It's interesting to see the different opinions on different sides of the Atlantic,

• The Times UK - Microsoft ruling will give wider choice
• CNN Money - Europe's Cheap Shot At Microsoft

What thing that really annoys me is Microsoft advocates stating stuff like, if it wasn't for them there would be no innovation in the IT world. An example of this is them saying that Google could not be successful if it wasn't for Microsoft

Before 2000, I was running an OS that was fully unicode, posix compliant and SMP optimized. It also came with a brilliant 64bit database like file system for which you could have smart folders which were actually queries on emails and audio files. This was almosta decade ago, and Microsoft failed on their promises to integrate into Vista.

BeOS desktop circa 2000

Click to view full-size image

Then there was great UI like the Workplace Shell for which some features have only been added in current desktop environments. Can you imagine current desktops working like this? Imagine drag and dropping a document onto a printer on your desktop, and another on a printer in a network folder. It would then be printed on your local desktop and on a networked one. Drag it onto a fax object, and a dialog would pop up asking for a fax number.

Part of the problem of course is Microsoft, and yes.. they did settle with Be Inc over antitrust issues (pressuring OEM vendors NOT to dual boot or provide alternative for BeOS on PCs). The other problem is that with proprietary software, if a company goes out of business, either through the actions of a monopoly like Microsoft, or bad management, or bought out by a competitor interested in killing the technology, most of the time the technlogy and software disappears and can never be reused.

This does not happen with Free/Open Source Software. A perfect example is this application for SMEs called Hula, which was open sourced by Novell. It provides a very simple to set up integrated mail, calendar servers with web interface for users. With Novell no longer committing resources to it, interested parties could continue to develop it as the Bongo Project and so useful software and technology (or the best parts of them) can continue to be resused and developed as long as somebody has a need for it.

We also highlighted this for Software Freedom Day, because with more of our media such as photos, music, videos and documents being in digital form, it's vital that they're saved in open standards. Imagine if you encoded all your precious family videos in wmv7 format, and a few years from now, it is no longer supported in Windows Hasta La Vista and nobody has the code/standards to implement it except Microsoft. Or there is a bug, that only effects you which marks all your personal videos as infringing on copyright. What real rights/power do you have then to insist that they continue support because your family videos are all so precious?

That was tiring to do an event during puasa.

First many thanks to all the volunteers who helped out.

• Maulvi - For the demo PCs and time!
• Sam - For the table and time
• ditesh, aizatto, angch, kenmin, jinny for their time
• there was one more person I forgot to introduce myself to, who was there for some time and also helped explain FOSS to others.

There was a range of people as it as a general place. The crowd was ok, not as much as PC Fair, but steady stream throughout the day, although a lot were mostly walking by. I think we needed a larger banner for the booth. We handed out all the Ubuntu CDs and a fair number of FOSS on Windows CDs. The people I talked to, were interested in OpenOffice. As I expected, most people wanted to see the applications and what they did, rather than concepts such as software freedom. Malaysians... :)

One particular interesting visitor, was a woman who said that their management forced all their users to use OpenOffice and they didn't like it. Free as in you have to use it. I think Maulvi did a good job on convincing her on the latest improvements and why it's better.

Here was our booth



The crowd at KL Sentral, spot our booth it's the red table.



Now waiting for kenmin's photos, hopefully he can upload it to flickr and add sfd200 and malaysia tags to it so we can find them.

For this year's SFD we will have it again at KL Sentral Level 1, the main area between the KTM station entrances. Unlike 2004, KL Sentral is now a major hub, so we should expect quite a lot of people traffic even though it's Ramadhan.

It would be cool to have an SFD banner hanging down from the ceiling, but Inigo's community and marketing department does not have funds like Google (yet!).

For volunteers and others helping out, the following pick gives an idea of the area of the booth. We should have plenty of space for the demo PCs and also the video display PC. They should be giving us one table and two chairs like you see in the following picture as well as a powerpoint. It's likely that we will need another table and chair for the video display PC and space for flyers/handouts.

If somebody's office could spare a table, chair and cloth cover (required by their rules), it would make our booth more presentable. A billboard would really help too, so that we can put up posters/flyers.

Some awesome dude helped us out with a portable screen + projector in 2004. That would rock if we had something like that this year.

Please comment here/contact me directly if you could help. This is stone soup event, if everybody chips in a little bit, we should be able to have nicer booth.

Full image.

Comments needed, especially the captions/highlight words on the right. Options for better images/graphics also welcome.

I'm probably going to add location and info box (find out more kind of thing) on the event, so that people can start advertising the event by handing it out or pasting it on billboards.

I'll come out with a final pdf/svg tomorrow so that people can print it out and do their own mashups.

Cheers

PS. this flyer was done in Inkscape :)