Of Mice and the Malaysian Digg
Aizatto and Colin pointed out to the Malaysian Digg, and the condemnation it has received from Malaysian websurfers for not respecting intellectual right laws and not being innovative enough. “Why are Malaysians copy cats only?” - the question is posed, with heads shaking and sighs issued over the perceived lack of innovation by Malaysians.
Do allow me to shake my head and issue a sigh too. However, my reasons for sighing are quite different. I am sighing because, as usual, folk have gotten it wrong. Repeat after me: there is nothing wrong with copy cats. We should not be shooting the copy-cats, we should be encouraging them and patting them on their back. Copy-cats are good, and it is they who drive true innovation, not the phantom innovators that magically derive ground breaking technology from no prior art.
All innovation starts with a blatant copy. The real innovation comes later but the very first step is blatant, unadulterated copying. All nations we would consider innovative today have done this. Americans did this to the British in the early 1900s and to the Soviets in the 1960s. The Japanese did this to the Americans in the 1950s and 1960s and later in the 1990s. The Koreans and Taiwanese did this to the Americans in the 1980s. The Chinese have in turn, in a perhaps oxymoric inimitable style, done this to the Koreans and Taiwanese and the Japanese and the Americans in the 1990s and 2000s. All these countries built their industries by blatantly disregarding foreign intellectual right laws in the interest of national building.
These are just a few examples in the arts, electronics and technology sectors. There are many more and all point to the fact that a healthy disregard for intellectual rights is key in developing industries. Sure, other countries may not like it too much but we must recognize that their insistence on stronger intellectual rights only help them - there has never been a positive cost benefit analysis showing that a developing country can benefit from stronger intellectual property rights. All studies actually show the reverse!
So what if the Malaysian Digg performs exactly the same functions as the “real” Digg? So what if they copied logos and stylesheets? So what if their viral networking model is exactly the same? I ask you in all honesty - what is the harm? In all the head shaking and sighing that commences when discussions about the copy-cats in Malaysia take place, nobody actually mentions the real harm done. I suspect that this is because there is no real harm. Zero. Zilch. Nada. And thus, as a corollary, if there is no real harm, why are we attacking them instead of encouraging them? After all, they have obviously put effort into building the system. The experience gained from building this will pay off in the next endeavour and the next endeavour may very well be the replacement to Google.
In the context of Free Software, I pointed out as much in an interview with ComputerWorld:
Some countries have had strong technology, engineering and scientific cultures as well as enabling business environments. This has resulted in modern day dominance in these areas of business.
How do we replicate this in Malaysia? Government initiatives through MDeC and the efforts of other parties have helped set up an enabling environment.
The question is then “How do we build a strong technical culture?” Many universities are teaching technical courses to their students applied computing. This essentially means that students are learning to build applications on proprietary platforms. But can students learn about software systems when they are disallowed by license agreements in pursuing their education? Proprietary software licenses allow you to build on their platform but don’t allow you to learn about the technology of the platform itself.
The end result is that by the time students graduate from universities, they still would have little or no understanding of the inner workings of the systems and would have effectively become technicians (or if you are a Simpsons’s fan, you could use the analogy that they are becoming point-and-click engineers ala Homer Simpson) with little or no understanding of the underlying technology.
These students go on to become technology entrepreneurs by launching startups. We have a dearth of such successful startups. In correctly recognizing that Malaysians, at this point, lack necessary know-how, we have been expecting foreign proprietary software vendors to help us build our national technology capacity, yet after many years of building labs and incubators, we still have nothing to show for it.
The reason for this is obvious enough: how can Malaysian startups compete effectively when proprietary software vendors deny them the ability to learn and innovate from that technology? How can Malaysian startups learn about database technology, operating system technology, web server technology, browser technology, multimedia technology, desktop and graphic and VOIP technology when the interest of the incumbent vendors is in building a generation of consumers, not competitors?
The obvious answer is that they can’t, not by using proprietary software.
The correct way to move forward is to not to tie ourselves down with NDA’s and restrictive technology licensing agreements. The correct way is to build a culture of integrating, extending and branding open source software as OSS provides the most economically efficient form of technology transfer.