Colin Charles Agenda » FLOSSAdvocacy

Open Source Saves Malaysian Government RM188 Million

Colin Charles — Mon, 05 Jul 2010 07:40:32 +0000

Back in January 2009, we found out that the Malaysian Government had saved about RM40 million using open source. In a little over a year, that number has been topped: over the past six years, the total costs savings are now quoted to be RM188.39 million (USD$58.54 million)! That’s a hell of a lot of money for software licenses, don’t you think?

Worth noting is that before the OSS Master Plan started, there were zero companies supporting OSS registered with the Ministry of Finance. Now more than half of the 4,000 companies do (53% is the quoted number). For more information, read the latest newsletter from MAMPU’s OSCC. Key takeaways:

Saved RM188.39 million on software licenses over six years
Successful OSS adoption in 691 government agencies by the end of 2009 (till April 1 2010, the number looks like it has increased to 699 agencies).
In total, 95% of agencies are adopting some form of OSS solution, 87% are using it for back-end infrastructure (here its clear there’s Linux, MySQL in use), and 66% are using OSS on the desktop! (via OpenOffice.org and Firefox)*

* – Software use extrapolated from the actual OSS Master plan, and what was in the report in January 2009. I’m sure Joomla! is also used quite heavily, but never recall seeing it as the choice for CMS in the plan.

How do you convince an entrepreneur to go opensource?

Colin Charles — Wed, 09 Dec 2009 06:58:52 +0000

So, a while back, I became a council member at the Technopreneurs Association of Malaysia (TeAM). My focus is on open source and open standards.

I would like to get more entrepreneurs building their products on opensource. I want them to harness open standards, and expose APIs so others can build cool stuff around it. I want to see TeAM help create more Malaysian tech success stories.

As an aside, I found FOSS FAQ, and decided to post a question there: How do you convince an entrepreneur to go opensource?.

Seems like a silly question. I mean, VC’s like Guy Kawasaki like you to use cheap, and highly available tools, and opensource fits that bill. But nowadays, proprietary vendors have also upped the game – they also provide cheap (free for a time period) tools. So how do you get entrepreneurs going OSS for their products? What’s your pitch to them?

foss.my 2009: are you registered already?

Colin Charles — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 07:24:33 +0000

foss.my 2009 is happening October 24-25 2009, in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. There is already a tremendous schedule, and the registration prices are still ridiculously cheap.

If you’re in the region, consider flying in by many of the budget airlines available. Also, time is running out to register to win a free netbook, for two lucky winners. I hear it comes with GNU/Linux pre-loaded :)

In other news, the foss.my team had a press conference on Tuesday 6 October 2009, and the superstar reporter from The Star, Joanne Timbuong already wrote up a good article for The Star’s In.Tech titled: Open-source experts gathering at Foss.my.

So, great program, great lineup, what’s keeping you from registering?

Software piracy, the BSA, and where’s the opensource love?

Colin Charles — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 17:25:58 +0000

Piracy is a big deal in Malaysia. Apparently, piracy is causing greater losses for the software industry, and is a billion ringgit problem. The piracy rate is 59%, which is below the regional average of 61%. Wow!

The Business Software Alliance (BSA) hates piracy. They’ve even setup an informative site, titled B4USurf. Its great to see that they run Apache, on CentOS, and are powered by PHP and CMS Made Simple. They however, don’t at any point in time mention opensource in all their information. Of course I understand why – the BSA themselves shouldn’t like opensource.

However, the Domestic Trade and Consumer Affairs Ministry plans to increase public awareness to buying only original software. They’ll also touch on the downside of pirated products. Will they then not talk about opensource software?

Its all fine and dandy to create an open source conference for advocacy purposes, but if we’re still doing advocacy after so many years, something must be amiss. Maybe enlisting help from other ministries, tacking on information campaigns organised by the Domestic Trade and Consumer Affairs Ministry might make sense, no?

Seeing ads that tell you to buy original software, just falls on deaf ears. Show them alternatives. Show them that there is no need to buy original software, after all, open source software is free (as in bebas, not necessarily percuma).

Tracking government spending with regards to economic stimulus funds

Colin Charles — Wed, 06 May 2009 11:09:53 +0000

The good news – the website to track economic stimulus funds in Malaysia is now ready. Check out: Rangsangan Ekonomi Malaysia.

Even better news, they used an open source software solution (Joomla!) to make that website happen. So mad props go out to them.

