Open Malaysia

Onward Pak Nan -- cycling from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing!

Pic: On flag off day, 27 May 2008, Adnan Osman with Dato' Dr Low, Commander-in-Chief of St. John Ambulance Malaysia

My uncle, Pak Nan (Adnan Osman) is 65 years old. He's cycling all 9,000 km from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia to Beijing, China! This will take him 2 months, from Malaysia through Thailand, Laos, Vietnam and into China for the summer Olympics.

Datuk Johan Jaaffar first highlighted Adnan's quest in the New Straits Times early this month. Datuk Johan said a duo will be cycling to Beijing, but no, when I called Pak Nan last weekend to wish him well, he said he and his partner will cycle to the Malaysia-Thailand border town of Bukit Kayu Hitam; from then on he will ride alone!

You can read updates on his adventure at his own blog: http://oadnanxtreme.blogspot.com -- please post your comments there and lend your support!

Update 1 June 2008: Join the Facebook Group: Adnan Osman Cycling from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing

God, and all people meeting him in Malaysia, Thailand, Laos, Vietnam and China, please take care of Adnan Osman. When I was 21, I cycled from KL to Langkawi. That was not even 1,000km. But my uncle is making history. It's arduous, but I know he will make it. Safe journey, Pak Nan.

ODF Alliance Newsletter 7 September 2007

OK, so this ODF Alliance Newsletter I post here is a week old, but that's because I have been on a journey in which I have been totally offline for almost two weeks  --  becoming a pilgrim/recluse who,  amongst other deeds, watched mountains, got shaved and made peace...

As soon as I landed back in Malaysia yesterday on the first day of fasting in Ramadan, Yoon Kit's welcome-back text message beeped on my mobile phone, and it included, "Nice to be back? Malaysia will do u proud!"

Later I got online and finally caught up with the news about Malaysia's Abstention vote for OOXML. But I am at peace. I half-sulk at Malaysia's National Body committee Disapproval vote that turned into Abstention, and I half-smile that in the math of the ISO result for OOXML's failure, if any 4 of the 22 countries who abstained and/or didn't vote had voted Approval/Yes, then the result would go OOXML's favour  --  so Malaysia did make a difference by not voting Yes.

I'll give more recent digests of other ODF, OOXML and open source news later, but in the meantime, here is a catch-up of last week's ODF Alliance Newsletter.

ODF Alliance Newsletter 7 September 2007

You can download a free PDF version of the newsletter: http://www.odfalliance.org/mail_list.php. Please feel free to forward to whom it may be of interest.

OOXML Bid For ISO Approval Falls Short of Necessary Votes

Microsoft's bid to secure ISO approval of OOXML during the 5-month ballot period failed. Approval required at least 2/3 of the votes cast by national bodies participating in ISO/IEC JTC 1 (so-called P-members) to be positive; and no more than 1/4 of the total number of national body votes cast negative. Neither of these criteria were achieved, with 53% of votes cast by P-members being positive and 26% of national votes cast being negative. During the 5-month ballot period that ended on Sep 2, the ranks of the P-members had swelled to include 12 new members (from 29 to 41), 10 of which ultimately voted for approval, including Jamaica, Malta, Cyprus, Cote D'Ivoire, Lebanon, Pakistan, Venezuela and Turkey. Despite the sudden surge, 15 P members voted to disapprove (with comments) and another 9 voted to abstain. The ballots were accompanied by thousands of pages of comments from national bodies highlighting major concerns with the insufficiency of Microsoft's patent pledge, the undocumented features of OOXML preventing its use by other vendors, dependencies on other Microsoft proprietary products, and technical defects, which will have to be resolved at a Ballot Resolution Meeting (BRM) on February 25-29, 2008 if OOXML is to ultimately achieve ISO approval. ODF was approved unanimously (23-0 among P members, 31-0 overall) as an international standard by ISO in May 2006.

