Open Malaysia

MSCOSCONF

The Multimedia Development Corporation (MDeC), a government body which has the appearance of a very corporate Malaysian company is organising and funding a new conference this week. It's called the Multimedia Super Corridor Open Source Conference (MSCOSCONF), to be held from 31st May to 3rd June 2009.

The Malaysian Government has been a strong supporter of Open Source, from their hard work on the Open Source Master Plan back in 2004 which outlined support for Free and Open Source in their procurement policies.

This was somewhat put in confusion due to the ill defined "Technology Neutrality" principle, which is evident in the lack of direction since 2006. However the momentum within the government has been strong, especially in the drivers at MAMPU, the Malaysian Administrative Modernisation and Planning Unit under the Prime Minister's office.

They proceeded to organise the Malaysian Government Open Source Software Conference (MyGOSSCON) in 2007 and 2008, which highlighted local and international speakers. These talks were mainly targeted at government officials and public service employees.

The Free and Open Source Software community of Malaysia also organised a more developer and community centric conference in 2008 called foss.my 08.

What is interesting about the MSCOSCONF is that it combines all the aspects of the previously organised conferences. From community, to developers, to business and also to the government sector. I personally find this a huge step forward in MDeC addressing the need to bring these sectors of the FOSS ecosystem together, and to create a more cohesive meta-community for the future.

However I do have some issues with this inaugural conference.

Apache not good enough?
The official website of MSCOSCONF is running on IIS. IIS is a proprietary product. The majority of websites on the web runs a fully fledged Open Source product called Apache as a webserver. When queried on why the mscosconf website is running on IIS, there were rumours that the front facing IIS just a "proxy" however. The other rumour was that it was because one of the sponsors only have Windows machines to host the website. Whatever the case, this is strange because the community have offered to sponsor the hosting of the website with a certified freedom stack.

This fortunately can be resolved easily in the future.

The Microsoft "Competition"
It's great that Microsoft has been playing a significant role in terms of sponsorship for this event. Their efforts in publicity and community relations have been positive, together with their support for the foss.my 08 event.

What is interesting is that they are currently sponsoring a competition which sports a RM10,000 prize in the porting of popular PHP webapps which currently exist on a completely free stack, to a completely closed stack. Yes, the purpose of the competition is to port webapps which run using Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP (LAMP) to Microsoft Windows, Microsoft IIS and Microsoft SQL Server, PHP (WIMP). This contest was a misnomer and spun as LAMP2WIN, as should be more accurately called LAMP2WIMP.

This to me is a bizarre requirement and totally goes against the philosophy of what an Open Source competition should be. I'm not sure what rationale was during the design of the competition, but this could have been easily designed with a more "Free" objective.

For example, instead of moving apps and restricting choice, perhaps the competition could move the otherway: porting dotNet apps to the FOSS stack, for example a Linux, Apache, MySQL, Mono config. Or abstracting the database layers of certain popular MSSQL projects to cater for all types of databases? Or to ensure that MS SQL is fully supported as database drivers from a Linux webserver?

Projects like these would be infinitely superior with wins to Microsoft, the FOSS developers and the FOSS end users. Thats real choice.

Constructive criticisms for MDeC
The change in "direction" from MDeC has been dramatic. From apathy last year, to full support of FOSS this year, has been very surprising to us whom have witnessed the tepid commitments in the past. It seems that the people heading this initiative are genuinely determined to put their support behind FOSS from now on. However the entire MDeC machinery needs time to catch up to get into the spirit of things. For example, and ironically, the "Sponsorship Prospectus" (amongst others) which has the purpose of wooing potential sponsors to promote open source, is written and published using Microsoft Office 2007.  It may seem like a normal business decision to use whatever tools they are familiar with, but to us freetards, it seems rather distasteful. Also they need a better copywriter in their social media alerts.

