My main train of thought recently has come from thinking about ‘how can we get Linux to be recognised and accepted as a superior platform to Windows in Thailand?’. Whilst my main bread and butter comes from writing PHP websites for commercial clients, I don’t find I get that much job satisfaction out of it. It’s not like I’m doing anyone except myself and my one customer any big favours. Ever since setting up ‘Golder Software Systems as a registered Thai company, I’ve wanted it to be a player in the Linux/GNOME market in Thailand, and maybe even Asia. I’m inspired by the other Linux support players making good moves in the western world, such as Ubuntu. I have already converted a few Thai home users who are now happily doing their accounts with Gnumeric (translated in Thai) and I feel I need to start promoting it in the commercial sector, not excluding the public sector of course.

Thailand doesn’t help itself in some ways, as one Thai pointed out to me yesterday - ‘why bother with Linux when a copy of Windows costs just 100baht?’. Most people don’t understand or know about Linux yet. They’ve typically been told to just buy a hooky copy of Windows for 100baht (about $2) just about anywhere, and to hell with the license and copyright issues. Most of them will just gloss right past the odd ‘OpenTLE’ CD on sale (Thai home-grown Linux distro) and straight to ‘Windows XYZ’, mostly because ’thats what everyone else runs’. They install all the latest spyware and anti-virus this and that (typically cracked copies of the commercial products etc). They usually know someone, maybe a friend or family member, or someone who has been recommended who will help them choose the hardware, and install Windows and all the ‘security’ updates and office applications. This is usually the same person who will have to come and re-install it all again when something goes wrong, or a new virus slips through because they forgot to (or couldn’t) run Windows update. From what I’ve seen, this is typically true of home users, and of small businesses without their own technical staff, regardless of nationality.

However, at this point, not only have they already wasted a hundred baht or so, they’ve wasted their (and maybe other people’s) more valuable time getting it secured enough to use on the Internet. And, at the end of the day, in the eyes of the law they’re no better than petty thieves. The problem is, they just don’t know that for 0baht (zero == free), Ubuntu will send them a CD wish a much better system on it. Or, if necessary they’d do better spending their 100baht on an OpenTLE CD. No anti-virus or anti-spyware involved, free updates and on-line community-base support. No ridicuous license fees. Businesses with more demanding needs should easily be able to find cheap/local commercial Linux support services (e.g. Golder Software Systems and others).

So, to help Thailand help itself, what is needed is more people evangelising and converting people to Linux in Thailand, and more people doing business in that area. Let’s put Linux in people’s faces, and force people to how this ’new’ cool-looking alternative desktop setup can easily work with all your existing Word documents and Excel spreadsheets, and a whole lot more. Seeing this kind of thing on large projector screens in front of a mixed audience really impressed me at the early GUADECs. Businessmen went back to their companies and said ’this stuff works!’. With all the applications and desktop software available nowadays, we need to go out and show this stuff off on large projector screens for everyone to see.

Hopefully, I’ll find some time soon to restructure and redesign the main GSS homepage to reflect the our goals more clearly and answer all the questions Thai users are likely to have. In 6-12 months time, once I’ve cleared my outstanding client work projects and have some time (and money) to set up some basic infrastructure services (both community and business based - much like Ubuntu), I am hoping to start the ball rolling by launching a mini-GUADEC in Bangkok, aimed at GNOME users and developers in the Asia-Pacific region. Hopefully I can persuade a handful of Thai open source developers to join me and create an event that can help promote GNOME and the Linux desktop to more Thai developers and businesses. Hopefully, between now and then I can stimulate interest amongst some Thai open source developers to help find a suitable venue etc, and prepare a financial plan. We can then approach potential sponsors and make it a reality. Maybe invite Mark Shuttleworth and the International Ubuntu Roadshow along! :)

Either way, Golder Software Systems will continue to develop and support the websites, software and systems it has already provided it’s existing customers. Hopefully, promoting and supporting Linux in this way will generate enough work to employ many more technical staff, and we will thus have a larger technical skills base and workforce to draw on when supporting, maintaining and developing all of our systems (open source and commercial), both now and in the future. As it stands now, I know a few Thais now who are competent, technically-minded and can easily be trained (and/or certified) as technical engineers in such a case. I am looking for more too, so please drop me an e-mail if you are (or know) a Thai national (or even farang - with a valid work permit!) that might be interested to get paid to work on developing or supporting open source systems for Thai businesses. The kind of work can vary from a few hours support investigating small issues to larger development projects.

So there, in a nutshell, is what I would like to achieve in the next few years. My main goal is to help Thailand unlock it’s technical assets from it’s Microsoft prison, and create new jobs and export opportunities, help promote open source software in Asia, make myself and a few others a name and a living - and hopefully have some fun at the same time :) Anyone interested in helping with this project, please feel free to join me on irc.gnome.org/#gnome-th.

However, back in the real world (other than the usual customer work) I’ve managed to spend a couple of days tidying up gtranslator in CVS. I fixed and closing a few minor bugs (and a couple of crashers) and re-structured/bugfixed the messages tables in HEAD to play nicer with multiple open po files. Also added a couple of milestones for it to bugzilla to help highlight the fact that CVS HEAD will be released as 1.9.1, 1.9.2 when ready, leading up to a stable 2.0. Hopefully, the remaining GUI issues are easily resolvable and 1.9.1 will address the remaining bugs in the database (which are all related to the now-redundant parser code). Got some help from JordiMallach and FatihDemir. Thanks, guys. A new stable 1.1.7 release will probably come out shortly.

I’ve also reached a point where I needed to back up my 16Gb of MP3s and 12Gb of other data that I’ve collected over the years, sitting on my XBox. I need to upgrade the regrade the Linux filesystem on the XBox harddisk (and install a more recent distro), but I haven’t got anywhere capable of temporarily storing such data. So this weekend, I am backing it the music part up over the network to a series of 650Mb files (tar cf [email protected]:xbox-backup –this –that). As each chunk arrives from the XBox, I rename it (to ‘xbox-backup-nn’) and start to ‘mkisofs’ it and ‘cdrecord’ it (as we speak, I’m on disc 13/24), whilst simultaneously letting the XBox start sending the next chunk. This isn’t actually that bad a backup mechanism - perhaps someone should write a python script to make an easy ‘home computer full backup/restore to CD/DVD’ type script (pygtk?) based on this principle. However, I accidentally let too many images build up (I only have 3Gb to work with on the laptop), it just crashed so I’ve had to start from the top and /dev/null the first 12 images! Sadly, laptop slows to unusability while cutting the CDs. Typing this blog during the mkisofs :)