Only thing that irks me? Its all in Bahasa Malaysia, with no translation in English.

GeekCamp was born

Colin Charles — Wed, 15 Apr 2009 17:25:08 +0000

The idea behind GeekCamp started from Kamal Fariz’s tweet:

I’m going to run GeekCamp. All technical talks, single track. No offense to marketers, *preneurs, social media experts but you can suck it.

It received overwhelming responses over Twitter, and Kamal couldn’t have suggested a better date/time scenario — right before/after the MSC Malaysia event.

What is GeekCamp?
Its a platform for all technical talks to take place, in a single track kind of scenario. There will be no marketing pitches, no entrepreneurial talks, and nothing about social media — just focus on good technology talks. There will also be an emphasis on great food, laid back learning and sharing environments, and after parties.

Be a caring geek, by sharing your knowledge openly. Don’t go up on stage, to speak on git(1), when you don’t know how to use a SCM… you’ll end up looking like a git.

Do you know all the cool tricks to tunnel connections, and make SSH do wonders, with all the variety of configuration options in the ssh config file? You’re probably entitled a lengthier lighting talk session, then, I’m sure :)

Do you know how to write a search engine in about two-hundred lines of Ruby? Do you know how to index email metadata at the server level, and provide a Spotlight/Beagle styled search on the server side? Do you know all the nooks and crannies behind making Apache scale? Do you know what the most common ways websites get broken into, and how to fix XSS, and other things? I think you’ll definitely get a session that way ;-)

What resources are there for GeekCamp?
We have a mailing list, a a Twitter account @geekcamp, and a poll to decide when to hold GeekCamp.

We are actively looking for a location, somewhere in central KL, preferably available for FREE (as in ~~beer~~teh tarik).

Attendance is expected to be free, ala Barcamp style. All this of course, provided we get a free location. Food, drink, et al – BYO (bring your own). After all, you’re coming to learn, and hack on stuff.

Anything else?
Once the location is decided upon, there are thoughts to have a proper “call for papers” session. However, unlike many other conferences, the CfP process will be public, and chances are you can vote on Doodle, like you are doing for the location.

Let’s make this as open, and geeky/technology-oriented as possible. Kudos to Kamal for kicking this off.

If you’re coming in from overseas, once we have a location, we’ll recommend hotels.

Comments? Send them to the mailing list.

Takeaway

Let’s decide how many days and when it should be – vote here
Let’s decide where to hold it – a hall for the sessions, and another room for hacking/socialising – read more about the requirements
If you do want to sponsor the event (not with marketing materials, thank you very much), we’ll be looking at food and drink

OSDC.my 2009 != foss.my

Colin Charles — Fri, 27 Mar 2009 08:02:03 +0000

Just to set the record straight, OSDC.my 2009 has no relation to foss.my. They have a different theme, a highly swank location (i.e. not a place of higher education), it is not community run (there are community members in the committee though), and its sponsored by MDEC.

In fact, I’m not even sure what the event is called – it may differ between OSDC.my to MSC OSCON.my. Mad props to the folk behind the real OSDC (community run, in a different city within Australia) and O’Reilly’s OSCON, since their names are really popular :-)

Now, what about foss.my 2009? Its about time we started planning for the event. foss.my 2008 was most successful, held during November 8-9 2008, but a lot of students complained — they didn’t like the time, as they had exams before or after the event (heck, even one of the crew members, had an exam the next day!).

So, let me ask a few questions, and feel free to reply in comments:

What timeframe would work best for foss.my 2009? In terms of a month, is September or October better? Keep in mind we don’t want other event clashes.
Do you want foss.my 2009 to be longer? Two days, with two tracks, seemed to be a little short for people.
If so, how many days do you want foss.my 2009 to be?
Do you want it to run through the weekend (so maybe Saturday, Sunday, Monday)?

International folk should answer this too… because you’ll probably be coming to attend, to speak, to mingle, etc. Do you want to come at a time when Malaysia has a colourful event? Do you want to see parts of KL or other parts of Malaysia?

Disclosure: I don’t speak for anyone else on the past/current/future foss.my committee, just myself.

Open Source saves Malaysian Government RM40 million

Colin Charles — Tue, 13 Jan 2009 03:07:17 +0000

Today, Dinesh pointed us out to the fact that MAMPU/OSCC saves RM40 million with open source. That’s about USD$12 million dollars!

I quote, from the report:

Savings on licensing fee alone by adopting OpenOffice.org have already exceeded RM12 million, which is based on the total installed seats of 12,760 at public sector agencies.