For the Future!
However, I know that these issues can be easily resolved in the near future, and its still very heartening that MDeC is finally warming up to the community of fedora.my ubuntu.my, php.net.my, foss.my, fosschix.my and all the other freedom loving geeks in Malaysia. The speakers lineup is certainly impressive, and I look forward in meeting with the distinguised delegates. We hope to see more events like this, and cheer on the teams at MDeC and OSCC who have worked so tirelessly in hopefully making the next 4 days a huge success.

yk

An Afternoon With Herr Proprietriness

For the last two years, I have been working almost exclusively with Free Software. The last time I decided to have a looksee at the proprietary software, it was a MIND event which focused solely on Microsoft software. I was distinctly underwhelmed during the event because the speakers seemed to carry a strong anti Open Source agenda (which was an unfortunate irony as we later saw a speaker using Python extensively in his application). In any case, I thought it was high time to see the technology Microsoft has been developing recently. So, when I saw Jeff Ooi writing about a blogger's meet showcasing Microsoft software, I thought I'd register and see what the software giant was up to.

Sembang Tech Ed 2007 was held yesterday (Sunday) at Bangkok Jazz Bar in Chulan Square. I arrived on time but apparently there was a lack of parking, so a further 20 minutes was spent hunting for parking. No matter, I arrived slightly late with high expectations and discovered that the event was starting late anyway.

Oliver Scheer (Microsoft Developer Evangelist Germany) started off by speaking about Microsoft Silverlight. Well, actually he started off by saying "I can code, I can develop" in an Arnold Schwarzenegger voice to emphasize his developer skillz. It was bizarre enough that I had a good chuckle over that. Anyway, he went on to give a demo of a Silverlight application which can be used to book airline tickets. This demo has been online for quite some time to highlight Silverlight purty-ness, so I wasn't really impressed (on a sidenote, this very same demo was again used in the TechEd 2007 keynote today morning). Is there any other impressive application of Silverlight that Microsoft can demo besides this one?

Oliver spoke about building a media player using Microsoft Expression. Essentially, he built a "self-contained" player for a specific video by using existing controls available in Microsoft Expressions. He mentioned that this player works on FireFox but gave no details as to the licensing of the plugin. I later spoke to him and he mentioned that this plugin only works on Microsoft Windows and Mac OS X, so those on other platforms (including open source platforms)- you guys are out of luck at this point in time. Well, you can dance under some Moonlight and make sacrifices to a Novell demi-god to officially support other platforms, but at this point in time at least, you're (fortunately or otherwise) out of luck.

Oliver made a specific reference to the fact that Silverlight only supports the Windows Media Video (WMV) and Windows Media Audio (WMA) codecs. This seemed to be awfully restrictive to me, particularly when one takes into account that WMV and WMA codecs are not officially licensed for use on an Open Source platform and more shockingly, the WMV codec has software patent issues which deny independent implementation by a third party. Microsoft has actually sent a cease-and-decease letter to an open source implementation of WMV, so you can imagine how restrictive the decision is to only support WMV and WMA. Oliver later told me that Silverlight also supports MP3 (which is also patent encumbered) and WAV files (which went out of style with bell bottom pants).

What about other codecs, I inquired? Oliver seemed to be flabbergasted at the thought of somebody using non-officially-sanctioned codecs and flatly stated that "in the interest of keeping the size of the runtime small, only these few codecs are installed". I decided to push my luck and ask him about streaming new codecs to the end user. Oliver told me that this is apparently impossible.

Hmmm. Woop-tee-doo.

Oliver mentioned that 40 languages are supported in Silverlight, mentioning Python and Ruby (presumably through the IronPython and IronRuby execution environments). However, despite interest from the floor on Python/Ruby support, there was no focus on using languages other then Microsoft XAML and Microsoft C#.

Color me cynical, but I've heard more marketing speak from technology vendors then I care too comment on. A classic problem that we have traditionally seen with the Microsoft stack is simply that components and frameworks tend to only officially support other parts of the Microsoft stack and those wishing to use it on other platforms have to figure out an implementation strategy on their own. In other words, true interoperatibility works only within the Microsoft stack: a definition that is oxymoronic in itself.

