shown here.  The tagline there reads "OpenDocument - The choice that lets you choose" coming from the OpenDocument Fellowship. Try translating that: "DokumenTerbuka - pilihan yang membenarkan anda memilih." Yucks, doesn't sound right. Okay, okay, we need to put more heads together to get the right words.

The ODF icon options proposed by the OpenDocument Fellowship will certainly be considered.

Then there will be other "open" messages (open standards, open source, etc.) to be considered in such a campaign. Or should we not dilute the campaign with too many messages?

If Datin Siti Nurhaliza sings Budi Bahasa Budaya Kita (Courtesy Our Culture), now who should we get to sing for our Open Malaysia campaign? Perhaps the band Disagree?

I might just bring this up at the next ODF SIG meeting...!

Wireless@SG

In the chase for digital dominance in the region, Singapore has just fired another one of its guns. The Infocomm Development Authority has announced that it intends to turn 48 highly populated areas of the city-state into free 802.11 WiFi hotspots for the public.

The service will be provided by 3 of their existing WiFi hotspot providers; iCell, QMax and Singtel. To sweeten the motivation for the providers, the IDA is even willing to fund up to S$30 million of the expected S$100 million it'll cost to do this. While I think that S$100 million seems like an excessively large number, the point that counts is that the IDA will subsidize the rollout of WiFi coverage which will be provided free of charge (for 2 years) to everyone.

That's the clincher, right there. The ubiquitous availabity of free WiFi in these highly trafficked areas will undoubtedly lead to an increase in IP telephony calls made from WiFi and SIP enabled GSM mobiles (see here and here). Converged network, here we come !

Singapore seems to be taking the first concrete steps with strong government-led motivation and support to build a converged communications infrastructure in the country. By leveraging of the ubiquitous WiFi access point and the economies of scale and availability which millions of chipsets have generated, they're clearly setting in place the foundation for what they hope to achieve. On our side of the forgotten Scenic Bridge, we are still chasing elusive dreams of WiMAX and 3G and to our loss, ignoring the humble 802.11 WiFi protocol.

By providing the access network, Singapore will also be able to deregulate its telecomms industry much faster as consumers would be able to get CLASS 5 and other PBX-type services from their IP PBXes back in the office, thus weaning them further away from the dominance of telecomms monopolies.

Features like One Number and Call Forwarding, FindMe, FollowMe as well as local transfers and conference calls can all be enjoyed by consumers as long as their enterprise IP PBX provides these services, freeing them from the chains which bind to their cellular providers.

It is really heartening to see Singapore take these first steps towards opening up access in the telecommunications space. They must have pondered long and hard over the pros and cons of this move, and clearly the IDA's offer of subsidy is testament to the faith they have in the converged network.

I just can't wait get turn on my Nokia E61 and enjoy connectivity to my office IP PBX and both outgoing and incoming calls through our fixed line without having to fork out huge roaming charges.

GooTube

So the market talk of the last two weeks was true. Google bought YouTube, for a staggering US$1.65 billion. That's putting a price of US$16.50 on every single one of YouTube's 100 million daily hits. Say that again, US$16.50 (RM61) for every daily hit on YouTube.

    

Now, for most of us in Malaysia, we get our movie supply from Uncle Ho's minions. And Uncle Ho only charges a mere US$2.70 (RM10) for his copyright infringed fare. DVDs on Amazon DVD go for anything from US$20 to US$35 for the legit stuff.

Paying US$16.50 for each daily hit does seem like a lot, especially so since many believe that YouTube isn't making a profit at all. It's led to many people saying, "Why didn't I think of that ?".

Which begs the question, what does Google intend to do with YouTube ? Sure, there's the obvious assumption that it'll power Google Video and that Google will intend to extend it's advertising options to include well-placed ads on YouTube's website. Whether they'll take the next step and insert pre and post video advertising remains to be seen, but this can't be ruled out either.

But what exactly drove Google to value YouTube at US$16.50 per hit, when building the same infrastructure would have cost a whole lot less given Google's engineering expertise and ability to hire top notch talent ?

Stickiness, and the promise of a future video channel to consumers, bypassing the legacy and incumbent cable, satellite and terrestrial TV operators. Google bought into the largest IPTV provider in the market, and has set its sights firmly on the next generation network. Remember, this comes not too long after eBay acquired Skype for another monstrous amount. While Skype would provide a communications channel which would augment eBay's e-commerce business, Google's emphasis is on information delivery channels.

Their flagship search engine has already made itself as the defacto delivery channel for web documents. YouTube will do the same to Google for video, and this would potentially herald the age of GoogleTV.

