Does the culture discourage open source?
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.
He felt that, unlike in the U.S., they don’t have enough support infrastructure locally to man and staff open source-based smaller companies. I had to disappoint him by telling him that most U.S. companies don’t provide their own in-country support and instead outsource to India, Philippines and other locations. He seemed somewhat surprised by this. But it obviously raised the issue of why SE Asian companies don’t use the same model.
The rest of the group felt the same way. There was a real reluctance to look at open source security solutions, even though universally they all cited lack of budget as a primary reason they couldn’t maintain better security. Faced with a lower-cost alternative, they would rather do without than use something without a big company behind it for support.
I don’t know if this is a cultural thing, a lack of a developed market for open source support or if the “no one gets fired for buying IBM” mentality is still very much in control there. Is it an evolution that the region will make when they realize open source really does work? Or will open source never really reach critical mass in the region?
I had always heard that Asia was fertile ground for open source adoption. Maybe that was more in India and China where they have a larger base of users. I will say it is not because Singapore is not developed. It is one of the most modern cities I have visited. There is a mature business environment, so I am a bit curious about the open source adoption. I can see in some of the other areas that perhaps are a bit further down in the development cycles.
In any event, with open source adoption so ubiquitous here in the U.S. and Europe and some other parts of Asia, I can’t help but believe that sooner or later, open source will infiltrate SE Asia as well.