My impression of Silverlight is that it seems to be a souped up Flash player with a focus on building web applications. That in itself is fine, but as an observer from the floor noted, Flash is signficantly more mature at this point in time and is increasingly being used in the area of rich Internet applications. From that perspective, there is little new groundbreaking technology that Silverlight contributes at this point in time.

Next up, Rohan Thomas, a developer evangelist from Microsoft Malaysia, spoke on Microsoft Popfly. I had difficulty following his presentation because I had no idea what Microsoft Popfly was and only realized towards the end of Rohan's presentation that it is a hosted service by Microsoft to create mashups using Microsoft Silverlight. He showed how Microsoft Popfly supports drag and drop mashup creation and cooly informed us bloggers that the difference between Flash and Silverlight is that Silverlight renders on the client side. Whaaaaat ???

Ok, maybe the free flowing alcohol was getting to presenters too (quite understandable, if I may say so myself). Despite this gaffe, Rohan went on to show how webpages could be created through Popfly, which didn't work out too well because the Save button was hidden lower down in the page and the website didn't have scrollbar. Maybe the developers of Popfly were also enjoying free flowing alcohol in Redmond when designing this application? I didn't see anything particularly special about the webpage creator other then fancy look and feel.

In any case, I was getting mighty bored at this point in time and was contemplating leaving. I mean, mashups are cool and all but it's not exactly the next iPod, is it? Somebody in the audience had the same thought and pointed out that Yahoo Tubes and Google Mashups provide similar tools and asked why Microsoft's version was better. It was a fair comment, in my opinion. I mean, why use Popfly when there are great tools out there already, right? What separates Popfly from the rest?

Rohan answered that Popfly has Team Foundation Server running ("ooooooh"), that it's updated every two weeks ("aaaahhhhhh") and that Team Foundation Server is still in alpha and Popfly users are effectively alpha-testing it ("WTF?!!"). In other words, Rohan is saying that we should be using Popfly over Y! Tubes and Google Mashup only because Microsoft needs to be provided with free feedback on their alpha software? If this was an open source project, I'd have more sympathy to Rohan's answer but considering Popfly is as proprietary and closed as a pyloric sphincter is, I failed to see the reasoning behind Rohan's answer.

Chewy "Chewbacca" Chong (Microsoft Developer Evangelist Singapore) jumped in later and said that Popfly helped fuel much of the development in Y! Tubes and Google Mashups. Whether this is true or not is completely irrelevant. In an open industry, competition drives innovation. Just as Yahoo and Google's mashup tools forced Microsoft to enter this area, Microsoft's subsequent involvement certainly would have helped improve the general state of the mashups. That it inself is an indication of an innovative economy, not a sign of any benevolence on Microsoft's part. More directly to the point, however, is that this is certainly no reason for end users to use Popfly over Y! Tubes. Nobody from Microsoft really did satisfactorily provide an answer to why users should use Popfly over Yahoo's and Google's existing tools.

The second last presentation was by Chewy on Microsoft Home Server. His presentation focused on how easy it was to use Microsoft Home Server to control and backup machines within a home LAN. The technology itself, as Chewy admits, is not new. What Microsoft has done is to put a GUI front end to manage all the systems within the LAN. I think for those who are solely on a Microsoft Windows platform, the technology can possibly prove itself useful (if it works as advertised).

But what about the rest of us? Pffft. There is nonexistent support for non-Microsoft platforms so those on a Mac or Linux or even FreeBSD are out of luck (in my case, that counts as a triple whammy). The second problem I saw was that Chewy kept pimping the software as easy enough for his Mom to use. I'm not sure if his Mom works as a system administrator but from what I say, it's definitely not easy enough for the layperson. A closet geek maybe, but definitely not a layperson. To a real technologist, there was little being offered that could be appreciated because most of the functionality already exist in other forms. So, thanks Chewy, but I'll stick to my shell scripts and Samba mounts for now.