Google has long intended to be the single point of contact for all things Internet, with every one of their moves, acquisitions and offerings focussed into an arrowhead for this one goal. Google wants you to go to Google for everything, even if they're not the ones providing the actual final product. They want you to consult them for these things, so they can tell you where to go and who to buy from.

They want to be your trusted friend on the Internet, bringing you everything and in the process making it harder for others to break this chain. Do No Evil, indeed.

Remember, you heard it here first.

Going Local

Much has been said by all and sundry about the need to Beli Barang Buatan Malaysia. And yet, the common lament among local innovators is that they just don't get opportunities when it comes to procurement, both by government and by the private sector. The latest to make this call is none other than the Prime Minister,

Give local inventors and their products a chance. This is Prime Minister Datuk Seri Abdullah Ahmad Badawi’s message to Malaysians with a penchant for imports.

Abdullah said Malaysians were generally sceptical when it came to locally made products, but embraced imports without question.(October 8th, 2006)

The PM's message is very apt, as the mindshare and perception problems faced by Malaysian innovators is both very real and entrenched in the psyche of the nation. Too often we find that an imported solution is used, inspite of the availability of much better locally developed solutions. As a result, the local innovators will eventually find their funds  (and support) drying up and much worse, lose the enthusiasm to further innovate in their respective fields. The net result would be the slow but steady colonization of our industries and our economy by foreign companies.

I've been told many times by well-meaning folk that we should actually be basing our company in Europe or the United States, and from there make our approach into the Malaysian market. Apparently, we would be more accepted through this method as we'd be seen as an imported solution. Coupled with our technological advances, this would (they say) make us a shoo-in for projects we submit proposals for.

Many a time, I find it hard to disagree with this line of thought. To do this however would raise our costs of production, and this in return will result in a higher price paid by the Malaysian customer. To top it all off, this just seems to silly given that the solution originates in Malaysia, and is worked on by Malaysians and would be supported from Malaysia by Malaysians. MSC notwithstanding, I think a better way needs to be found in order to address the issue. The cause of the problem should be eradicated.

For the mindset to change, an impetus with far reaching impact should be made. The cause of the problem lies deep within the Malaysian psyche, which is still shackled by the mantles of colonialism when it sees imported solutions as being better. This malaise rests in all sectors of our industries. To make a change here and to bootstrap the local software development capacity of Malaysia would be the single most influential thing any administration could do.

While preferential policies may raise the ire of "fair and balanced" arguments by the US and the WTO, the fact that the present situation is unbalanced viz a viz, the unwritten preference for imports over supposedly inferior locally developed solutions. Procurement of government solutions should be made on a truly fair and balanced basis, with local solutions being evaluated on par with foreign solutions. This would require greater enforcement by the relevant agencies to ensure that such practices are maintained and that personal preferences for imports do not creep into procurement decisions.

Building our local software capacity and our technological prowess will provide a strong impetus to our future economy, as the reliance on imports and foreign exchange are reduced. Short sightedness in proliferating the perception that imports are better irrespective will only serve to harm our innovation and domicile us as industrial colonists in the long run.

The change has to happen now, and words must be translated into concrete action one way or another.

Water in the cracks

When engineers build roads, they're usually faced with what seem to be insurmountable barriers in the form of ridges, hills and mountains blocking the proposed path of the highway. There are two ways around this, to either reroute the highway around the barrier or the more brute force method of going straight through it.

If they choose the latter option, splitting a mountain is by no means an easy task. Thousands of years of geological growth is not going to allow itself to be broken apart easily. Engineers however sometimes use the strength of Mother Nature against herself. A common way of splitting mountains is to make cracks in the mountain, and then pour gallons of water into the cracks. They then freeze the water and take advantage of the fact that the volume of water will expand when it becomes ice. The expansion of the freezing water pushes the cracks apart and the mountain is then slowly broken into two by the forces of nature and physics.

Just like freezing water splitting a mountain, the opening up of the telecommunications mountain by IP telephony is breaking down barriers artificially put in place by legacy providers. The continuing growth of the Sessions Initiation Protocol (SIP) commonly used for IP telephone calls and its near ubiqutous availability is allowing individuals and enterprises to wean themselves away from their providers and at the same time take a firm grip on their communications needs.

