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TheEdge: All Talk, No Action

TheEdge Daily published an article Open source: All talk, no action yesterday. Local open source people are pretty upset with the article carried by Sharmila Ganapathy, which it came to a conclusion that:

Still, the lack of open source adoption among the private sector in Malaysia indicates that most companies have, for now at least, decided it does not meet their business needs. That will, no doubt, be greeted with relief by Microsoft.

I couldn’t agree with the security issue mentioned in the article. But no points to go into that. Besides, it’s good to see Ritchie Lim’s deployment of Linux+PDA solution to their business need. And indeed it’s a cost on training of Open Source which some of the companies scared of (But isn’t Windows + MS Office need training too??)

You don’t see any statistics or data analysis showed in the article, except words from Open Source evangelist Dinesh Nair, Ritchie Lim — head of IT of Yeo Hiap Seng Bhd and Chu Hong Keong — CIO of of HSBC Bank Malaysia Berhad. These people either explained what Open Source is about, talk about their implementation experience, and address some of the issues of Open Source. It’s rather realistic and positive, in my opinion. So how’s the author came to the conclusion that “most companies have, for now at least, decided it does not meet their business needs”?! It sounds ridiculous if you could conclude this with just the perception of the low adoption rate of Open Source in Malaysia.

Nobody is going to argue about the adoption since it’s intuitively a fact at the current moment. But as Dinesh noted in his weblog, there are certain achievement by local Open Source group, and Yeo Hiap Seng’s take of Open Source approach as an example, that showed the successful implementation of Open Source. Just as other development area, Malaysia is way slow in IT deployment. We’ve used to buying intellectual property from others instead of creating ourselves. Despite of Open Source products, you could rarely see the proprietary softwares fully “made in Malaysia” too (yeah, there are great softwares, but it’s too few compare to other country).

I bet 80% of IT managers heard of Open Source, at least at the local forums/conferences held by big corp like IBM. But what would they said? “Open Source, No support.…no security (sounds pretty unsure)…who want to take the risk? I feel comfortable in what I have/am now…leave me securely in my wonderland lah…” This isn’t all of the cases, but you’d know if you’ve ever worked in some of the big corporate here.

Related stories could be found at Screenshots , Alphaque: Action Talk , Poor quality of tech journalism in Malaysia .