The final presentation was by Zeddy Iskandar (Academic Developer Evangelist, Microsoft Indonesia). Zeddy certainly had something impressive to demo: Microsoft Robotics Studio. Well, it was impressive to me anyways since I'm a true-blue geek with an electronics engineering background. I enjoyed the idea that one could program and build a robot and have it run within a virtual environment with true physics. Very cool, but unfortunately fully proprietary, which means one cannot contribute to its development and have the freedom to extend it where needed. It's strange the Robotics Studio would be proprietary when one would assume that the freedom to adapt the code to one's need would be a killer feature for the product. Hmm, I wonder if Open Source equivalents exist. Btw, Zeddy, if you're reading this - your sample code did not work in stopping the robot because you failed to explicitly include zeroing out movement in your final output.

That was that with the presentations. During the Q&A, a member from the floor asked about possible free tickets to TechEd 2007. A representative from Microsoft Malaysia (whose name I failed to capture) curtly informed those present that Microsoft, as a principle, does not offer complementary tickets to its business partners. Now, this is fair enough, except that its completely untrue. I know for a fact that several complementary tickets were offered for TechEd2007 to some companies. This answer (and the curt tone itself) turned me off quite a bit.

Anyway, there you go. That's what I saw and experienced. Microsoft certainly makes for a great host (food and free flowing beer!) but I had seriously expected more from the technology presented and from the quality of presentations. Perhaps I've been spoiled by Open Source events, where one listens to the actual developers and it is easily possible to get into the thick of things, ie to become a participant instead of a customer.

This is the stark difference I noticed between Open Source events and Microsoft events. The former is almost always informal, acceptive and has substantial technical details presented for all and sundry to learn from (and contribute). The latter seems to be "Hey, this is the latest version of a Microsoft product which has X,Y,Z features and sells at RM $$$". In other words, Microsoft events are geared towards making its audience Microsoft customers (as Chewy starkly admitted: "I've got a convert!") and Open Source events are geared towards making everybody a participant in improving the software for the common good of all. The long and short is, if what I saw was the best Microsoft had to offer today, one could certainly be forgiven for thinking that the greatest innovations are now coming from outside the land of Redmond.

My second observation is: where are the Microsoft hackers? You know ... the Raymond Chen's of the world. Where are they? I'm quite sure they exist but I've not met a single one, not even at today's at TechED conference.

When I was in FOSDEM this year, we had presentations directly from folk like HD Moore (security), Miguel de Icaza (GNOME, .NET etc), Andrew Morton (Linux kernel hacking), Jeremy Allison (Samba), Keith Packard (X.org) and many more. At AsiaOSS in Kuala Lumpur last year, we had Yukihiro Matsumoto of Ruby fame presenting. At FOSS.in last year, we had Malaysia's very own JayaKumar (who has contributed drivers to the Linux kernel), Rasmus Lerdorf (PHP founder) and many others presenting. I distinctly remember my first international Open Source conference, LinuxConf Australia 2005 where Tridge (of Samba fame) presented. Tridge delved deep into the CIFS technology itself and it was  an incredible rush listening to him explain the design decisions made in Samba 4.

So, why are the equivalent Microsoft hackers sequestered away? All we have been meeting are developer evangelists who end up giving the same tired demos we have seen online. Hearing from the real developers  themselves really makes all the difference in the world.

Anyway, I'm tired. The night is nigh, and it's a good time to end this extremely long blog post. Upon spending some time grokking the reflection of the glass of amber liquid sitting in front of me now, I believe this blog post probably wins the most number of times the word "mashups" has been written ever in the history of OpenMalaysiaBlog.  Urgh., I am indeed feeling sick now.

ps: A note to Chewy: Prime numbers actually start from 2, not 1 :)

LPI Linux Training of Trainers, Kuala Lumpur

From Khairil Yusof:

Open University Malaysia Open Source Community in collaboration with Dreamsoft (M) Sdn Bhd and IOSN ASEAN+3 will be organising two weeks workshops on LPI in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia from July 9th – 20th, 2007.

http://www.iosn.net/asean-3/countries/malaysia/events/linux-tot-malaysia

Introduction

A major barrier against adoption and deployment of Open Source Software is the lack of human resources with open source software skills. This introductory programme aims to address the problem by training trainers so that these trainers in turn will be able to train other trainers and
therefore a kick start for self sustaining of open source human capacity building.