Because SIP is an IETF open standard, anyone can implement a SIP stack into their software. We are increasingly seeing the IP telephony enablement of traditional enterprise applications like ERP, HR, financial and operational systems and this is a good harbinger of the converged network. Some legacy handset manufacturers have read the writing on the wall and have either released or have plans to release SIP enabled GSM mobiles. I wrote about one such device by Nokia, the E61 which I use on a daily basis. D-Link will soon release a WiFi/GSM handset which is based on Linux and contains a SIP client as well. 

These two will not be the last SIP enabled devices either. As more of these devices proliferate in the marketplace, enterprises are going to realise that there is a whole lot more their communications systems can do for them through open standards and interoperability. True interoperability which is based on open standards would make it trivial to connect your enterprise's IP PBX with your Web 2.0 AJAX driven application. Our developers at QubeConnect, led by Ditesh, are exploring this right now and are producing some really cool applications based on Javascript, AJAX and Firefox plugins.

For this growth to sustain however, the adherence to the SIP standard has to be complete and clear. Too often, vendors are known to bastardize a standard in order to create an intentionally non interoperable product in order to lock in customers. Nowhere is this practice more pervalent than in the telecommunications industry, as even we've experienced before when attempting interoperability with a very large legacy equipment vendor.

Additionally, regulators should also be wary of telecomms operators who accidentally on purpose block SIP calls over their ISP networks. Wary of the next generation network eating into the revenues of their incumbent parent, these ISPs usually try to stall these moves until they have a competing service in the market and then use less than ethical practices in QoS to show why their service is better than rival players.

But like water eating into cracks and breaking up the mountain, the  flow of openness in the telecommunication sector will erode the barriers which are put in place. As more enterprises and individuals go towards IP telephony, the relevance of monopolies of old will become less of a factor. This includes companies like Skype, popular though they may be, who are still based on closed and unpublished standards to create a walled garden for their subscribers.

Communications is all about being open and connected, and we are not going to be able to get this done well if we practice a closed approach to the matter.

Open innovation - IBM Innovation Center launched in Malaysia

Photo: Steve Wilkins, Director ISV & Developer Relations, IBM Asia Pacific, Voon Seng Chuan, Managing Director, IBM Malaysia and Rashmy Chatterjee, Director IBM Software Group ASEAN/South Asia officially launching the IIC

Voon Seng Chuan, Managing Director of IBM Malaysia during his welcome speech at the official launch of the IBM Innovation Center (IIC) for Business Partners yesterday emphasized that innovation (unlike invention) is more often done collaboratively with others than done alone, and IBM has chosen not to be in the business of developing software applications -- thus the IBM Innovation Center for Business Partners allows for such open innovation, to create and enhance solutions of joint clients of IBM and IBM's partners.

The press release for the launch is here.

The Star covered the launch as follows: IBM makes Malaysia Asean hub
Excerpts:

"IBM chose Malaysia due to the country's strong developer base and the excellent IT infrastructure and facilities here," he said after the opening of Kuala Lumpur ICC [should be IIC] yesterday.

Voon said the setting up of the ICC [should be IIC] in Malaysia to serve the Asean region was testimony to IBM’s commitment to support and collaborate with its business partners to generate more innovative solutions for their customers.

Sited at IBM Malaysia’s new office in Bandar Utama, the ICC [should be IIC] will provide the tools and hands-on support that will help IBM business partners to build, port and test their solutions and industrial applications on IBM hardware and software platforms.

It will also help IBM's business partners cut their development costs, shorten their sales cycle, leverage on innovation to compete and get their applications to market faster.

IBM also provides hands-on workshops and technical seminars to help developers update their technical skills on key IBM technologies.

On top of the workshops and seminars, the ICC [should be IIC] will also provide assistance on prototype and proof-of-concept development, porting and testing services, validation, integration testing, performance and scalability testing, technical support and secure remote virtual private network (VPN)...

...The Kuala Lumpur ICC [should be IIC] is one of IBM’s 32 ICCs [should be IICs] worldwide and the sixth in the Asia-Pacific after Seoul, Tokyo, Bangalore, Shanghai and Sydney.

The software platforms provided at the center includes Linux, the most exciting open source operating system that has been gaining acceptance by the the marketplace, including in Malaysia.  There is also emphasis on SOA (service oriented architecture) in the development of solutions by ISVs (independent software vendors) signing up at the IIC.

An earlier coverage of IBM Innovation Centers worldwide was by CIO Magazine:
IBM to Open Innovation Centers to Startups, VCs
Excerpt:

IBM can give startups free advice on how best to approach markets outside their home countries, for instance, how a company in China can sell its offerings in the U.S., Clark said. Startups also can talk to IBM’s technical architects either face-to-face in the centers or remotely from their phones or computers to take advantage of their specific areas of expertise.

