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.

Nanchang, China mandates Linux

An interesting snippet of news swung by my RSS reader the other day.

Authorities in the southeastern Chinese city of Nanchang are requiring all local Internet cafes to replace their Microsoft Windows XP operating systems with a Chinese-made system, Red Flag Linux, according to officials and Internet cafe owners.

An official with the Nanchang Cultural Discipline Team, which oversees the roughly 600 Internet cafes operating in Nanchang city, said the new operating systems were mandatory. "We have already started installing the new software in all Internet cafes. All of them must have this new one," the official said.

While one may wonder if the main motives behind this move are less than noble for open source, given that it is after all mandated by the Nanchang Cultural Discipline Team, which sounds ominously like big brother. Nevertheless, this signals a growing move towards bringing open source desktops closer to the end user and to students.

If something similar were to be done in the town of Wuhan, for example, where there are many universities and colleges, you would be assured of a generation of graduates all well versed in using Gnome or KDE on the desktop. This would be a skill they would take to their jobs and to their homes, thereby further propagating the use of open source desktops.

While the mainstream media and the technology rags have stopped talking so much about open source adoption and its encroachment into the enterprise, I see a silver lining in this. It is not because open source is no longer the flavour of the day, but because it has become so common, it is no longer novelty news. The ubiquity which we have long sought, has finally arrived, one would say.

This however does not mean that the fight has ended. In fact, it should intensify, as with the economic recession looming, the battle for enterprise IT dollars will become much more closely fought. With its lower TCO, open source based solutions have a growing edge. We need to be cognizant however that complacency can only hurt the inroads we have made into the enterprise. We must strive to continue delivering higher quality systems and applications to stem the tide of proprietary software.

On the local front, it does seem like MDeC is now beginning to embrace open source within MSC companies and to promote those from within that stable who are open source companies. While this is laudable, I have been down the same path with them before, and that more or less fizzled out as MDeC lost interest. I wonder if they will have the staying power this time around, and have learnt the lesson of the past that it is the community which builds open source. A stronger and more open engagement initiative would be strongly welcomed.

MSC companies should also take the opportunity open source provides and use that to jumpstart their businesses in the software industry. Why reinvent the wheel, when there are perfectly good wheels you can take and modify to build the systems you need to deliver your customers ? Why forsake a global community of developers, users and testers who will assist you in doing just that ?

With the release of Android and Google's entry into the 3G/GSM handset market, even mobile communications is now open source ready and capable. I wonder if this will be taken advantage of, and Android based systems with its potential of harbouring thousands of third party applications will supercede the iPhone as the coolest handset to be seen carrying.

Time, and the effort and innovation required, are the only things which will tell on this.

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.

Awash the FUD

By now we've all heard about the purported about turn by the government on its open source policy. Apparently, we now have a technology neutral procurement policy. And we'll soon see folks like Microsoft, BSA and CompTIA go to town about a victory in overturning a "biased" policy.

The point they're all missing is that there has been no about turn. Datuk Seri Dr Jamaludin Jarjis just reiterated what has always been the case, that all government procurement will be evaluated on the basis of technical and financial merit without bias. This has always been the case, and its even mentioned as such in the MAMPU OSS Masterplan.

With Microsoft going to town about Market Neutrality, one really wonders what this is all about. As Mack Zulkifli put it, a convicted monopolist isn't going to be championing market neutrality. Just as they are opposing the adoption of ISO 26300 as a Malaysian Standard. Clearly, neutrality here is used sparingly and when beneficial, as opposed to doing it across the board as one would expect. Given the joy about  Market Neutrality, I wonder what the good folks at Microsoft, CompTIA and BSA are going to say when it comes to ISO26300's adoption as an MS.

One wonders why they'd object to an international open standard validated by the ISO from being adopted as a Malaysian Standard. Surely the champions of market neutrality aren't against open standards, since open and freely implementable standards like ISO26300 are drivers for market neutrality and provide the user with choice of technology implementations. Surely, they're not suggesting that we use a yet-to-be-an-open-standard OpenXML which only has a single technology implementation by its champion, Microsoft.

Having just got back from India, where I witnessed the opening of MDeC's Bangalore Representative Office by Datuk Seri Dr JJ, I am reminded of the lone coconut tree which rose above the buildings surrounding it in one of the city's suburbs. Like the beacon of open source, it stands tall and refuses to be overshadowed by attempts to throw it into disrepute.