OUM Open Source Community in collaboration with Dreamsoft (M) Sdn Bhd and UNDP will be organising two weeks workshops on LPI in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia from July 9th – 20th, 2007.

This ten-days workshop provides the knowledge and skills for Linux system administrator. The workshop covers the LPI 101 and 102 objectives.

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. ;)

Do we need two ISO standards for document format? - Part 3

Pic: 15 kg, 2 boxes, 6039 pages of OOXML specs

Much excitement has gone on since I wrote Do we need two ISO standards for document format? - Part 2 in December 2006.

Ecma submitted the Ecma-approved Microsoft Office OpenXML (OOXML)  standard to ISO for "fast track" standardization. By 5 Feb 2007 after a 30-day review before the real fast track 5 months balloting by countries, National Bodies had the opportunity to submit to ISO any contradictions.

Malaysia spoke up! Malaysia was one of 20 countries who sent comments of contradiction to ISO. Technically, out of the 20, that's 17 P Countries out of 30 -- and that's a big percentage. So the math says, "If 11 P-Countries vote against OOXML during the 5-month ballot, then OOXML will fail."

We wait for Ecma to respond to ISO by 28 Feb 2007, after which we will publicly see all the 20 countries' comments and  Ecma's response.

On 7 February 2007, Dr. Nah Soo Hoe and I spoke at CICC's Asia OSS Workshop in Kuala Lumpur in the session on "Open protocols, Standards and Content & Open document Format (ODF)". Dr. Nah presented on open standards (click here for pdf) and I took on ODF (click here for pdf). We generated some excitement in the audience by relating the past month's events related to the OOXML contradictions.

A participant from Singapore asked how we see the future of multiple standards -- I responded with a dream, a wish that OOXML will merge or harmonize with ODF, just like the Chinese UOF standard is.

In the meantime, don't print the Ecma OOXML pages! Ecma has changed them, and may still keep on changing them, so I'm stuck with 15 kg of wrong page numbers and changed contents!

LinuxWorld OpenSolutions Summit, New York, 14-15 Feb 2007

Anyone going? LinuxWorld OpenSolutions Summit will be in New York on 14 to 15 February 2007. The conference will focus on the financial, retail, media, public and healthcare industries and will examine topics including security, virtualization, interoperability and Linux on the desktop.

The detailed Conference Program looks packed, but I thought I'd highlight my company's hosting of the IBM Linux and Open Source Forum 2007  on Wednesday afternoon, 14 February 2007. You can register for the overall event here and the IBM Forum here.

Excerpt from IBM invitation:

Linux and Open Source. How can they benefit you? Join us at the IBM Linux and Open Source Forum and find out. IBM customers will show you how they integrated Linux and Open Source to achieve new levels of flexibility, efficiency, and innovation. IBM executives will review industry trends, IBM’s strategy, and the offerings to help you to achieve success, too. Linux and Open Source, a must in today’s demanding business environment.

The agenda of the IBM Linux and Open Source Forum is as follows:

Successful Deployment Of OpenOffice.org In The Public Sector

The Malaysian Public Sector Open Source Software Initiative with its Master Plan is moving along fine, as one would expect. A few days ago, the  Public Sector ICT community discussed the Master Plan progress,  shared case studies and found out the latest updates and trends, this time focusing on one aspect of open source software (OSS) implementation -- the OpenOffice.org office productivity suite.

MAMPU, the Malaysian Government central agency responsible for ICT policies and guidelines for the Malaysian Public Sector did a great job in conducting the Successful Deployment Of OpenOffice In The Public Sector Seminar  on 8 December 2006 at Nikko Hotel, Kuala Lumpur with over 300 Public Sector (mostly from the ICT community) participants from all over the country.

Supporters of the event, like me were also invited to attend.  On another day, I will update this blog post with my commentaries on the presentations and discussions, but I thought it is timely to provide the list of the presentations and their links first:

Press Release: MOSSA Roundtable 07 December 2006

Image: Moderator of the MOSSA Roundtable  - Y.Bhg. Dato’ Lee Ow Kim, Chairman of the Federation of Malaysian Manufacturers (FMM) ICT and Multimedia Committee

MOSSA (Malaysia Open Source Software Alliance) just issued a Press Release, "MOSSA Roundtable 07 December 2006" found here.

