NSH's Blog Foray
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Below are the 8 most recent journal entries recorded in the "shnah" journal:
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04:32 pm
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RMS in KL, Malaysia
Richard M. Stallman, founder of the Free Software Movement and Foundation as well as the GNU project is in Kuala Lumpur Malaysia today (20 Oct 2004) courtesy of the UNDP-APDIP IOSN
programme to deliver a talk to anyone interested. And boy were they
interested if we are to just go by the pre-event email registration
numbers. Over 200 emails were received expressing interest in attending
the event but the lecture hall in KMDC can only accomodate 120 (standing room). So the co-organisers MNCC
had to inform over 100 of those registered that they should not turn up
since there was no space to accomodate them. However the actual turnout
was a bit of a disappointment as only about 100 people showed up
altogether! Maybe it is because the organisers actually told half of
those responded that there are no more seats available, but hey where
are the rest who had emailed in weeks in advance that they will be
coming along to see RMS? Has it ever occured to those who were accepted
but did not show up that they may be actually denying a place to others
who are genuinely interested? Such is the local (Malaysian) culture/way
of wastage and apathy!!!
The talk itself was good. Although most of what RMS said had been
covered by the local FOSS people in one way or another at the various
local FOSS events, there is nothing like hearing it straight from the
horse's mouth, from someone who has been there from day 1 and more
importantly from someone who has all this time held on steadfastedly to
the Free Software ideals and philosophy. RMS as expected stressed on
the freedom aspect of Free Software and how important it is to
emphasise this philosophical aspect even in an initial advocacy effort
as opposed to highlighting the non-philosophical and economical
benefits as many OSS advocates tend to do in order to make it easier
for the uninitiated to understand and accept the benefits and ideas
behind Free Software. The evils of software patents were also
re-iterated and their threats to software development (both free and
non-free) emphasised especially for developing countries.
The Q&A was quite lively. It was kicked off by some lawyer dude
from Microsoft (I was told) who challenged that the FSF's 4 fundamental software freedom
can be restated based on the user's right to choose to use non-free
software and that others should respect the user's decision and the
licensing rights of the non-free software and not try to get others to
act against it. To all these, RMS brushed them off as akin to saying
that a person has a right to say that she believes in slavery and that
it is good for the people and therefore people should not do anything
to question this. The usual questions on how to increase local FOSS
capacity as well as make the local software developer community more
responsive to FOSS development came up and to which RMS was of the
opinion that basically if there is greater FOSS awareness, usage and
deployment in the school/education system, the kids later on will by
nature become more accustomed and atuned with the FOSS culture of
sharing and community collaboration and this problem should resolve
itself naturally.
So all-in-all it was quite an exciting morning seeing the MAN himself
in action! However, I could not help feeling a bit disappointed in that
RMS's delivery was somewhat subdued. While he spoke well (without the
aid of any written notes or slides), I had expected more fire and
passion from him. Perhaps I was expecting too much, perhaps all those
years of struggle have taken their toll or maybe even perhaps he had
been advised to tone down a bit and not be so straight-talking.
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06:20 pm
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Malaysian Public Sector Positive Discrimination for OSS
Recently the Malaysian Public Sector announced its preference for OSS IT solutions over proprietary ones if both have equal merit and the BSA voiced its strong objection
to this discriminition. IMHO, the positive discrimination for OSS
is a good move as OSS can provide additional social benefits that
proprietary software cannot, like empowering the local users with
choice and technologies, skills improvement and the potential to learn,
innovate and invent.
Furthermore it is not a level playing field with the local ICT business
environment stacked heavily against OSS and OSS businesses. Many
local OSS companies are small with limited resources and many Govt
personnel rely too much on vendors and vendor-fed information.
Many of these personnel do not really understand OSS and its
development and business models and hence succumb to the normal FUDs
about OSS spread by competing proprietary vendors. While the
Public Sector Implementation Plan is an important step in the right
direction, what is important now is that the Govt. has the political
will and determination to push through the sometimes disruptive change
that is needed to bring this to fruition. Hopefully at the end of
all of this, even if it does not go OSS all the way, the Public Sector
will be less reliant on vendors and be able to go about implementing
its ICT projects using open standards in an independent and
cost-effective way.
Another looming threat on the horizon for Governments promoting OSS may
be the fear of software patent violations, especially as the US is
trying to get many Governments to recognise software patents, the
latest being Australia. The recent flurry of activity in this
area may be a harbinger of things to come what with the news of the
on-hold status of the city of Munich's OSS migration and that out of
the possible 283 software patent infringements in the Linux kernel, 27
of these are owned by Microsoft.
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06:58 pm
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Mozilla (MSWindows version) Vulnerability
Learnt about the Mozilla (MSWindows version) shell: protocol security issue from the full-disclosure ml and was pleased that Mozilla issued a fix very quickly. It is good that the Mozilla people responded so quickly.
The vulnerability affected only the MSWindows version of Mozilla, so (as usual), users on OSS platforms benefit yet again. However, suddenly realised that my better half is an avid user of Mozilla on her office WinXP system. So off I went to her office this afternoon to patch her Mozilla. That went off smoothly and took less than 15 minutes.
