Seminar about FOSS @ UTP

Today was a quite tiring day. There was a seminar about Open Source Software Initiative at UTP today. Mainly consist of what Malaysian government have done for migrating Malaysian agencies to use OSS.

The main speakers are Tn. Hj. Muhammad Rosli, ICT Policy and Planning Division Director,Manpower and Management Planning Unit, Prime Minister Department and Dr. Azman Firdaus, Founder Chairman & CEO, Open Source Systems Sdn Bhd.

the day started off with a boring speech my the government guy, about why Malaysia want to adopt FOSS and its current progress in migrating the public sector. I did mention to him about why the E-Filing system are not compatible with FireFox, but the answer was quite dissappointing. The answer was off-topic and seems like he doesnt understand my question. Well anyway, i dont like asking too many times, so i leave him as it is. Perhaps the guyz from MyOSS can debate more with him. :P

Next was a speech from the Dr. Azman CEO of a company that specialize in grid & cluster computing using opensource stuff, Open Source Systems Sdn Bhd (personally, i feel that using the name "Open Source" for the company might confuse new users. They might end up thinking "Open Source" is the company, not a concept, and that is bad~~). His speech was nice, with quite an input about the capability of FOSS, its future and its relevancy with ICT/BIS industries. He explains quite well about the community and how it works, however, i'm quite disagree about his opinion that to be an OSS expert requires user to give a significant amount of code. To me, an OSS expert is someone who knows a lot about the community itself and contributed (codes might be one of them, but thats only one of the many things that can be done) to the growth of the community.And on the afternoon we got discussion sessions about FOSS movement with the participants of the seminar. Dr. Azman answers were satisfying and very informative. His explainations are not too detailed yet nicely done to encourage ppl into FOSS community.
Open Source Systems also gave some briefing about LPI, RH, and Novell certifications that they plan to collaborate with UTP to create a course here. Thats good news for me because i wont need to make myself trying to find an exam center where i can "fit in".

Overall the seminar was okay, (yet i think the myOSS meetups would be more preferable to those who are already a part of the community) . The speakers are good, particularly Dr. Azman (frankly speaking the ministry dept guy are very boring~) . Not many new inputs i got however, anyway, its a seminar to pull people into FOSS, while i'm quite already in it :P .

During the seminar i also got to meet the postgrad student thats working on the UTP-HPC project and the OSS Lab, had some nice chat with him. :) . and he invited me to join the OSS Lab project and become a tester for their systems . yay!! ... :D .. i can start to come and play next week! :P. And i also got a chance to give one CD of Ks-X LiveCD to a person from OpenSourceSystems.

I'm looking forward for the LPI certification program in UTP, hope it wont be too expensive bcoz from what i know, only taking the exam is around RM120 (this is community based exam held by MyOSS volunteers,  i'm not sure if the company will charge diffrently).

- Izhar Firdaus -