[ossig] Software democracy was always here

[Ditesh Kumar]

The Edge printed an article by dinesh on "software democracy", as
follows

From
http://www.theedgedaily.com/cms/content.jsp?id=com.tms.cms.article.Article_51720e73-cb73c03a-36d04700-718984ac

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4 Dec 2006: Net Value: Software democracy was always here 
By Dinesh Nair 
Email us your feedback at fd at bizedge.com

Recent events have thrown a tremendous amount of confusion, fear,
uncertainty and doubt into the Malaysian ICT landscape. Key to this is a
purported change in stance by the government with respect to its
technology procurement policy. Apparently, some quarters want to give
the impression that we had a biased procurement policy and that it has
now been neutralised and thus is a victory of sorts. 

Science, Technology and Innovations Minister Datuk Dr Jamaludin Jarjis
in a statement two weeks ago reiterated what has always been practised
by the government. Malaysia has consistently had a technology-neutral
procurement policy, and that really is the way it should be. The
minister's statement in no way deviates from existing government
procurement methodology as even the Mampu Open Source Masterplan clearly
states that all procurement will be evaluated firmly and equally on
technical and financial merit. 

Therefore, this is not a swing nor a victory for any party. Elements who
are claiming a victory of sorts are quite obviously not up to date with
Malaysia's policy on the matter. Our technology procurement policies
should be technology neutral, based on validated open standards and
beneficial to the government and the people of Malaysia. Such a policy
would provide choice, efficiency and economies of scale to ministries,
government departments and agencies. 

Neutrality should go towards the adoption of open standards from many
different vendors while ensuring that his documents can be viewed,
modified and edited by users of other software since the standard is
used for storage. 

Given the benefits of open standards in enforcing technology neutrality
and open standards-based procurement, it is thus surprising that some
parties are objecting to the adoption of ISO 26300 as a Malaysian
standard. It does seem that the champions of "neutrality" do not want an
internationally validated open standard to be used in Malaysia in favour
of existing proprietary and closed document standards. 

One really wonders how such proponents of neutrality can, on the one
hand, champion software democracy in Malaysia but, on the other hand,
object when an open standard is to be adopted as a Malaysian standard.
Clearly, open standards, technology neutrality and barrier-free
implementation are tools to be used to pursue commercial and economic
agendas instead of keeping the nation's interests as the top priority.
It does seem that buzzwords like "open standards" and "technology
neutrality" are only used to serve narrow interests and not for the
betterment of our national software capacity.

Augmenting our national software capacity 

For a developing nation like Malaysia, it is critical that we augment
our national software capacity by getting involved in high-end (and
high-value) software development. Open source software development gives
us that opportunity by allowing us to participate in and benefit from
international and world-leading software technologies like the Apache
webserver, the Linux and FreeBSD operating systems as well as middleware
and enterprise technologies like PHP, JBoss, MySQL and PostgreSQL. 
In addition, open source software licensing is firmly based on an
established intellectual property framework through copyrights. It is
only through copyrighted intellectual property that open source software
licences hold their value and are possible. 

Open source software firmly believes in intellectual property copyright
laws on software and thus contributes to the national intellectual
property bank. The implication by some mischevious parties that open
source software denies software developers IP rights and economic value
is misleading. 

Open source software developer JBoss' recent acquisition by Redhat for
US$420 million in addition to Oracle's acquisition of Sleepycat Software
certainly show there is clear economic value in open source companies.
Which entreprenuer or venture capitalist would not want his company to
be acquired for such sums of money? 

Leveraging off the world-class knowledge embodied in leading
technologies like Apache, Linux, FreeBSD, MySQL, JBoss, Java, Com-piere
and Asterisk will give Malaysia a strong foothold in our ambitions to be
an international technology producer and user.



Dinesh Nair is the founder and chief technology officer of QubeConnect
Sdn Bhd, a Malaysian outfit specialising in the design and development
of Internet and telecommunications technologies in packet voice. He is
also an active member of the Malaysian Open Source Community and has
spoken at many events globally and nationally.