Excerpt:

"...the overwhelming consensus arising from the roundtable (consisting of leaders of the open source community, the United Nations Development Programme, and leading software vendors) was that open standards is a key ingredient in the neutral choice between either open source or proprietary software.

“This roundtable is critical in terms of ensuring that the OSS and all activities around it is not misunderstood. It is clear that the participants are for software neutrality, and a higher degree of competitiveness to enhance the overall industry, and put forth better and more cost-economical solutions for customers. It is the seed that inspires a soon-to-be-crafted customer charter, which will inevitably enhance the marketability of OSS products and hopefully map Malaysia in the global arena,” said Dato’ Lee."

"Position Statement on Software Neutrality and Openness" from MOSSA (Malaysia Open Source Software Alliance)

On Thursday, 7 December 2006, a Round Table discussion was conducted by MOSSA (Malaysia Open Source Software Alliance) at the office of the New Straits Times newspaper in Bangsar, Kuala Lumpur. MOSSA consists of ICT solution developers and providers, associations, groups, users and individuals. The Round Table discussed an announcement by the Malaysian Government on software neutrality.

Formation Of The Dynamic Coalition On Open Standards (DCOS)

The Dynamic Coalition On Open Standards (DCOS) is being formed. Several excerpts from this article at Computer Review On Line:-

"Sun Microsystems Inc and like-minded organizations will promote the use of open standards, including the OpenDocument Format much feared by Microsoft Corp, at the Internet Governance Forum summit this week in Athens, Greece."

"This DCOS, which is not believed to yet have any kind of formal IGF or intergovernmental endorsement, will present two papers for discussion at a workshop in Athens on Thursday.

The papers, available for viewing now at cptech.org, argue that adopting open standards is useful to spur adoption of the internet in developing countries, and that open standards are currently "in jeopardy" due to vendors plugging proprietary interfaces.

The social value of interfaces has increased; so has their business value," the paper says. Software patents and proprietary APIs "are now being used to manipulate the direction of the network effect and to thwart widespread interoperability of computer programs" and this, the paper says, "will be particularly harmful to developing countries."

Another paper to be discussed deals specifically with government procurement practices. It addresses government as tech buyer, tech policymaker and tech producer, and in each context urges governments to support open standards.

Governments should "ban procurement policies from requiring compatibility with proprietary technologies or proprietary ICT standards" and "ban procurement policies from specifying particular brands, manufacturers, or products", the paper says.

"'Openness' is best judged by the number of competing, fully substitutable implementations of the standard," the paper suggests."

"The DCOS coalition may have one influential ally in the form of Vint Cerf, the co-inventor of TCP/IP, Google vice president and chairman of ICANN. While he does not appear to be directly involved in Thursday's workshop, he advocated similar beliefs during prepared remarks at the IGF opening ceremony in Athens yesterday.

"Digital documents often need to be interpreted by special software packages to be rendered in understandable form," he said, according to an IGF transcript. "Steps are needed to assure that the information we accumulate today will be usable not merely decades but centuries and even millennia into the future."

Mansur

Happy Deepavali and Selamat Hari Raya Aidilfitri

As we approach the weekend and the coming week which many Malaysians will take a one-week holiday, on behalf of the bloggers at Open Malaysia blog, here's wishing all a Happy Deepavali (Saturday, 21 October 2006) and Selamat Hari Raya Aidilfitri (Tuesday, 24 October 2006)!!!

The wish is especially for all Malaysians who celebrate all festivals of all races in the country by hosting each other at our Open House, and it also goes to all our worldwide readers who celebrate these two festivals.

In the spirit of Hari Raya, here's also humbly asking for forgiveness, maaf zahir dan batin, from us bloggers here.

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.