I've been asked to comment on a number of soon to be published newspaper articles on this issue, and to all the journalists, I've said the same thing: There is no about turn by the government. The technology neutral policy was always in place and the government has always evaluated tenders equally, open source or proprietary software. Just as I said in my letter to In.Tech a few weeks back.

So there's really nothing to see here folks. Move along.

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.

 

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

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.

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.

Open your networks

The one big fillip open standards gives us is the ability for different people and organizations to communicate. That, in essence, is the prime aim of open standards: to ensure that we are all going to be speaking the same language.

Nowhere has this been proven in practice more than the Internet. Everyday tasks like sending an email, reading a blog or online newspaper or even googling something up is made possible because the standards which define how information is sent across the network are mature and have been implemented the same way by everybody. This has resulted in a very connected world.

The same revolution is now taking place in the telecommunications industry. We are beginning to see the true convergence of voice and data, as Voice over IP services are now becoming the norm for phone calls. No, I am not talking about using a VoIP provider to save a few sen on your long distance or international calls, but rather the backbone which delivers your voice between any two elements of the network.

Today, telecommunications operators are increasingly using packet voice networks over IP trunks to deliver even traditional fixed line telephone traffic. Clearly, they're moving away from traditional circuit switched TDM networks. What this enables us however is more exciting than just discounted long distance and international calls. It enables us to finally make that jump across the chasm towards an open network which combines voice, video and information.

End user devices, like the Nokia E61 I recently acquired, are beginning to have both WiFI 802.11 connectivity as well as a builtin SIP VoIP client. This allows the same phone to be used both as a 3G/GSM mobile as well as an office phone extension when paired together with our IP PBX. Incoming calls, either on my GSM number or my DID direct line are delivered to the same phone, and I get to make the choice to either use VoIP or GSM for my outgoing calls. Admittedly, this is still treated like a separate application by the phone device itself, but it heralds the changing mindset among the legacy telecommunications players.

They are now beginning to see that being open and allowing seamless interconnection between Internet based devices and legacy telecommunications elements has benefits far beyond the sum of its parts. While at the onset, with so many differing interoperability standards, this may take a while to happen, we will soon however begin to see intermediate technologies which bridge the pervailing telecomms infrastructure with Internet infrastructure in an invisible way.

Invisible because it will be virtually indistinguishable to the user, as voice carriers start ditching their TDM backbones and replace them with pure IP links. The growing emergence of IPv6, and the additional options it enables, will acccelerate the interconnectivity between the currently disparate networks.

What's interesting about this, and the point of this entry, is that without open standards and interoperability, this would just be a pipe dream instead of the next wave of communications.

Interesting, isn't it ?

Relevance of education

The state of Malaysian education usually draws lots of comments and opinions from everyone, more so as Generation X become parents. With the escalating costs of that piece of paper which validates a diploma or a degree, parents are now more concerned about the obsolescence of Junior's education and his employability at the end of it. It's all about the money.

Such lofty issues also occupy the concern of Datuk Seri Dr Fong Chan Onn, Human Resources Minister when he said,

the courses they studied were not the latest because the institutions had not kept up with changing technology and job market requirements.

The good minister was commenting on the 20,217 registered unemployed graduates, the majority of whom took ICT related courses in local IPTs. The minister is right in recognizing the problem, but not the cause of it when he suggests that the institutions had not kept up with changing technology and job market requirements. He does give a hint to the real cause of the problem when he refers to graduates who took certified professional software development courses under the ministry’s Graduate Retraining Scheme.

As an employer, that is the crux of the matter. Too many of the unemployed graduates are not relevant to skills requirements by companies in the knowledge economy because they are mere users of a software product or have been trained in proprietary based software languages. These graduates, and it is pushing the envelope when you call them that, lack any understanding of the principles of computer science or understand the mechanics of software engineering. Knowledge of a particular product or software suite trains you in how to use that particular product, but doesn't impart the fundamentals which are truly needed.

There is a misplaced emphasis on certified professional courses, for they are nothing more than training on a particular product. The individual would not have garnered the skils needed in analysis, design and architecture which would make his education future-proof and have the ability to withstand the progress of technology in the industry.

