Kuala Lumpur, 29 June, 2010: The Multimedia Development Corporation (MDeC), the driver of the MSC Malaysia National ICT initiative continued to support the adoption and use of open source software (OSS) at the three-day MSC Malaysia Open Source Conference 2010 (MOSC) which opened at the Berjaya Times Square Hotel here today.

The event was jointly organised by MDeC, in collaboration with the Malaysian Administrative Modernisation Planning Unit (MAMPU) which is the force behind OSS adoption by government and the Open Source Developers Club Malaysia (OSDC.my).

MSC Malaysia encouraged Malaysian companies to adopt open source software as a means to raise productivity and efficiency while lowering costs and to improve their competitiveness in world markets.

The term “open source” refers to to software of which its initial form in human-intelligible script is made available along with its executable form which can be run by computers, along with permissive licensing conditions which allow users to freely use, copy, modify and distribute the software or its derivatives.

Most of the proprietary software used today only comes in its executable form, which is very hard for even the most competent programmers to fully understand and modify.

An analogy would be an open source cake, where its recipe is provided along with the baked cake, so that others can either make the same cake or with modifications and enhancements to suit their taste.

Also, OSS is usually available for download free of charge or at a nominal fee covering the cost of the CD, DVD or USB-drive on which it is provided.

“To truly embrace an innovation culture, Malaysian companies must explore new ways of empowering their people, improving their business processes and refining their management, and OSS is the pillar that can support Malaysia's innovation-led transformation into a high-income economy,” said MDeC chief executive officer, Datuk Badlisham Ghazali.

“While vendor-based software delivers a 'closest-fit' solution to the ICT needs of Malaysian companies, OSS can be customised to deliver further refinements and greater efficiencies, including rapid bug-fixing, improved security and freedom from vendor lock-in,” Badlisham added.

Examples of leading MSC Malaysia companies which have produced world-class OSS solutions are Technodex, Byte Craft and Slashes & Dots.

Technodex's OSS platform is used in the banking, telecommunications, transportation, oil & gas, education and government sectors in Malaysia, Thailand, Brunei, China & Australia.

Byte Craft is a consultancy which conducts custom web and multimedia development and is Malaysia's first Google Enterprise Partner.

Slashes & Dots is an award-winning Malaysian Web 2.0 software development firm, with tens of thousands of customers worldwide using its MyBlog and Jom Comment products.

“Our vision for OSS is to promote OSS innovation in key niche areas & sectors via local and global development collaborations; to encourage greater use and support of OSS technologies; and to grow skilled jobs and help produce world class Malaysian developers,” said Ghazali.

Last year, MDeC helped 39 MSC Malaysian companies in the OSS industry to generate RM595 million in local revenues and over RM234 million in export revenues, and these companies employed 6,206 ICT knowledge workers.

This year, MSC Malaysia has continued to support the Malaysian OSS industry through:-

Launching its PHPAcademy and PHPMarketplace in partnership with Microsoft and PHP.net.my.

The Java Education and Development Initiative (JEDI) programme in collaboration with Sun Microsystems.

The Open Source Lab at the MSC Malaysia Incubation Centre at Multimedia University, Cyberjaya.

Co-organised this MSC Malaysia Open Source Conference, as well as the upcoming Malaysian Government Open Source Conference together with MAMPU, to be held on the 2nd and 3rd of November.

About 20% of MDeC's pre-seed fund supported companies use OSS tools.

Meanwhile, MAMPU supports the use of OSS in a general way and as a result of its initiatives, 97% of the Malaysian government already uses OSS. Moreover MAMPU endorses community initiatives such as Penguin Masuk Kampung which brings open source resources to village communities and the voluntary Linux Varsity events and initiatives.

“Embracing OSS take a long time as it's suitable for specific purposes and involves change management and reskilling,” said Tan King Ing, deputy director, MAMPU, ICT Policy and Planning Division.

“The use of OSS has not only helped Malaysia narrow the digital divide but has also enabled us to save RM200 million annually in software licence fees,while increasing our competence in OSS development. Moreover, it has proven to be the most cost-effective in the implementation of Malaysia's learning management system, which would have otherwise been prohibitively costly using proprietary software,” Tan added.

Meanwhile, the OSDC.my has a programme to promote 2D and 3D  animation using Blender, the OSS equivalent of the proprietary Autodesk Maya 3D animation software. Blender was used to create the Kluang Man cartoon in the Durian Project on You Tube.

The semi-animation movie Avatar was created using Blender running on Ubuntu Linux, which should dispel any further doubts about OSS' suitability for use in creative multimedia.

However, OSDC.my found students to still be apprehensive about using OSS

“We interviewed several university students and found that they feared not knowing how to use OSS but after they used it, they slowly ditched Microsoft Windows and this year we will try to get more management people to adopt OSS for office use,” said Mohammad Sallehuddin, OSDC.my treasurer.

Closing thots

Rather ironically, while this OSS conference was going on on one side of Jalan Imbi, it would most probably be impossible to find any OSS in the many computer stores in the popular computer emporia on the opposite side of the road, where instead proprietary operating systems and software, whether original or pirated, have been or is still the norm.

Catching MAMPU's Tan King Ing on the sidelines, Comm & Tech Asia suggested that since a very powerful, effective, albeit highly cynical advertising strategy is to encourage peer pressure among users to buy or use certain products just to “keep up with the Joneses” and to appear “hip and cool” in their eyes of their peers, perhaps MAMPU should adopt the same strategy to create peer pressure to make users want to appear hip and cool by using open source software.

This article was typed using the open sourced OpenOffice application, running on Ubuntu Linux 9.10  and posted on this website using the open sourced Mozilla Firefox browser. The photos were edited using the open source GNU Image Manipulation Program (GIMP) and uploaded to this web server using the open sourced Filezilla FTP client – all of which come free of charge with Ubuntu.

I began my migration to Linux in late 2008 when I dumped Windows Vista on my notebook and installed Linux instead. Now all nine of my PCs (yes nine) run Linux and I've not looked back since. I use Ubuntu 9.10 & 10.04, OpenSUSE 11.2 and Debian 5.0 Linux (Lenny) on different machines.

So if Linux works fine for me, who's no Unix-savvy genius; so it can just as well also work for you if you dare to give it a try.

I've found Ubuntu Linux to be especially friendly with Huawei and Vodafone branded HSPA-USB dongle modems, while with OpenSuse, you'll have to download the Vodafone modem driver using Webpin under its YAST management utility. As MINT Linux is derived off Ubuntu, it should also work with these modems.

You can download live CD ISO images or full DVD ISO images of popular Linux distributions from the following websites.

http://www.ubuntulinux.org

http://www.opensuse.org/en

http://linuxmint.com

http://www.debian.org

http://fedoraproject.org

http://sabayon.it