FLOSSWorld 2007 Workshop
The FLOSSWorld Workshop was conducted today to discuss the findings of the OSS survey conducted in Malaysia by MIMOS in the governmental, industry and developer communities. Much was said and done; sessions were conducted proficiently and there was a healthy exchange of ideas.
That’s the good part of it.
The bad part of it is that I’ve heard much of the deliberations that took place many times before. It’s almost painful to the ears to hear the same ideas being brought up again and recycled in ever-so-creative incarnations. By my estimate, if I had a ringgit each time I heard of ways to revolutionize our universities using OSS or areas to look at to spur the use of open source in non-IT industries in Malaysia, I would have entered the Forbes billionaire list by now[0].
At some point, interested stakeholders need put their foot down and say “We see the importance of getting this done immediately and we will take the necessary initiatives to that end. We will need all help we can get in these relevant areas, interested parties please contact us ASAP. Our deadline are as follows …“.
Yet, thanks to issues being politicized beyond rational belief, an unbelievable culture of NATO and most importantly, stakeholders not seeing the importance of working together as a single driving force, nothing ever gets done as nobody is willing to commit to Getting Stuff Done.
Apologists for the status quo may claim that such is the nature of conducting business in Malaysia but I refuse to believe that. Inspired individuals have gotten things running in the past and the only reason for the derailment of the state of open source in Malaysia is to be attributed to us: the current generation of stakeholders who can’t get beyond writing questionable Position Statements[1] and multi-page Recommendation Papers and spending two hours arguing about sentence structures, grammar and choices of words[2].
The opposition in this game, the convicted monopolist, has taken full advantage of this lull. They have gotten the Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation to make strong statements against the Malaysian Open Source policy. They have gotten the Malaysian computer industry association, PIKOM, to do the same. They have received the latitude of a prominent business newspaper to report that the behaviour of LowYat computer shops in preloading Linux on PC’s facilitates piracy. I’m pretty sure they would have tried selling that story to the Ministry of Domestic Trade and Consumer Affairs.
The adoption of ODF is being stalled by them, with various unequivocal statements indicating the FDI that they have brought into the country and why the government should listen to them. And governments do listen to them because nobody else is speaking up. Well, nobody supporting open source at least. They did get pseudo-neutral industry groups to send in strong statements about how open source and open standard policies are negatively affecting their ability to conduct business. They have even have gotten universities to state that the open source developmental model is a really bad idea.
How did the greater OSS community respond to this onslaught? Yes, you are right - we conducted a workshop and drafted further Recommendations. It is a situation which can drive even the most optimistic mind to utter despair. Yet, even as I wax on about the futility of hoping that Malaysians can fight the good fight, I recognize that there is a glimmer of hope.
In the last one year, I have been introduced to folk that have been working quietly behind the scenes in pushing the FOSS and open standards agenda. The open standardization work, the strong push of open source syllabus in Open University Malaysia and Internation Islamic University, the work on lobbying against software patents and combating the Microsoft FUD engine, the behind-the-scenes lobbying and letter writing campaigns for a saner culture where end-users are not beholden to the Microsoft platform and various other initiatives deserve the heartfelt thanks of the greater open source and IT community.
But I don’t think these folk do it for your thanks. They do it because they are tired of dealing with the status quo and they realize that the only change they can make in this world is the change driven by their own actions. And to that end, all they expect from you is step up and start fighting for your freedom.
[0] Fine, I admit that’s an exaggeration. But I assure you, it’s an exaggeration not far off its intended mark[3].
[1] This actually happened in Asia OSS 2006 where an untold number of hours were spent on mundane banalities in the drafting of the AsiaOSS Position Statement. And as you may be very interested in learning, this extremely painful multi-hour exercise was facilitated fully on Microsoft Word.
[2] Competent technical folk would immediately recognize this as the classic bike-shed culture and would take all steps to evacuate themselves from the folk exhiting such behaviour.
[3] Yes, I use zero based arrays.