Press and Publications
How one student can make a difference
This article was published in the September 21, 2005 issue of the Bangkok Post.
Software Freedom Day took place on Saturday September 10 with a very interesting mix of visitors to the little stand that a group of open source enthusiasts (including yours truly) had set up at the National ICT Learning Centre at Central World Plaza.
Things got off to a subdued start with most of the early birds being expats who had read about the event in the Database. They had decided to pop by before going off to work or other engagements. While fun, at one point it seemed that the fears that the event might turn into a gathering of foreigners would come true.
The first sign that the day was going to be very interesting was when senior director (Legal Department) of the Bank of Thailand Sermsingh Sinhaseni came up to us and spoke of the problems that a large organization like his would have in changing over to open source.
The problem, said Sermsingh, was one of assurance. He explained how the bank's IT department now prohibits any bank employee to install any software of their own accord and how his own experiments into new and interesting alternative software solutions had to be confined to his home PC. The conservative organizational culture was one in which they were willing to pay anything (and often did) for stability, continuity and the assurance that someone out there was ready to offer help and support if something goes wrong.
In that light, he reasoned, acceptance of open source in large organizations was all but impossible. How, then, can open source overcome the inertia inherent in the Bank of Thailand?
While the facts are right, Thailand sorely lacks open source solution providers, it can be viewed as an opportunity. In fact, one can argue that this lack of "assurance" was the opportunity that IBM has successfully taken advantage of in recent years.
IBM is no longer a PC company and today is very much an IT consulting company, having brought the consulting arm of PriceWaterhouseCoopers back in 2004. It is a provider of IT solutions and one which is built, in large, around Linux.
The value that IBM offered was not so much technical, but rather it was this very assurance and handholding that Sermsingh said open source lacked. An IBM-delivered (or, to be fair, Novell or Sun-delivered) open source solution has the backing of a major multinational that will not be disappearing anytime soon. It is up to them to make a convincing business argument for open source, factoring in the reduced cost of software against the cost of re-training.
In other words, if Windows were priced much higher than it already is, then people like Sermsingh would have a good argument for retraining all the Bank of Thailand staff to use Linux. So he already indirectly "benefits" (to stretch the word) from open source in the form of cheaper Windows licences.
Locally, there are some open source solution providers popping up to tap into the lower end (relative to IBM) market. Two come to mind, though it must be said neither bothered to show up on that day. A particularly photogenic gentleman by the name of Danupol Siamwalla heads an open source security company called ICE Solutions, while Chatchawan Dejitthirat heads a company called Open Enterprise Systems.
OES got a lot of free publicity at the event, despite not turning up, as everyone was asking about Suriyan, the open source back office turnkey solution / platform that SIPA is developing and had supplied us for the event. OES was the primary developer for Suriyan, having been granted a seven figure grant by SIPA to turn the concept into a reality.
Suriyan is not a new Linux distribution, rather it is a preconfigured installation of Debian that provides, out of the box, all that a typical SME needs to get started, such as collaboration tools and instant messaging. It also provides ticketing for sales or a mini-call centre and a Certificate Authority (CA) to provide for self-signed digital signatures for internal documents, bypassing Thailand's woefully unclear national CA strategy.
On one level, Suriyan is a grand gesture of the government backing open source (at last). But it is meant to become self-supporting in the long run. How? SIPA wants Suriyan to become the centrepiece of many SME solutions, whereby systems integrators will use Suriyan and sell solutions to SMEs across the country. They will not be selling the software, which is free, but rather they will be selling a turnkey solution and selling support for that solution.
We had artists, financiers and people from all walks of life visit us and leave with CDs that day, but the highlight by far was when a high school student came up to ask what open source was. Already a competent programmer in Visual Basic, this young man had not had any experience of open source at all prior to the event. Yet, the way his eyes lit up when one of us fired up an editor, wrote a small program in C, compiled it and ran it there and then was just amazing. The simplicity of having a good old-fashioned C complier in text mode rather than the bloated alternatives of today really underlines what it means to be free.
By the time we were finished, we were talking about whether he should study computer science or computer engineering. Personally, that made all the hard work and hours spent ironing penguin transfers onto t-shirts worthwhile. While we did not have thousands of people visit us, we had succeeded in changing someone's life that day, awakening him to the wonders of freedom and open source and leaving him with a sense of hope and wonder as to what he can actually explore next in the wonderful world of open source computing.
I would like to thank No Magic Asia for their staff and t-shirts, Sanuk Software for Gordon Anderson, the National ICT Learning Centre for hosting the event free of charge, SIPA for Jeroen Vermeulen, the Suriyan and Chantra CDs and for printing the Open Source Philosophy, the ATCI for Dilok Guna-Tilaka and the ICT Ministry for Chatchai Khunpitiluck.
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