ISO Press Release - http://www.iso.org/iso/newsandmedia/pressrelease.htm?refid=Ref1070
Ballot Results and Vote Map - http://www.noooxml.org/ballotresults
ISO/IEC Voting Process Explained - http://www.consortiuminfo.org/standardsblog/article.php?story=20070831151800414
Linux Foundation Statement on OOXML - http://stuff.techwhack.com/archives/2007/08/29/ooxml/

Day 2, Microsoft Technology Summit 2007

First off, let's face it, it's obvious that we won't be mentioning much else of what happened at the MTS2007 apart from the OSS bits. At least I won't anyway, because I'm just too jetlagged to process anything else. Secondly, I don't reckon we'll mention anything about taking a piss at Microsoft anymore after this, because you can only stretch a bodily function joke so far.

Onwards.

Sam Ramji, the Director of Platform Strategy and the lead for Microsoft's OSS Lab took to the stage in the morning to talk about what Microsoft is doing with regards to understanding and supporting OSS. It was ... interesting. Sam notes that there is a generational change within Microsoft today, since the new developers being hired are more likely to be exposed to OSS before being employed by Microsoft. This results in better acceptance overall within the company. He also mentions (during and after the talk) that this process of understanding and acceptance of OSS is an ongoing evolution and that Microsoft is today better disposed towards engaging with the community than before. He hopes and feels that the interaction between the two would only get better over time.

Sam talked about how his crew managed to pressure the product groups within the corporation to, among other things, optimise PHP for IIS 7.0 and to make Samba work properly with Vista. Echoing Bill Hilf's talk a day earlier, he noted that these things are done not so much to help the OSS community but for sound business reasons on the part of Microsoft. For example, he said that a large proportion of PHP applications were coded on Windows boxes which are then deployed on a LAMP platform. Therefore, from a revenue perspective, the Windows platform loses out. In the case of Samba, he guesstimated that there'd be some 50 million users accessing Linux-based NAS devices which wouldn't be able to do so anymore when they upgrade to Vista because there was some implementation changes in Vista which broke Samba connectivity. It's not an optimal reason from an OSS perspective, but I suppose it's reasonable enough from theirs.

We asked him about whether there were conflicts between his group and the various other product groups, and he said sure there were. But they're not the boss of him so he's going to do what he needs to do. For example, he invited some of the Mozilla team over which got on the IE team's tits, but he went ahead anyway.

Microsoft is schizo. But this is normal for any company with thousands of smart people employed. Which goes some way towards explaining why they'd have a team that's trying rather hard to both "interoperate" with OSS, as well as educate the rest of their shower about OSS yet at the same time have another bunch of people dissing OSS.

IBM spent $1,000,000,000 on Linux and yet do not have a native Notes port. Same difference. Superficially, at least.

Here are some random notes:

I think that in some cases Microsoft somehow views standards and interoperability as two rather distinct issues. Which is orthogonal to how most advocates of open standards would view it. From an open standards perspective, the standards begets interoperability and that's the end of that. For Microsoft, interoperability means making sure that their stuff works with other people's stuff, as long as a business case can be made. Occasionally, interoperability is an imperative, infusing them with the spirit of cooperation when they don't actually have a choice in the matter. They'd also be most comfortable using standards which they can control. But that's nothing odd. Other corporations look at it the same way too.

Bill Hilf, Sam and their team feels the pain whenever StevieB (which would be a good name for a member of a Boy Band) says something that riles up the OSS community, like threatening to sue countries for patent violation when using Linux, or that OSS is a cancer and un-American. Sam thinks that they've managed to get StevieB to show some love and understanding towards OSS -- where it also provides benefits for Microsoft.

I'm not sure that the disabled access doors at the Microsoft Conference Center behaves the way that it's supposed to behave. When you press the disabled access button, the outer door swings open but the inner door doesn't. I kept trying it throughout yesterday and today, enough to annoy Dinesh. Seems like itsatrap! Made a video of it, which you can find on YouTube here: The Handicapped Doors.