Thus, another role of the IIC is to help partners go to market, locally and globally.

Other news coverage on the launch:

The Edge Daily: IBM opens first Asean Innovation Centre in KL
Excerpt:

The RM10 million investment included skilled resource, equipment, state-of-the-art facilities and networking

Business Times, The New Straits Times: IBM Innovation Center launched in KL
Excerpt:

IBM also provides business partners with resources to help them accelerate the development of open standards-based and small and medium business-focused solutions.

MNCC 2006 Open Source Award Winner

This is slightly delayed as I have been busy but as is said, better late then never, eh? Well, MNCC announced the winners of the 2006 Open Source Award, as follows:

The winning Open Source Software for 2006 is ‘Forensic Investigations  & Recovery Systems (FIRST) LIVE CD 1.2.0’ developed by a team from MIMOS Cyberspace Security Lab and led by Mr. Azril Azam Abdul Rahim. The software is a complete system built on top of a collection of open source software solutions that has been posted onto a bootable CDROM. FIRST aims to provide the ideal system environment to handle security, incident response and computer forensics. The software compares favorably with other competing products and unofficially holds the record for the smallest distribution, fastest boot-up sequence and lowest minimum memory requirements.

OpenOffice computer based training - Part 2

Three months ago, I wrote on neighbouring Singapore's Resolvo Systems launching their beta online training portal, OpenOffice.org Computer-Based Training (OO.CBT). Yesterday, Mark Nguan, Programme Manager at Resolvo emailed me to inform me that they have officially launched the portal!

Excerpts from Mark's email:

Resolvo believes that this is possibly the first OpenOffice.Org online training portal that provides comprehensive step-by-step interactive flash tutorials, knowledge base with search by topic/keywords capability, humorous animation coupled with online quizzes to measure pass rate for users.

Recent development of OpenOffice.Org has been very positive, especially now that Open Document Format (ODF), the format which OpenOffice.Org uses, has become an ISO standard since May 2006.

"This project is symbolic for everyone in Resolvo. We have always been strong advocate of OpenOffice.Org adoption. Since our last big win with Singapore Ministry of Defense in a project that leads to migration of 25,000 users to OpenOffice.Org, we have been exploring how we can further contribute to drive even wider adoption. One of the top concerns we gathered over time is the user re-training cost. Therefore, we thought the best way to address this concern is to have a D.I.Y learning portal for the users." said Yap Boon Leong, Resolvo's business development director.

Resolvo also hopes to explore partnership with various Linux desktop operating system vendors on extending value of their current Linux desktop O/S (usually comes default with OpenOffice.Org) with this training portal.

Access to this portal is FREE for individual/home use. For corporate, there is a free trial version available online.

Go check it out! When I wrote about it in June, one reader, Dennis Lee found the beta version to be "very impressive".

Closed is dead

One thing which has become quite clear with the prolification of the Internet is that openness is now a business principle which has been made dominant. The rise of service oriented architectures, Web 2.0 (AJAX, XML-RPC and SOAP) for example could only be made possible if we're all interconnecting over standards based interfaces.

A closed model wouldn't work here as all we'd be doing would be to build inpenetrable silos of applications and information. There're so many different ways of doing this, mostly adhoc and undocumented, that the business applications people have come together to strategize on a common way of talking to each other. This is a Good Thing™ in more ways than one, and sends a very strong signal to the proprietary vertical applications people (SAP, Oracle) that they'd better buck up or see themselves being made irrelevant.

From a recent WiReD article,

One day in 1995, Marc Benioff, then a senior VP at Oracle, was trolling a new Web site called Amazon.com. He clicked on the Buy button, and a thought struck him: Applications on the Web were the opposite of Oracle’s bloatware. They executed transactions through a simple interface that was available to anyone on the Internet. Web standards made it unnecessary for customers to install, upgrade, or maintain anything but a browser and a TCP/IP connection. “I thought, ‘This is amazing,’ Benioff says. “I saw the power of an open-standard platform.”

Like Benioff, who went on to co-found Salesforce.com, many people have had the same epiphany. There is a clear understanding that only in aggregating all our guns into the same bunker can we exponentially multiply our business firepower[1]. The removal of these silos then become a critical factor in the effective utilization of the information bank, and the integration of a smooth and flawless user experience.

It's a simple epiphany, but one which has tremendous groundbreaking capability in refining our industry.

[1] A convoluted turn of phrase and mixed metaphors, but it's a lazy afternoon so the brain cells aren't too active.