[ossig] ICT Industry To Get A Boost With Perks

[Khairil Yusof]

On Mon, 2006-09-04 at 14:15 +0800, Ditesh Kumar wrote:

> You are missing their point - they are arguing that govt mandated foss
> initiatives ARE skewing the free market.

It's a waste of time to respond. The best way is actually to continue
what we are all doing:

- build successful FOSS companies (that attract investment)
- ensure that the best IT professionals available are local,
  and are FOSS (eg. kernel developers, db developers etc.)
- to build capacity and professionalism by sharing knowledge

I would like to stress the building capacity/sharing part, because MS
will never due to their IPR stance share knowledge as freely as us at
every level of the ICT stack. We have Malaysian Linux/FreeBSD kernel
developers, we have Malaysians writing key components of various
software used by companies internationally. And the number will continue
to grow.

When other countries (Vietnam/Uzbek) come to Malaysia to study it's ICT
strategies, it's not Microsoft projects, but FOSS. When UN Joint
Inspection Unit looked for examples in the region, they came to Malaysia
because of FOSS not Microsoft. And when the US wants to negotiate FTA,
it's the FOSS people that represent Malaysia for ICT, because we *CAN*.
You can't represent Malaysia if you work for Microsoft, you're a local
representative of a foreign company.

And with IBM, Sun, Novell, Google and Apple all supporting open source,
not to mention the MNCs serviced by these companies that use open
source, wouldn't there be *less* foreign investment if we don't have a
FOSS capable ICT industry? It would make our industries less competitive
if our ICT service costs are driven up due to having skills heavily
dependent on an overpriced monopoly company.

It's not worth responding.

>From health, telephony, security, manufacturing, government, education
and other sectors all of us FOSS people are busy producing and not just
talking.