There are some other things which Dinesh and I discussed that I think should be said, but I'm just too jetlagged now to remember them. So we'll keep those for later.

Oh, and on the ODF/OOXML thing, it'll have to wait a bit. Sam said that we've misunderstood the issue. Or that we're misunderstood. I'm not sure. Same difference.

Day 1, Microsoft Technology Summit 2007

I took a piss at Microsoft.

No, really. I took a piss at the Microsoft Convention Centre in Redmond, WA.

As you would already know, Yusseri and I were invited to attend this annual, exclusive event at Microsoft Corp. It's cold out, 10°C daytime and 2°C nighttime. They feed you with lots of expresso, latte, mocha and a fridgeful of soda. I really had to take a piss.

We got in yesterday afternoon, after 24 hours in the air and in transit via Singapore and Tokyo. As luck would have it, US Customs and Border Patrol in Seattle has to reward me with a random check. They were interested in the HackInTheBox sticker I had on my notebook though, but the whole check was a mere formality.  Boy, am I glad though they don't do checkups like they do in Wuhan, China as the pic on the right shows.

I still had to take a piss after that though, 16 hours on an aircraft and all that.

Day Zero, which is what yesterday is, was quite uneventful if you can discount a deep discussion of what last city visited meant on our Customs forms and having the Hummer H3 we are driving being broken into and our stereo nearly getting jacked. Pretty uneventful. Oh yeah, I also bought an IPod at the Apple Store and took a close up view of the newly launched Apple TV media device.

Up and early in the morning for the 7.30am shuttle to the Microsoft campus, the coffee they poured down our very willing throats was abundant, resulting in aforementioned piss.

Ditesh's email of the scanned in article in Monday's Tech&U on the ODF thingy had me quoted as well. And lo and behold, keynoting the morning's session was Bill Hilf, who was also quoted in the same article. Bill's the General Manager of Platform Strategy at Microsoft.

Bill is a former OSS dude who worked on Apache, and today heads Microsoft's platform strategy. Microsoft's Linux Labs started off being a lonely Dell tower sitting under Bill's desk. His message was one of community and collaboration, and how Microsoft is learning to play nice with us open source type folk while still maintaining they're software licensing based business model. Make no mistake about it though, Microsoft is in it for profit, Bill stressed.

What got really interesting was when Yusseri raised the issue of OOXML and why didn't Microsoft just work on ODF in collaboration instead of creating a new, bloated standard. Bill's answer was quite surprising, as he clarified that the file format (OOXML) was a part of the software and that OOXML and the software (MS Office) are quite inseparable. Ergo, OOXML is an integral and inseparable part of MS Office. That's why they could not adopt ODF as the file format for subsequent versions of MS Office.

I don't really know if Bill realises this, but he's just illuminated that this whole OOXML, ECMA and ISO standards play is not about standards nor about Microsoft vs IBM but about legitimizing as a standard a specific technology from a single company developed in isolation from the general technology and user community worldwide.

It was an eye opener, and in my opinion, quite damning to Microsoft. Are they really trying to push through their software, in the form of the inseparable OOXML/MS Office as an international standard ? Is this all about ensuring that future generations of MS Office have a purpose on the planet in the face of competition from other office suites like OpenOffice.Org ?

Perhaps these questions should be asked at the ECMA, ISO and at the level of National Standards Bodies as well.

We'll be sitting with Sam Ramji and Bill in a couple of days to go over this issue in much more detail, given the time constraints at the summit proper.

Kevin Schofield's presentation on what Microsoft Research is doing was interesting, from a geeky perspective. Showing prototypes of image processing technology, visual recognition software as well as working prototypes of new ground broken in the Human-Computer Interface as a leadup to truly pervasive computing was illuminating. While I have seen different implementations of these before at the MIT Media Lab, one does trust that Microsoft will be bringing some of these to the average user in the years to come.