Open innovation - IBM Innovation Center launched in Malaysia

Photo: Steve Wilkins, Director ISV & Developer Relations, IBM Asia Pacific, Voon Seng Chuan, Managing Director, IBM Malaysia and Rashmy Chatterjee, Director IBM Software Group ASEAN/South Asia officially launching the IIC

Voon Seng Chuan, Managing Director of IBM Malaysia during his welcome speech at the official launch of the IBM Innovation Center (IIC) for Business Partners yesterday emphasized that innovation (unlike invention) is more often done collaboratively with others than done alone, and IBM has chosen not to be in the business of developing software applications -- thus the IBM Innovation Center for Business Partners allows for such open innovation, to create and enhance solutions of joint clients of IBM and IBM's partners.

The press release for the launch is here.

The Star covered the launch as follows: IBM makes Malaysia Asean hub
Excerpts:

"IBM chose Malaysia due to the country's strong developer base and the excellent IT infrastructure and facilities here," he said after the opening of Kuala Lumpur ICC [should be IIC] yesterday.

Voon said the setting up of the ICC [should be IIC] in Malaysia to serve the Asean region was testimony to IBM’s commitment to support and collaborate with its business partners to generate more innovative solutions for their customers.

Sited at IBM Malaysia’s new office in Bandar Utama, the ICC [should be IIC] will provide the tools and hands-on support that will help IBM business partners to build, port and test their solutions and industrial applications on IBM hardware and software platforms.

It will also help IBM's business partners cut their development costs, shorten their sales cycle, leverage on innovation to compete and get their applications to market faster.

IBM also provides hands-on workshops and technical seminars to help developers update their technical skills on key IBM technologies.

On top of the workshops and seminars, the ICC [should be IIC] will also provide assistance on prototype and proof-of-concept development, porting and testing services, validation, integration testing, performance and scalability testing, technical support and secure remote virtual private network (VPN)...

...The Kuala Lumpur ICC [should be IIC] is one of IBM’s 32 ICCs [should be IICs] worldwide and the sixth in the Asia-Pacific after Seoul, Tokyo, Bangalore, Shanghai and Sydney.

The software platforms provided at the center includes Linux, the most exciting open source operating system that has been gaining acceptance by the the marketplace, including in Malaysia.  There is also emphasis on SOA (service oriented architecture) in the development of solutions by ISVs (independent software vendors) signing up at the IIC.

An earlier coverage of IBM Innovation Centers worldwide was by CIO Magazine:
IBM to Open Innovation Centers to Startups, VCs
Excerpt:

IBM can give startups free advice on how best to approach markets outside their home countries, for instance, how a company in China can sell its offerings in the U.S., Clark said. Startups also can talk to IBM’s technical architects either face-to-face in the centers or remotely from their phones or computers to take advantage of their specific areas of expertise.

Thus, another role of the IIC is to help partners go to market, locally and globally.

Other news coverage on the launch:

The Edge Daily: IBM opens first Asean Innovation Centre in KL
Excerpt:

The RM10 million investment included skilled resource, equipment, state-of-the-art facilities and networking

Business Times, The New Straits Times: IBM Innovation Center launched in KL
Excerpt:

IBM also provides business partners with resources to help them accelerate the development of open standards-based and small and medium business-focused solutions.

MNCC 2006 Open Source Award Winner

This is slightly delayed as I have been busy but as is said, better late then never, eh? Well, MNCC announced the winners of the 2006 Open Source Award, as follows:

The winning Open Source Software for 2006 is ‘Forensic Investigations  & Recovery Systems (FIRST) LIVE CD 1.2.0’ developed by a team from MIMOS Cyberspace Security Lab and led by Mr. Azril Azam Abdul Rahim. The software is a complete system built on top of a collection of open source software solutions that has been posted onto a bootable CDROM. FIRST aims to provide the ideal system environment to handle security, incident response and computer forensics. The software compares favorably with other competing products and unofficially holds the record for the smallest distribution, fastest boot-up sequence and lowest minimum memory requirements.

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):

IBM extends open source suppport

At LinuxWorld San Francisco on 15 August 2006, IBM annouced new initiatives for open source beyond Linux support.