Also, from the same report:

The top three applications being considered by most Public Sector Agencies are:
1. OpenOffice.org – Office Suite
2. Firefox – Web Browser
3. MySQL – Database using Open Source Technology

That is impressive. OpenOffice.org and MySQL both come from Sun Microsystems Inc. Of course I’ve known this for a long time coming, but seeing it in B&W (ok, a colour report!) is of course, most useful. Go on, and read their first quarterly newsletter. More savings to come, I’m certain in 2009.

Some Qik thoughts

Colin Charles — Sat, 06 Dec 2008 16:07:51 +0000

I was at the December foss.my meetup, something I haven’t been to in a while. I had told Aizat that I’d attempt to record the session, but when push came to shove, I couldn’t find the AC adapter for my video camera!

With less than an hour to spare, I decided to give Qik a try. It seemed to work in my initial testing, so I headed to the location and decided to give it a twirl.

Executive summary? It just worked. AeU had a good enough WiFi connection, and broadcasting Mohan speak live, just worked.

The MyOSS Meetup
Mohan talked to us about oAuth. His slides are online – Mohanraj – Securing Your Web Api With OAuth. If you want to grab the video, don’t hesitate to look at Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3. Note that there are also comments from the live chat feature – very cool.

Why is it in 3 parts? I received three phone calls during that one hour session, and everytime the phone rang, and I cancelled the call, it would end up in me having to restart the streaming. Oh woe!

Live chat? Allowed a few others to join in on a myoss meetup, without actually being there… There might have been five people chatting, with two actually being in the room ;)

My initial thoughts on Qik

Its dead easy to setup. I broadcast video now at my Qik account.
It allows export to .3gp (which I presume will work in real player on my Nokia), and mp4 (which may work on an iPod?). It doesn’t do .ogg, but neither does anything you can find hardware for commonly…
It doesn’t seem to playback in my phone, in browser (with OperaMini or even the standard Series 60 browser). It also looks like playback in the iPhone doesn’t work. I understand kyte.tv fixes that (but its woefully slow in Malaysia, so a waste of my time)
It seems to be pretty choppy on my UMTS connection. Bad Maxis… So there’s lots of buffering, before
When it buffers, it uses the phone memory, instead of the memory on the memory card… this means that with about 100+MB free on the e71, you run out of memory after about 10 minutes of video… and then it kind of hangs the phone (typical of S60 devices). It involved rebooting my phone once
The moment the connection resumes to qik.com though, everything buffered gets uploaded in an instant. Great!
1 hour of video knocked 2 bars off my battery, while using WiFi
Receiving phone calls, breaks video streaming. This is annoying. Continue recording, please!
There seems to be no way to concatenate videos together. It would be wise, considering the problem above, where you actually get phone calls…
It integrates with Twitter. So those following me there, or on FriendFeed can know when I’m broadcasting something live. Smart.
There is mapping capabilities on the website… but it didn’t seem to integrate with the GPS in the phone. Why? Maybe I need to look harder
It looks like it integrates well with iTunes… so this is a great tool for video bloggers and video podcasters… with enough adoption, I see this as being crowd-sourced JenniCAM… a way for the current camwhores to become videowhores!

There seems to be a little trend of Qik users now… han and aizat are broadcasting BarCampJB live on Qik. All in all, hat tip to @thechannelc, whom gave me that “aha moment” before going to the meetup – I saw her short clip of StartupCampKL, and was amazed that it was live, coming off an e61i…

StartupCampKL, BarCampJB

Colin Charles — Thu, 13 Nov 2008 06:07:04 +0000

Daniel (aka Mr. Messina of Malaysia) is organising a bunch of events, and since they’re on weekends, I’m going to gladly participate, without seeking approval from the overlords.

First up is Startup Camp KL, on 22-23 November 2008, in MidValley. On Sunday, I’m going to lead a session titled “Using Free Software to bootstrap your startup”. Check out the agenda. It should be fun, especially in today’s market to ensure there are no software licensing costs, especially if you’re a startup.

Then there’s BarCampJB, 6-7 December 2008, in Johor Bahru. I haven’t been there in…. ages :) I’ll be talking about “MySQL Best Practices for Developers”, where we’ll go through good schema practice, understanding different engines (and their uses), and probably a lot more. If there’s enough interest, a similar discussion on free software in business, will be there (AMP stacks, ftw!).