Last Saturday, I gave the opening keynote of the Malaysian Free & Open Source Software 2009 conference. The speech was prepared the day before, but as usual, I will improvise some stuff, so some parts have been amended based on memory:

Ladies and gentlemen, honored guests, good morning!

Today the landscape of information technology has been transformed by the vision of free software and open source. The search engines of Google roar with the sounds of open source Linux. Our Malaysian government encourages the use of open source whenever possible. Sounds of PHP, MySQL, Apache, GPL have become familiar names in the tapestry of IT.

But that was not what it was like when I first started out as a young student in the mid-80s at the University of Melbourne, Australia. Things were different then. Concepts such as open source, GPL were still unknown. I still remember a fellow student was expelled from university for making copies of the source code of proprietary Unix software for his personal use.

I admit I was disturbed by this, because I too had an insatiable curiosity about how software worked, and it was impossible to learn more without access to the source code. I wanted to find and understand the wiring inside the software.

I remember fondly, and today with a bit of guilt, that I used to crack copy protected games, not for the pursuit of profit, but as an intellectual challenge – well ok, I have to admit I did it to play the games. The trick doing this (cracking) metaphorically is finding the wiring behind the copy protection and reversing the wires so that instead of refusing to run, it does the opposite and continues working.

Of course to quickly find the right wires to switch and crack a large program is not easy. Which brings me to the first piece of advice if you want to be successful in software design… You need to have good taste, which is kind of weird because nerdy programmers are notoriously bad dressers, fond of bad hair days and certainly not fussy about the finer points of fine dining.

What I’m taking about is of course is a taste for good logic. The feel of a beautiful idea, the taste of a mighty logic, or the fun in a great hack.

Games designers and coders are a talented bunch of people, and if you understand their logical rhythms and designs, it becomes obvious where the wires you need to reverse to crack the software reside.

The other important element of success is being happy. You have to have passion and enjoy what you are doing. To me cracking games was like cracking walnuts, a fun thing to do, but after a while it got boring. You need to do something with others and share with others to become really passionate about something.

Social responsibility is another important element of life. You need to channel your life productively - only then will you find true happiness. Cracking games became boring and I found other better diversions.

It was around this time my fellow student was expelled that I learned about the international USENET community. To young people, you have to imagine a time before the World Wide Web, when people used the Internet primarily for email. USENET was a fantastic group of mailing lists with forums and archives. USENET was also used to disseminate programming ideas and knowledge in the form of source code.

So even before the concepts of Open Source and licenses such as GPL became well known, there was this thriving community of programmers who shared their source code and learnt from others. Which brings me to the next lesson: the typical image of the best programmers being lonely introverted hackers is misleading. People are only successful in a community. Open source software needs to be grown organically and for that you need social skills. The classic example here is of course Linus Torvalds, author of Linux, who has skillfully led the Linux community from its inception.

It was through the USENET that I released software that I had written, including the one that won runner-up for best Australian Macintosh software in 1988 while still a foreign student in Melbourne.

You know, while preparing this speech, at the back of my mind I have always wondered why Malaysia has not had a bigger role in contributing software to the open source community? Was what I achieved due to my overseas education? I was thinking about it last night while writing this speech, and I don't think so: I will tell you why...

Malaysians do not lack ability. I see many smart and interesting people around me here at the conference. And I have seen many sophisticated pieces of software in the commercial world developed by talented teams of Malaysians. English, the language of Science and the Internet, is widely spoken here. However in the open source world, we have many more consumers than contributors.

Is it our education system? Perhaps an over-emphasis on exams it is a contributing factor, but I don’t think that is the main reason. I studied for 12 years in Malaysian state schools, and I survived sane and reasonably intelligent! And exposure to the Internet has made young people more worldly than any previous generation of Malaysians.

After reflecting, I suspect the reason is primarily economic. After college, it is difficult to sustain a living and have the time to contribute meaningfully to an open source project here in Malaysia. There are companies with strong support for open source here, but most companies here see little value in allowing their staff to contribute to open source.

So let’s flash forward from studying Melbourne in the 80’s to working in Malaysia in the year 2000. At that point in time, my company was planning on developing their next generation web application server, called PHPLens. An application server is a professional software framework which makes it easier for programmers to build high quality software modules.

We also wanted PHPLens to support as many databases as possible. That was the reason why we decided to open source our database abstraction library. Contributions from the programming community were encouraged so that we could support more databases.

And as this was the 3rd database abstraction library I had developed in my career, I had some meaningful experience in this area. Other developers liked it and today the library has become very popular world-wide and is in use by thousands of developers.

I have been working with and supporting the ADOdb abstraction library for over 9 years. I can tell you working on open source is sometimes not fun. You work for hours to implement some feature and then the feedback you get is that it’s not very useful. People will disagree with you. You also get cranky people emailing you in broken English to fix their problems urgently. And if you misunderstand them, it just gets worst. To survive, you need to be passionate about your work, really listen to people (which isn’t easy in an email exchange) and be committed to excellence.

I would like to show you now a presentation I did on ADOdb a few years ago. [presentation here]

In closing, I would like to ask how do I think the Malaysian Free & Open Source Software movement can advance further? Actually I think we are doing a good job. I see a lot of local companies have already switched to using Open Office or running Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP for their web-sites.

As I mentioned before, the real factors we need to look into are still economic, your take-home pay. What we need is more demand for people with the right skills to support this open source infrastructure, and an ecosystem where the pay is attractive.

We need to transition from the idea that “free software is cheap” to “free software is cost-effective”. There is dignity in work, and people deserve to be rewarded. Thank you.