Sun: Asia's OSS development thriving

Malaysian Business, Jul 1, 2007 by Edwin Yapp

ASIA Pacific has been identified as the region that will experience prolific growth in open-source software (OSS) development, according to computing giant Sun Microsystems Inc.

`Asia is the soul of OSS developers,' says Naveen Asrani, Sun's manager (developer relations) for India, Asia South and Australiasia.

Asrani says countries in Asia Pacific have arguably the most diverse, vibrant and brilliant minds on the planet and these people are building an ecosystem that will enable OSS to thrive.

`The momentum for OSS in Asia Pacific has never been better as it has one of the largest OSS developer communities in the region in countries such as India, South Korea, China, Thailand, Singapore and Malaysia.'

`Increasingly, we see more and more youngsters in the region coming out with some of the most innovative ideas and applications that in the past would have been developed by enterprises. Many of these minds are between 19 and 23 years old, and they are creating these applications on OSS-based platforms such as Java,' he says.

Asrani observes that the OSS community is being engaged by young minds which are evaluating available OSS platforms made available for free on the Internet.

`The beauty of these young developers is that they evaluate the platform and consider what the technology can do rather than to make judgments as to which software should or should not be used for development,' he says.

Asked about the claims by some that OSS has not been active recently, Asrani responds by saying that OSS is still very much alive.

He explains: `If you look at what's happening today, you'll notice that the web has empowered individuals to be more vocal than before. Previously, OSS developers expressed themselves primarily through blogs. Today, there are thousands of groups, communities, forums by which developers can collaborate and share their ideas.

`As a result of this, individuals in the real world are now able to participate in the virtual world. This has in fact given individuals more power to connect with other people within the virtual community, and given them the ability to share their ideas and collaborate differently, which is essentially what OSS promotes.'

Asrani also says that Sun's strategy has always been to promote OSS as a viable means to spur innovation and empower developers to move up the value chain.

`As more people join the OSS community, more innovation takes place. This in turn would result in a more vibrant environment which will enable the community to move further up the value chain,' he says.

OSS in Malaysia

Meanwhile, Sun says it has experienced tremendous growth in the OSS community and customer adoption since it open sourced its Solaris Operating System (OS) two years ago.

In 2005, Sun created history when it made available more than five million lines of the source code of its flagship operating system Solaris to the public, via its Open Solaris website (www.opensolaris.org/os). Analysts and industry observers said the move by the Santa Clara, California-based company was a bold one, designed to regain relevance and fend off rivals Red Hat Inc, Microsoft Corp and IBM Corp.

`The OpenSolaris community worldwide has grown to more than 14,000 members while Solaris 10 has exceeded seven million registered license shipments,' says C P Loo, country sales director, Sun Microsystems Sdn Bhd.

Loo says that the OSS movement in Malaysia, like most other developing nations, is generally quite good.

`Malaysia stands out in the free and open source software (FOSS) movement, mainly because there's a fairly well organised FOSS movement, the media is FOSS-aware, and there is support from the government for FOSS usage,' he notes.

Despite the positive outlook, Loo acknowledges that the OSS community in Malaysia is still only at the awareness stage.

`We need to bring them to the participation stage - where the community can freely contribute to maintain the open source movement. (Thus), for a developing nation like Malaysia, it is critical that developers continue to champion the national software capacity by getting involved in high-end (and high-value) software development,' he explains.

Loo says a major challenge facing OSS today is the compatibility and interoperability factor.

"The more serious aspect is related to data formats developed by proprietary systems vendors, which sometimes appear to put obstacles in the way to compatibility. However, both proprietary and open source communities are moving towards global standards for data formats, and once open source becomes more widespread, the market forces would ensure compatibility."

Loo also says the migration from proprietary systems to OSS is another big challenge.

"Most people are still resistant to change. However, this can be overcome. Many OSS is freely available such as OpenOffice.Org office suite, a major Sun contribution. Over time, the fact that it is free is irresistible. It is the same with Sun's own Solaris operating system as well as the NetBeans Integrated Development Environment (IDE). This should over time help increase the adoption of high quality open source software."