It's nice to be here at Redmond, if anything, to get frank discussions going with the folk behind the stuff Microsoft creates without having to cut through the veils and mazes thrown up by the marketroids. I am looking forward to that discussion with Bill and Sam, as well as meeting up with an old misguided buddy, Tan Loke Uei, who's now based in Redmond.

More on the summit in the days to come, but I need to go take a piss again.

Here we go, off to Microsoft in Redmond

Tomorrow evening, Dinesh and I will be on our way to America to attend the Microsoft Technology Summit 2007. We were initially rather bemused when we received the invitation and I kept asking the Microsoft Malaysia dude whether he was really sure he'd invited the right people. He said that he was sure, "no regrets". I was initially reluctant to go, since the thought of 20+ hours on the plane sitting next to Dinesh, in coach class wasn't exactly my idea of a good time. Because I'm fat and he's fidgety. Anyhow, after some haggling with the local Microsoft guy, we decided to accept the invitation.

The "no regrets" part piqued me, though. So I decided to dig around a bit on Google. The search results returns this. Ah, so. It turns out that this MTS thing has been held since 2005 in various places and only a small number of people get invited. And the people who get invited are mainly developers who don't normally use Microsoft technology, plus a few thick-headed open source type guys. It didn't say so at the invitation email though, the first paragraph of which says:

The developer group at Microsoft is hosting an exclusive, invitation-only Technology Summit for a small group of 50 or so technologists.  The purpose of the Summit is to discuss today’s technology challenges and solutions as well as learn more about and discuss Microsoft’s future direction.  You will have an opportunity to be part of an exclusive group of technologists to learn about Microsoft’s core technologies from the product and research teams, and be able to provide feedback to the owners of these technology efforts at Microsoft.

I must say though, looking at the blurb above ... I'm still not sure that they didn't pick on the wrong dudes. Anyhow, since we've been informed that this is not an NDA event, we're free to blog about it, take photos, etc. I'm also assuming that we can post the Agenda of the summit, which I've put here: The Microsoft Technology Summit 2007 Agenda. It does look ... interesting, I must say.

Anyhoot, we're going. We'll take some pictures of the wildlife there and maybe make a blog post or two (probably after the event, though, 'cos it looks packed). For what it's worth, I'm looking forward to asking Microsoft's developers what they really think about interoperability and whether the mealy-mouthed, wishy-washy, double-speak disease which seems to have infected their marketdroids embarrass them or not. But, just in case, I'll make sure that all the chairs are bolted to the floor first. ;)

Merry Christmas

Image of fireflies borrowed from the website showing the resort we're staying at

Last night, I actually saw "Christmas trees" with live lighting!

"Live" as in "alive", because the lights were fireflies. They were sucking the juice of the leaves of the berembang trees lining up the Selangor River. Only a few were flying about. These fireflies had light emanating from their tails.

With my family, we were rowed in sampans (small boats) in almost pitch darkness and we witnessed hundreds of male fireflies brightly flickering 3 times a second and the females less brightly once in 3 seconds. Yea... the males gotta be flashing harder to attract the opposite gender! The females sleep earlier (lights off!) so at about 10:00 P.M. then, I witnessed  synchronized rapid flickering of the lighted trees. A sight to behold!

No boulevard of Christmas trees can beat the wonder of this scene at Kampung Kuantan, Kuala Selangor.

Merry Christmas!

Kuala Selangor mangrove

High tide at Pantai Remis, Kuala Selangor, Malaysia. Staying cool amidst the mangrove trees. Smelling the sea and swaying with the soft waves.

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.

Perhentian Islands

Merdeka weekend was spent at Perhentian Islands, billed as the most beautiful islands in Malaysia. The islands have a rustic charm and makes for an excellent weekend getaway. The corals were magnificent; the snorkelling among the colorful fishes was akin to being in a National Geographic special - there were so many of them swimming all around us!

