Malaysia: On the verge of an open source revolution?
The six-hour flight from Adelaide, Australia, to Singapore allowed me to finish the tutorials and presentations that I had prepared for the first LinuxWorld Malaysia 2000, held Nov. 7 to 9 at the Putra World Trade Centre in Kuala Lumpur. In March I had attended the Singapore Linux Conference/LinuxWorld 2000, and I was interested in seeing what LinuxWorld Malaysia would be like. The Singapore event attracted people from all over Asia, with people traveling from Indonesia, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Singapore, Malaysia, India, and even Australia and New Zealand. LinuxWorld Malaysia, however, was a local affair, though turnout was strong. For example, at least 150 people attended my Samba and Ethereal tutorials. Feedback from IDG suggested that more than 300 people attended the conference and more than 3,500 people attended the expo.
Because of the time differences between Malaysia and the US, we got the US presidential election results on Wednesday, Nov. 8, and the Malaysians seemed to be as interested in the outcome as they were in Linux. From the first tutorial to the last presentation, it was obvious that an enormous interest in Linux exists in Malaysia. (Although by the end of the conference, Malaysians were as disappointed as Americans at the election's unclear outcome.)
Election disappointments aside, the event was fairly standard, with the first day devoted to tutorials on Samba, XFS (SGI's Journalling File System), Ethereal, and Developing Applications with IBM Software on Linux. The second and third days were devoted to the usual assortment of conference sessions. While most of the talks naturally centered on Linux, Greg Lehey gave two talks on FreeBSD. Lehey is a FreeBSD developer who currently works for Linuxcare in Australia.
Some clusters and the star of the show
The accompanying expo, although small, had a number of very big name attendees who brought along some interesting equipment. Both IBM and SGI had booths at the Expo, while Compaq's presence was through Open Source Systems, a local company.
While SGI had a Beowulf cluster at its booth, and Open Source Systems had a Compaq Alpha-based Beowulf cluster as well, the star of the expo had to be the IBM S/390 Multiprise 3000 that was running both OS/390 (MVS) and Linux in separate logical partitions. The Multiprise 3000 stood about waist high, had one processor, and was chock-full of disk drives in simple snap-in canisters. The unit I saw ran IBM's presentation manager as its GUI, and the person doing the demos used Telnet to connect to and login to Linux in the other logical partition. I asked him afterward about running X and KDE or Gnome, and his answer was that it would require a second graphics adapter, which they did not have in the machine.
Getting involved
However, the most exciting aspect of the whole conference was the level of interest expressed by Malaysians in becoming involved in the whole open source phenomenon. Many people approached me after my Ethereal tutorial, as well as on other occasions, asking how to get involved in the open source movement.
One of the keynote talks was given by Dr. Mohamed bin Awang Lag, the COO of the research and development arm of MIMOS, a Malaysian government research and development corporation (please see Resources for more information). It appears, then, that even the Malaysian government is aware of the potential of open source software and Linux. Dr. Mohamed's talk, titled Open Source, Linux, and Creativity: A Malaysian Perspective," provided insight into how long some sections of Malaysia have been working with Unix and went on to explain that MIMOS expects open source software to play a big role in Malaysia in general.
Dr. Mohamed observed that open source software would allow Malaysia to play a part in the international software community as well as reduce its dependence on imported foreign software. He also pointed out that using Linux on older PCs was a cost-effective way of getting computers into schools throughout Malaysia and an effective way of introducing a whole generation of Malaysians to computer programming.
Representatives of IDG (LinuxWorld.com's parent company), which staged LinuxWorld Malaysia 2000, seemed to think the show was a success, announcing another for 2001 as well as a Singapore show for March 2001.
As I left the conference to head back home, I believed Malaysia was on the verge of an open source software revolution.
- More details on the conference can be found at:
http://www.linuxworldmalaysia.com/ - Information on MIMOS can be found at:
http://www.mimos.my/ - A Website devoted to the Malaysian open source movement can be found at:
http://www.my-opensource.org/
» posted by abennett
LinuxWorld.com
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