I was also an exhibitor at MyGOSSCon so I didn't attend most of the talks.

This was a good event in that the vendors had to showcase FOSS products. The support of MAMPU to provide exhibitors with spaces for free was also a good move. Why? Most of the FOSS support companies are SMEs with maybe 30 employees max, most are much smaller between 5-10. Working together with local FOSS SMEs helps MAMPU achieve it's aims of greater FOSS usage by building local IT capacity which is needed for implementation and support. As a result I saw a lot of the smaller FOSS companies that we are familiar with given a chance to show their products and expertise. It also got me a chance to meet some others that I didn't know about before.

The Inigo booth should really have been foss.org.my booth. Most of the people dropping by were people I already knew, although there were also quite a few people interested in Plone as a replacement for Sharepoint and also as a knowledge management platform. The content type approach I blogged about earlier was also a common enquiry. A simple way to fill in and organise various forms such as leave forms, claim forms etc. and then attach a simple workflow to them.

I wasn't wearing my FOSS-SM hat at the time. What we should have done there was to network all the SMEs and university booths there and get them into the loop and work with the local FOSS community. For those which I didn't have time to talk to, I picked up cards for them to join us.

I only managed to hear talks by FMM and by K-Perak. Yoon Kit as usual makes very good arguments for businesses for which IT is just a tool.

Some good points from his talk:

• We're paying first world prices for software
• With FOSS, once you learn the expertise, you can scale it as much as you want as there are no licensing restrictions.
• IT users don't want to be harassed and treated as guilty unless you prove you make sure you've paid up for our proprietary licences and adhered to our articial limits.

Although I have to disagree with his slide "Piracy is Theft". Copyright violation is not theft, it is not a criminal offense. It's not a good thing, but you shouldn't be sent to jail for copying something illegally. It's more like getting fined for speeding.

K-Perak talk was interesting, with their approach to building community centres and exposing Orang Asli to ICT. One of their main points for using FOSS was licensing costs. Their approach seems to be quite sound, including informing users of why they are using FOSS and about choices. FOSS usually works well in these situations, those that have never used a computer before don't complain about differences. That will be Microsoft's problem in the future, when people ask why they can't just click on some icons and download software for free. BTW they're using Ubuntu.

Speaking of Ubuntu, a key observation by angch, is that almost all case studies and projects that seem to have been presented were all using Ubuntu or Centos. The reasons also include technical ones, like centralised updates for RH, which make it difficult for implementers to simply have local package repositories to update their RHEL. Maybe there is a way around it, but no registrations requirements for updates is a standard feature on Ubuntu and Centos. Novell booth also featured prominently the benefits of MS interoperability and their partnership.

Common thinking would be, that well it's another big exhibition and nothing much will come of it. I don't think this was the case, as MAMPU have made this a very open and inclusive event. They supported participation of local FOSS SMEs, they were supported by local industry (FMM), they supported participation by local universities and a few state wide use and policies of FOSS were presented. They're working in an open and participatory nature. That should lead to good things. We're all in this together now to increase usage of FOSS further.

Most importantly a big budget event like this, signals the seriousness of Malaysian government to support increased FOSS usage for the country. I'm going to be optimistic on this one, and not be cynical, but I do believe that a lot of public servants would support a point that was raised often at the event - The issue of sovereignty. Using proprietary software that is the control of a foreign company, for which all revenues go back to that foreign company is not a good thing for Malaysia.