There was turtle chasing (don't worry: the turtles were tame turtles and very used to tourists) and lets-spot-the-reef-shark-adventure which became slightly too scary when one was actually spotted (although we are assured that their palate doesn't include the occassional homo sapiens). Oh, in the light of the tragic and unexpected passing of Steve Irwin, I must say that it must have been sheer good luck that I resisted the temptation of wrestling with a sting ray I spotted!

Well, enough with the words for now, let the pictures speak more eloquently (click on the image to view it in all its glory):

Still in New York

Yoon Kit, like you said, the OO.o 2.0 (OpenOffice.org 2.0) ad is indeed in the New York free paper, Metro! It's on the back page. The final ad looks great. Wish you were here!

Photo: Hasan after a ride on the Staten Island Ferry -- it's free, too!

ODF in the news

Greetings from New York city! Arrived Friday night for some holiday and business. Here are some links on ODF.

Sam Hiser on ODF - an excellent "neutral" party description, developments and assessment: What Is OpenDocument

NewsForge -  A moderator at an O'Reilly Conference forum on open source confronted Microsoft with the expose by Rob Weir in his blog of ODF's second-class status in Office: OSCON day 2

Coverage on July 27 ODF Alliance press release citing Malaysia's proposal to make ODF a Malaysian Standard:

• ZDNet: OpenDocument wins more fans - Malaysia and Bristol are just two of the latest places to fly the ODF flag
• Andy Updergrove: Checking in on the ODF Alliance
• [Update 02 Aug 2006] Open Source News: Open Season - OpenDocument gets boost; Microsoft lets users share some code
• [Update 02 Aug 2006] Computerworld: Malaysia OKs move toward OpenDocument Format - It joins Belgium, Denmark and Massachusetts in embracing ODF
• [Update 02 Aug 2006] Newsforge: ODF Alliance Grows, Shares Good News from Malaysia

Asia Commons, Day 3

This is long overdue report of Asia Commons, Day 3. Day 3 was a continuation of the Open Space presentations.  I participated in the an open space regarding alternatives to the current intellectual rights regime. The participants suggested exploring an alternative epistemological to intellectual rights. In part, the participants justified this by outlining the current abuse of intellectual rights. I don't see this as a sufficiently strong reason as the changes that led to current intellectual rights regime are fairly recent and it did seem that the older regime worked much better. While the session was intellectually interesting, I personally don't see an alternative view of intellectual rights being adopted widely anytime soon due to the current vested interests (and, of course, one should never discount Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs in describing human psychological  drives, in this case, as it applies to knowledge creation in the Commons).

I had a presentation on free trade agreements. We started off with a discussion of copyright criminalization issues in India and Malaysia. However, Vijayalakshmi requested for a background on the FTA's and its dynamics for which Peter obliged by giving a good background on the FTA's: the US is signing FTA's with countries as they could not exercise sufficient leverage at WTO. IFAC is the main lobbying body in the US. IFAC, while representing a large body of other organizations, is a tightly focused group which promotes the interests of 21 main private sector entities. Peter also mentioned that besides the intellectual rights chapter in the FTA, the dispute resolution chapter is particularly important.

Primarily, the FTA's exist to set a higher standard which is primarily aimed to protect the US market, and that with each agreement signed, the intention is to continually increase the standard of "protection" afforded to US based companies. In particular, there are specific objectives set for certain countries. Peter brought up the example of the US trade negotiators aiming to abolish the Australian pharmateutical regulations which were more liberal and fair compared to US based regulations. Finally, he noted that the FTA is aimed to bring more income into the US via royalties.

As a counter to IFAC in the US, some public interest groups and individuals are taking action. Lobbying has been successful in certain circumstances but there is no group with the lobbying power of the IFAC. It was suggested that companies in the US whose interests do not necessarily coincide with the interests of the FTA start lobbying actions of their own. Litigation in the US was suggested as a method to remove some aspects of the FTA provisions, but the efficacy of doing this remains unclear.