What I learnt during my undergraduate years at USM 15 years ago is still used by me today in software development, for the university taught me the fundamentals and not proprietary, vendor-driven certification courses. As a result, I adapt to the changing technological landscape without being made irrelevant.

The Malaysian education system, unfortunately, started off on the wrong foot by emphasising user training of software instead of engaging in teaching the fundamentals of ICT to its hungry minds. This can be seen in the SPM IT Paper, which is a thinly veiled quiz on user training of a closed source office suite. As a result, we get SPM students who may be able to use a proprietary word processor but lack the ability to write a good letter or draft an informative report. And when the vendor EOLs the product and upgrades it to a new version, their user training knowledge is lost and needs refreshment. This is certainly not a future-proof solution.

The solution to this problem lies in what we train people to do, and the knowledge we impart on them. We need to focus on a different approach to the matter, emphasizing softer skills which are technology and product-neutral in order for the graduate to be able to transition across the cycle of technology change.

With great power comes great responsibility

Peter Parker, aka Eight Legs Spiderman, once said that. It's a very apt phrase to remember. The simple act of just paying heed to it shows maturity by an individual.

I keep reminding myself of this phrase everytime I write software. Software today has embedded itself (pun intended !) into all aspects of the human day. Other than a small fraction of humanity, software to the layman is an arcane art, a voodoo spell cast upon them by the High Priests of Programming and their acolytes. The High Priests exert a tremendous amount of control over the lives of man, through the software they deploy into the world. A mistake, or a malicious act, can render great damage.

Just as software developers need to exercise caution, others who enjoy a high profile should take young Parker's words to heed. The consequences can be harsh and unintended when we abuse the privileges given to us. One must always remember too the words of The Oracle,

The Oracle: Oh, well, not like me. But... look, see those birds? At some point a program was written to govern them. A program was written to watch over the trees, and the wind, the sunrise, and sunset. There are programs running all over the place. The ones doing their job, doing what they were meant to do, are invisible. You'd never even know they were here. But the other ones, well, we hear about them all the time.

Neo: I've never heard of them.

The Oracle: Oh, of course you have. Every time you've heard someone say they saw a ghost, or an angel. Every story you've ever heard about vampires, werewolves, or aliens, is the system assimilating some program that's doing something they're not supposed to be doing.

There are vampires, werewolves and aliens abound on the Internet, for they existed before the breed known as bloggers came to be.

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.

Let's talk about IP, baby

Intellectual Property, or IP in techspeak, is making a lot of news lately. Partly due to the misinformation spread around it in the push to get governments to legitimize software patents[1], it's come to mean many different things to different people. At the core of it all though, intellectual property as it applies to software should be only limited to copyrights, and not patents as many multinationals are pushing for and like the US Free Trade Agreement with Malaysia will most likely backdoor into our legislation.

A lot of people are pushing for increasing Malaysia's IP bank, and while I certainly do not agree with how they have defined intellectual property to be, the call still does have some fundamental basis. Malaysia has for too long depended on external sources for our technology, and the creation of indigenous software technology is paramount. It is for these reasons why I have long pushed to have our country increase it's software capacity. Software capacity is defined as the capability of a nation to utilize, create and manage complex and sophisticated software.

In the column, the MD of Microsoft Malaysia suggests a number of examples of companies which have built their own software capacity and are now quite successful on the global stage. However, these companies have done so on the back of infrastructure, tools and platform technologies based on closed source software.

By doing so, they have not contributed to the greater body of software knowledge. Open source software does not share this anomaly, and instead allows independent software vendors who've based their technologies on OSS to not only further the technological envelope, but also enhance the nation's software capacity.

The usual argument against open source software in enriching our IP bank however is that it generates no economic value as open source largely is distributed for very low costs. This argument fails to realise the value of the knowledge created, and the offshoots of increasing software capacity. In addition, the economic arguments also usually fail to take into account the tremendous economic value open source software companies have created for themselves.

Sleepycat a developer of an open source database engine, was recently acquired by Oracle. This may not stop there as Oracle is also rumoured to be interested in acquiring Zend Technologies who open source the very popular PHP web development language. Redhat, another NASDAQ company, has also bought JBoss, maker of the open source JBoss Java middleware stack for US$420 million. Sleepycat was profitable for over 9 years, before being acquired by Oracle.