Current Mood:  thankful
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12:31 pm
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MOSSIA
Last Saturday (19 June) saw the gathering of some 17 people in Molly
Cheah's office for the 1st meeting of people who are interested in
forming an organsiation to represent and front small/medium OSS local
companies to pursue commercial businesses and projects. This meeting was the
culmination of several weeks of discussion (sometimes quite intense and heated too I may add!) on the MNCC-OSSIG mailing list which started with this posting.
The gathering agreed to the formation of a locally incorporated private
limited company (a Sdn Bhd in the Malaysian business terminology) which
will pool the resources of its members in bidding for relatively large
projects and tenders. This agreement to set up such a company is
of course the easy part. A few people will next have to sit down
and come up with a draft of the rules and regulations governing the
formation and operation of this company and submit them to the rest of
the initial shareholders for approval and further discussion.
This is of course the much harder part as the interests of all its
shareholders comprising individuals and small and medium-sized
companies have to be taken into consideration. In addtition the
business as well as the political realities and pecularities of operating in the
Malaysian environment have to be adequately addressed too.
But like the man said, the longest journey begins wiith the first step,
and this is IMHO a very important first step in what will be a long
journey fraught with many perils, distractions, twists and turns.
If this organisation can be set up and with time survive commercially,
it will be a very useful example and model to the people and
organisations out there grappling with the issues of how to succeed
commercially with FOSS.
Only time will tell what will happen to this company but in the
meantime I urge everyone, especially those involved in the Malaysian
FOSS scene to give it a chance and support it where possible.
The initial website for this organisation is at: http://mossia.projects.inigo-tech.com/
Current Mood: optimistic
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01:22 pm
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KUKTEM
Went to the Kolej Universiti Kejuruteraan dan Teknologi Malaysia ( University College of Technology and Engineering Malaysia) or KUKTEM
last Thursday for a meeting and was impressed by KUKTEM's determination
to use OSS as far as possible for its ICT needs, both academic and non-academic.
The institution has a strong policy of deploying ICT to make its educational
environment efficient and effective. All of its academic staff and students
are equipped with notebooks and/or PCs running Fedora Linux.
(Colin Charles will be pleased to hear this. :) )
This pro-OSS ICT policy of KUKTEM has the blessings of its top management which
firmly supports and is committed to OSS deployment. Now if only more educational
institutions in the country were like KUKTEM ...
Current Mood: impressed
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11:03 am
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Time dotCom's Webbit Service and OSS PCs
Time dotCom's Time Broadband arm has introduced their Navini-based wireless broadband access service here in Petaling Jaya, a suburb of Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. All their marketing brochures as well as the info on the webbit website seem to indicate that only MSWindows-based computers can use the service but this is definitely not true!
The webbit wireless modem is the Navini Networks RipWave 2600E. This operates at 2.6 GHz and uses an Ethernet connection to connect to the PC or internal network. Since IP addresses and other network info are allocated to the hosts connected to the modem via DHCP, it is virtually plug-n-play and there is no reason why an OSS or Mac PC cannot utilise this modem. It would have been more problematic if they had used the USB model. Only the network monitoring tool is not available for non-MSWindows platform although according to the Navini website, a platform-independent replacement should be intorduced later on in the year. Signal strength varies and in my house it is at the moderate level.
This is another case of creating FUD about OSS in the mainstream market place. They should have in their marketing info indicate at least that OSS platforms can still use the modem while not being able to run the network monitoring tool. If they do not want to entertain support queries from OSS users then they can simply state this.
Current Mood:  annoyed
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05:13 pm
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Bonobos and GNOME
Happened to read about how bonobos,
a species of chimpanzees, are an endangered species in the world and how
these peaceful animals try to resolve conflicts through love-making!
Apparently whenever they feel danger or are threatened, they make love to
help ease the tension. They surely give the term "make love not war" a new
meaning!
What has bonobos got to do with OSS, you may well ask. Well for those
who are not aware, in the GNOME architecture,
the project which is the foundation for writing and implementing reusable
software components is called Bonobo. So there you are, the Bonobo project is a really
important component of GNOME and bonobo, the animal, can surely teach us a
thing or two about how to live and to love our fellow human beings. And both of these desperately need our help!!
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10:28 am
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First blog entry
Well here I am, my first attempt at writing a blog for Planet MYOSS, after much persuasion from Colin Charles :)
We are right in the midst of a 4-day holiday break in Malaysia and most of the OSS guys I think have left town. Will be going out of town with the better half on Monday too, just a simple overnight trip. The rest will be welcomed, spent a lot of time the last few days trying to understand how the GNOME help system, yelp, works. Uncovered some scrollkeeper peculiarities on Fedora Core 1. Over the last few weeks I have been trying to learn how to use the GNOME Desktop properly. I must confess that I have never really tried to learn how to use a Linux/Unix GUI desktop environment properly before this.
So there you are my first attempt at blogging, hopefully it will improve with time!
Current Mood: hopeful
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shnah's journal