As the intention is to sign a FTA with Korea, patcha brought us up to date with regards to developments back home. He mentioned that there was concern on the intellectual rights chapter as well as resistance from civil society bodies, that ISP's and ICT companies are concerned by organizing forums and analysis. He also mentioned that the digital libraries in Korea are under pressure by the US to be shut down, and the government position with regards to the FTA are kept under wraps.

The discussion shifted to the fast track authority until mid 2007 that the current US administration has received from the US Congress. Peter mentioned that by slowing down the negotitations such that it exceeds the fast track authority of the current administration, it would be possible to gain greater leverage of the situation as there is much concern in the US Congress as to the direction of the FTA's.

All in all, it was a pretty good discussion and I enjoyed the interaction of the participants.

Asia Commons came to an end soon after that. I came away with a strong appreciation of analysis conducted by various people (Vijayalakshmi, Lawrence, Peter come to mind) in this sphere and clearly, I have much reading to catch up on!

Valkommen till Stockholm

From the title, it's clear that I'm now on the Scandinavian peninsular. Stockholm, Sweden to be exact.  Stockholm is a decent city, but it's not exactly the most exciting of cities to be in. It's summer now, and most Swedes are already preparing to go off on their vacations. Our hosts here tell me that businesses and the city will slow down during June as they go off on their holidays in 20°C temperatures, something which they look forward to in their -5°C winters. Early June is nice though, with good sun and excellent weather if you're coming from the equator.

The one thing which takes getting used to, inspite of the many times I've come across this phenomenon, is the extremely long daytime. The sun sets at 11.30pm, and rises again by 3am. Pub hopping in Stockholm is a very surreal experience when the time is 9.30pm, but the daylight seems likes its only 3pm for us from Malaysia. That didn't stop us from getting our fair share of Spendrups, Pipps and the very Irish Caffrey's. Partying and eating out in Stockholm is not cheap, even though the Swedish Kroner is about RM0.56.

It has been a very good trip so far. We've far exceeded our expectations for coming here, even though some software had to be reworked a bit. Legacy telecommunications vendors do not always follow open standards, and having access to the source code allows us to dynamically rework the protocol so interoperability is achieved. Sitting in the lobby of the First Hotel Amaranten, where WiFi access is impeccable, it took me all of an hour to get it working. One wonders though why vendors need to implement a variation of a standard after spending lots of time in developing it and pushing it through the approval process.

Our hosts were quite impressed at the speed in which we achieved this though, and I took the opportunity to explain open source and what it really meant to them. Like many mainstream information and communications technology people, they saw open source primarily from an economic perspective and not from the development strengths it gives us.

It also illustrates something I've long moaned about to the local open source community. We've got to go beyond talking about it to showing that it can be done. Oddly though, some small segments of the community seem to think that hype is what we need. One wonders whether this is driven by idealistic goals or some measure of personal glory as they strive to create foundations for things like these.The reality of the situation is that businesses and industry does not really care about religious dogma and are more concerned with more practical issues. As open source evangelists, we have to show them how it can change the paradigm in a manner which they can digest, instead of preaching about vague notions of freedom or idealism.

Bridging the chasm between the legacy notions of software licensing and development with the revolutionary changes that the open source model brings  is the key towards unlocking the impasse. In the end, if we're all speaking the same language and understand the benefits, sitting together and consuming the amber liquid (or hot chocolate, as the case may be) becomes a satisfactory experience for a job well done.

Asia Commons, Day 2

So the second day started off with yours truly getting up to birds chirping and the Thai women speaking in the sweet dulcet tones that all men have come to recognize as heaven on Earth.