Clearly, there is economic value for companies who do open source inspite of the misinformation that only in closed source can one get returns of investment in software. Developing on open source however will increase our IP bank much, much quicker as more people get on the bandwagon and create wonderful software. Keeping this software closed definitely does not enrich our IP bank but only the bank accounts of companies who make the tools, platforms and infrastructure upon which these applications software are based on.

It is from this utilization of open source software that the fuel for our local software economy will be burnt together with the talent of Malaysian software developers to produce the next engine of growth.

[1] The European Parliament has voted to not recognize software patents, which was underscored with a recent clarification by the European Commission that software in Europe is not patentable.

The FUDgates open

When any new threat to a monopolistic situation appears, one can rest assured that the threatened ones will launch a series of Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt (FUD) messages on why they should continue to remain a monopoly. My blogging colleague, Hasan, covered it well when he debunked the dangers of dictating procurement policies.

It does look like the Titch article was the start of it all. Alan Yates, general manager of Microsoft's information worker strategy in the UK now says, "The use of OpenDocument documents is slower to the point of not really being satisfactory".

This is FUD, even if it's called by any other name. How really can a document format be slower than another ? Document formats, like the ISO/IEC standard 26300 ODF, are just standards specifying how documents are to be saved and the formatting used for them. Documents, not being executable programs, are not slow or fast. To call them that is just nonsensical, and in the case of Alan Yates, pure FUD.

What really matters are the programs which read those document formats. Now, with an unencumbered[1] document format standard like ODF, there will be many office suites which can read and write ODF, and the performance of these office suites will be determined by the market at large. ODF by itself is certainly not a performance attribute, but rather the mechanism which your information will be carried by.

This does sound like the proponents of OpenXML buying time, since ODF has already been approved as an ISO/IEC standard and OpenXML being only decided on by the ECMA by end 2006. 7 months is a long time in information and communications technology, and these FUD attacks do sound like the cries of a hurt beast. The market will realise that as an approved and truly open standard, ODF should be the one they will be investing and committing in.

[1] I'll cover what I mean by an unencumbered open standard in another blog entry

Risk of a monoculture

In agriculture, a monoculture is the practice of relying on a very small number of genetic variants, or cultivars of a food crop for commercial agriculture. In essence, what it means is that by using a very small gene pool with little variance, an agricultural blight could swing by and wipe out the entire crop as the similar genetic makeup of these crops will render all of them susceptible to the blight. This, as you can clearly see, would be catastrophic to our food supply.

A similar situation does exist in ICT, as famed security expert Dan Geer has warned. By relying on a monoculture, we're making ourselves susceptible to widespread virus attacks. Dan's warnings however have taken a new twist with the Backdoor.Ginwui virus. The twist is that the virus is carried not by an executable program, but rather by the Microsoft Word document format, and the virus exploits a vulnerability within Microsoft Word itself. What is interesting is that the same virus has no effect and is benign on other programs which read Microsoft Word, like StarOffice and OpenOffice.Org.

This is strong testimony to the fact that genetic diversity, be it in agriculture or computer science, shields us from events which could catastrophically wipe out life. With a standard like ODF being supported by both closed source programs (StarOffice and IBM's Workplace Managed Client) and open source programs (OpenOffice.org and KOffice), the genetic diversity would mean that a virus carried within the document format will not affect all users of the format but only specific users of a program.

With more office suites using ODF, there will be greater  genetic diversity. With this,  our risk to genetic viruses, greatly decreases in a multicultural world.

Piracy

According to a report by the International Intellectual Property Alliance, software piracy in Malaysia is estimated to be 60% in 2005, with perceived losses of US$75.1 million. With the Malaysian penchant for cost reduction, the extent of piracy is believable even though the perceived loss of revenue does seem overblown. For starters, one would need to understand the main reason why piracy occurs in Malaysia.

This is largely due to affordability of software, or the lack thereof. In many cases, fully loading a new personal computer with the software needed can double the total cost of acquiring the PC. While there have been low-cost PC initiatives, including the MIT Media Lab's US$100 laptop, these usually become ineffectual when one factors in the additional funds needed to license the software needed to make the PC useful.

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...