FOSS in South and South-East Asia: Lessons to learn

As the planet's largest continent (44.5 m sq miles, occupying some 30% of the earth's land and a population of 3700 million), Asia includes 47 countries and many island dependencies. It is home to the world's tallest mountains, and the most-populated countries (China and India).

Macro lessons

Strengths, weaknesses vary widely.

Asia needs its own specific solutions, priorities

Lot is happening, much is unknown.

Communication within the FOSS community is often poor (language, techie-orientation)

We have a lot to learn from each other.

Looking more closely: what works

Building local skills through FSUGs, LUGs, GLUGs (India).

Linking with academia, expats (Sri Lanka)

Official support, media profile (Malaysia)

Govt, NGO involvement. Global links (Cambodia)

Targeting local market, global links (China)

Where GLUGs, LUGs, FSUGs play a role

Malaysia, support and profile

Sri Lanka's link-ups

Most people seem to think Sri Lanka is far behind in terms of technology.

Cost is a very good reasons for a developing country to use FOSS. But a small country like Sri Lanka, there are other more important motivations: flexibility and independence.

It is extremely difficult to convince big software companies to customise their products for Sri Lanka because our market is too small for them.

For the last decade or so, we have steadily been improving the FOSS penetration in the country. With the formation of LSF, we are now becoming a big contributor, too. Apache WS work, and the Sahana Project ...

... which started to help manage the Tsunami relief efforts and now becoming a generic disaster management system, are some recent developments in in terms of contribution.

Cambodia, govt and NGOs

Vision: We envision a country where Cambodians can learn and use computers in their own language, a country that does not have to change to a new language in order to use computers! http://www.khmer.info

China: domestic,
global solutions

China is recognised as an

important country that will determine the growth and potential of FOSS, beyond Asia. FOSS in China draws support from the government, and is also gaining from local initiatives, and some ventures to promote it are helping build bridges with China's neighbours.

The China-Japan-Korea cooperation has been working on issues like Linux Standardization, FOSS Education and Training Research and Development.

Thailand, making FOSS relevant

The relevance of it all

A generation of young techies is just now discovering the potent combination of low entry-barriers into technology, sharing across what has been called one of the largest collaborative projects of humankind, and the possibility to share in (utilise from and contribute to) the skills of other coders.

Benefits for Asia

This talent-rich, resource-poor region is finding Free/Libre and Open Source to be well suited to its varied needs. Affordably priced in most cases (except for highly customised industry-oriented solutions), FOSS enables speedy learning, the ability for use across a number of computers without facing any restrictive “copyright” restrictions.

Contributions
coming in

Apache and Sri Lanka

Itojun for ipv6, Yukihiro “Matz” Matsumoto for Ruby, Hiroyuki Yamaoto for Sylpheed.

H.J.Lu (libc, gcc). Ariya Hidayat from Indonesia (KDE)

The real costs...

http://firstmonday.org/issues/issue8_12/ghosh/index.html

Lower cost, widening access

... comparing the $560 cost of a single Windows + Office licence to GDP/capita for 176 countries and some geographical aggregates. In India, GDP/capita is $462. So the licence cost of Windows is 14.5 months of average income, translated into US terms that's $42725. not surprisingly, the higher this effective cost, the higher the BSA-estimated piracy rate.

Asia, seen via distrowatch.com

Thirteen 'distros' came from Japan. China had nine – Asianux, Cosix Linux, Hiweed Linux, iBox, Magic Linux, OpenDesktop, Rays Linux, Red Flag Linux and Xteam. Six came from South Korea – Haansoft, Hancom, KoreLinux, MIZI Linux, NuxOne Linux and WOW. Hong Kong had Chinese 2000, KHLPG Linux and Thiz. India had ELX, IndLinux and Luit Linux. Taiwan, Thailand (3 each). Iran, Malaysia (1). http://www.distrowatch.com/stats.php?section=origin

Building talent

Government initiatives

Informal initiatives

Educational initiatives

Important to remember the principles of FOSS.

FOSS – a training environment

FLOSS is a training

environment that

increases the earning

capacity of communit

participants without any

explicit investment in

training; a novel form of

technology transfer? --

Rishab Aiyer Ghosh

SPACE... and Sarovar

Building domestic markets: China

Building talent

Hurdles in FOSS growth

Proprietorial software is “everywhere”

Steep learning curve

Acute need for support

Blocks in the world of education

Not taken seriously globally, yet

Poor communication within Asia

Need to build critical mass first

Target specific groups

Education

NGOs

Egovernance

Science

Engineering education

ICT-for-development, digital divide

Differing roles in Asia

As consumers of global technology (Singapore, Pakistan)

As contributors to global talent

Applying technology to own needs (Middle East: Arabisation, local banks)

2005-08-18T04:46:40