The second day was all about knowledge sharing and discussions. There was a session on speed sharing. It is a twist on lightning talks which are fairly common in geek and/or FOSS conferences. Each table is designated a speed sharer who talks on a particular issue/theme for 10 minutes. The participants move from table to table and are encouraged to discuss issues and opportunities at the table. A particular table I found interesting was a project by a Bangladeshi group that used their expertise in radio communications to allow for the youth to broadcast their own programs. Among the ways the youths communicated their message to the public was narrow casting (loudspeakers), burning their programs on to a DVD and  settings up TV's with their program playing in coffeeshops, and patching into the cable system and broadcasting their information. What excited me about this was the subversion of an information flow channel of state controlled media in a country where Internet access is not necessarily available. A fantastic idea and a great way to ensure equitable access to information and knowledge.

We also had the open space session whereby every participant was encouraged to put up a topic to speak on for 45 minutes. My session is tomorrow and I'll be speaking on the US free trade agreements and how it affects the commons. There was a session on countering IP propaganda led by the ineffable Lawrence Liang and Indymedia's Sasha. It was fairly informative.

Evening was a night out with Sam, Khairil, Anita with Chinarat as our tourguide. It was fun, other then a drunk Thai deciding to take on an unsolicited role of a tour guide to me (why oh why does my path always cross those of the strangest people?) :-)

I got to speak to James Love (of CPTech fame) about his suggestion to introduce an alternative IPR chapter in the US-MY free trade agreement negotiations. He sent me the following links that may be of interest to those who are following this issue:

• http://www.huffingtonpost.com/james-love/the-usmalaysia-trade-pac_b_19584.html
• http://www.huffingtonpost.com/james-love/globalization-in-a-good-w_b_17974.html
• http://www.cptech.org/ip/health/rndtf/bridges042004.pdf

I needed to get some work done later in the night, and headed down to the conference room for some late night Internet surfing. Turns out, I was not the only midnight owl as Sasha, James, Linda, Jac and a couple of other froods I forgot the names of, were happily getting work done over a bottle of Scotch. Had a long conversation with a friend over some Scotch, got sleepy and headed back :-)

It's day 3 now and unfortunately most participants have left. Will post day 3 observations in a day or so.

Asia Commons, Day 1

AlohaSawadee from the Land of Smiles. I'm writing from the Asia Commons conference, in Bangkok from 6th-8th June 2006.

The day started off with the keynote speakers, Peter Drahos and James Love, talking about Intellectual Commons and the Public Domain. I did not really take down notes of what James Love said as my personal convictions were already in line with what he mentioned. Peter Drahos stated that while we already have many theories and analysis from an economic and social perspectives, what's lacking now is a political philosophy of the commons that allows for diversity to flourish. He noted that as  IPR is a (legal) instrument of coercion (and therefore falling in the realm of politics), the three important Q's of any politics apply:

1) How much say have we had in the new arrangement of IP?
2) Should we obey?
3) How much coercion should we tolerate over our rights?

Peter also brought up John Stuart Mill's - "Experiments in Living"; we would want societies that tolerate experiments in living. I liked this idea as it brings to the table the idea that societies and cultural norms are not stagnant and evolve (for better or worse) over time as well as the idea that progress in society is due to lessons we learn from our trials and tribulations in the past.

Peter also noted the important yet much overlooked point that Information grows through use and he termed this as the Law of Repletion. He also stated that information is too important to be left to private monopolies and as information/knowledge may be covered by different intellectual rights legislation, they may not go into the public domain even if the protection afforded by one aspect of the legislation had expired.

Of Jamie Love's presentation, what I found interesting was his suggestion that we present an alternative to the IPR chapter in the FTA, for example replacing the IPR chapter with an A2K chapter or another relevant chapter. In particular, he stated that there is a need to show economic incentives to Washington when presenting such a chapter. I should speak to him soon but I have not had an opportunity do so yet.

We had several other sessions that went into various other issues with regards to the commons. Of particular interest was a session on software patents. Laurent Elder led off that session with a patent spectrograph. He put on the slides three statements regarding patents in Asia (use, enforcement, efficacy) and asked the participants to arrange themselves across the Strongly Agree to Strongly Disagree line.