IBM press release: IBM unveils development roadmap and business strategy for open source beyond Linux

Excerpt:
"IBM unveiled eight key open source initiatives beyond Linux, aimed at accelerating the adoption of open standards and extending existing product lines to reach new customers.  IBM also announced new work with the open source community to improve the development of general Linux kernel functionality, expanding its Linux focus around virtualization, Cell processor technologies, and security."

Links to news coverage on the announcement as below.

• ZDNet: IBM's open source expansion could speed up IT commoditization
  Excerpt:
  "This is an aggressive move by IBM which could speed up the commoditization of the IT sector and benefit its massive IT services business groups. But IBM  has a lot of proprietary technologies that are in the path of the open-source steamroller, and the trick will be to figure out which ones to develop further and which ones to leave behind."
• CRN: IBM Plans Big Push Beyond Linux Into Open Source
  Excerpt:
  "The company will push the Eclipse Rich Client Platform for hosting cross platform applications, Eclipse frameworks for development, Web application servers based on Geronimo, open source database Apache Derby and license-free IBM DB2 Express-C, the Aperi open source management project, open hardware organizations, Open Grid Services Architecture and Globus Alliance."
• VARBusiness: Linuxworld: New Opportunities For VARs In Open Source
  Excerpt:
  "Big Blue officials also announced its participation in new open-source projects designed to improve Linux kernel functionality and to expand its Linux focus around virtualization, cell-processor technologies and security. Looking beyond Linux, IBM's software, hardware and services organizations are using open-source business models to target opportunities in client-side middleware, development tools, Web application servers, data servers, systems management, open hardware architectures, grid computing, and IBM Research, business consulting and technology services."

Open innovation in Government - Part 2

Continuing from my previous post (part 1) on the MOSTI-IBM seminar on 15 August 2006 on Innovative Government Insights...

The three speakers, Krishna Giri, John Moran and Todd Ramsey delved into why innovation is important for the Government, what areas there needs to be innovation (including the two roles of Government in innovation) and how to be innovative.

Krishna presented the Global CEO Study 2006 but focused from the viewpoint of Public Sector, as the study did also interview Public Sector leaders. Three key themes emerged from the study:

1. Enhance existing capabilities and develop new business models
2. Collaborate and drive innovation
3. Integrate business and technology

Business models

Not only did the overall study find that business models matter, it matters even more for Public Sector (slide 9). The trend is that Governments are continually finding ways of operating differently. Outsourcing/shared services is one obvious choice Krishna mentioned. Other market-based examples listed by Krishna included competitive sourcing, public-private sector partnerships, competitive grants and auctions.

My comment is that the Malaysian Government, too, have explored several models, e.g. BOO (build, operate, own), but I recommend further reading of the source cited by Krishna, i.e. Six Trends Transforming Government:

• Trend 1. Changing rules
• Trend 2. Using performance management
• Trend 3. Providing competition, choice and incentives
• Trend 4. Performing on demand
• Trend 5. Engaging citizens
• Trend 6. Using networks and partnerships

Forward with Freedom

Merdeka is right around the corner, and talks of freedom are in the air.  For those of you that do not know, Merdeka means "Independence" and Malaysia's indepedence from its British colonialists on 31st August 1957.

For those of you who have been keeping track of this blog, then you might have heard of my booth at PCFair promoting Free and Open Source Software.  The event was a complete success and this is an important step towards software freedom.  As I don't want to repeat myself you can just read my blog post.  On an interesting note, from the various people I spoke to during the PCFair, there appears to be a greater adoption of OpenOffice in Malaysia that I have not heard of.  Even one of the visitors to our booth indicated that "It is pretty common now adays" which really startled me off.

Similarly in the upcoming month on Saturday 16th September 2006, is Software Freedom Day (SFD).  Though I don't have anything planned, this was celebrated last year by our advocacy efforts in Low Yat Plaza.

Tomorrow night would also mark my anniversary in taking over the MyOSS Meetups a year ago.

Freedom for me is on full throttle (well maybe not) and after the PCFair, I feel revitalized into making the Free and Open Source Community in Malaysia stronger.