Writing this post from the visitors lounge at London's Heathrow Airport. I am on my way home from Singapore, where I taught a four-day security workshop. The attendees of the workshop came from all over the SE Asia region. We had folks from Vietnam and Cambodia, Papua New Guinea, Australia, Singapore, of course, Malaysia, etc. The attendees ran the gamut from lower-level admins to higher-level VPs and director-level positions.The folks were there to learn and discuss security, but we had a chance to talk over lunch and dinner about software and technology in general in the area.
I was very surprised to hear almost universally from them that they do not seek out open source solutions. Open Source is almost the solution of last resort for many of their organizations. Now, I am sure had I gone back to their offices I would have found some open source software there. At the very least most of the servers ran Linux, according to the attendees. But they don't consider it open source because they buy the Linux servers pre-loaded from IBM and other large vendors. The idea of downloading "raw" open source programs, installing them and maintaining by themselves was frankly scary to them.
One of the attendees, a director of IT at a technical institute, explained his reluctance to me. He feels that the Asian Pacific
(meaning Singapore and surrounding areas) tech market is such that tech folks are under too much pressure and don't have the
time to "tinker" with anything. They want to use solutions that work and if it doesn't work they want to pick up the phone
and get a live person to make it work. Speaking for the group, he said that in order to get that level of support they prefer
to deal with bigger companies, rather than open source communities or even open source-based start ups.
Continued
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