As was expected, the majority of the participants did not particularly agree with either the fundamental concept of limited private monopolies or with the enforcement and scope of the current patent model. I found particularly interesting was how little I knew about the patent dynamics in the other Asian countries. Based on my discussions with the other participants, it emerged that while the participants clearly understood the issues with patents in other fields such as agriculture and biology, there was not as much awareness of software patents.

A presentation by Ronaldo Lemos from Brazil illustrated the Brazilian independent movie business model in Brazil which allowed for very profitable local content production without the passing of restrictive intellectual rights legislation. It continues to amaze me how Brazil continues to take the lead in civil society initiatives among developing countries.

Well, those were the salient points that I could gather. There are some other presentations that I hope other participants could chime in and fill the gaps :-)

Now some notes on the participants themselves; they come from all over the world with the majority coming from Asia. Quite a few of those present were lawyers, and those who were not, were representatives from NGO's. From Malaysia, we had a Creative Commons representative from the MDeC, Khairil, a chap from Open University Malaysia, myself and a couple other people.

The political persuasions of the participants compromise a diverse spectrum of thought. Some feel that the entire field of intellectual privileges should be demolished, but I could gather no credible alternative for replacing the current intellectual regime. Others felt that while some tuning is required in the current legislation, throwing out the entire regime would be counter productive .

Coming from a free software background, it was slightly shocking to find that not many participants understood the importance of free software to the commons and why the newer forms of legislation would hurt free software. On the other hand, it was also shocking how little I knew about other non-software intellectual right areas. So all in all, lots of knowledge was shared.

We had an evening cocktail and that was an excellent good opportunity to meet other participants. Discussions were extremely diverse; from discussing methods of kicking off Creative Commons in Malaysia to human right violations in Africa to operating ham radios to discussing ways of putting the current copyright legislation to good use by stopping bad Thai renditions of cheezy English pop music :-)

It's the second day now, will post latest observations in a day or so (it's already progressing at a most excellent pace!).

Photos from Pangkor

Just came back from Pangkor Island and felt the following two are the best pics I took during this trip:

On innovation

Innovation happens in many ways.

It happens when we're engaged on the throne and the eureka! idea hits us. It happens when we hit a stumbling block, and a new solution to the problem is discovered through thought and error. It happens when you gather a group of open source hackers together for four days, and give them the freedom to rip something apart and put it together again.

That's exactly what happenned for four days last week in Pisa, Italy. It was AstriDevCon Europe 2006. 96 hours of hacking on the source code of Asterisk, the open source PBX and engineering the architecture for the 1.6 release of the software. The open flow of ideas, of immediate coding spurts followed by innecessant chatter on subversion commit conflicts, this is what innovation in the new economy is all about.

It's a mixture of collaboration, open discussion, open standards and sharing which results in innovation today. The mantle of innovation is no longer carried by the cathedrals which hid it behind layers of protocol, secrecy and control. Innovation is the very act of advancing our science to the next step, and in doing so, advances the capabilities of our species. Sharing our ideas is the very act of enhancing innovation in the new economy, not hiding it behind layers of laywers and legalese.

By being a party to this cultural and economic upheaval of openness, we enable ourselves to determine our future and our existence. Openness cultivates the sharing of information and knowledge, instead of encouraging them to be locked within the cathedrals of old. Sharing can only happen when we are open, for a common language and a common format we need to adopt.

Openness, collaboration, open source, innovation, open standards. Understand them well, for polluted their meanings have been by those misled into getting the wrong facts.

With a new standard adopted by the ISO, ODF, our daily output of documents, spreadsheets and presentations can now be shared by all, the information is free to flow from mind to mind. No longer will we be tied to proprietary standards which change in every software release. Any software can now read and write ODF, freedom of choice is provided for.

Open the gates of knowledge...