Passion for FOSS unmatched globally

This week has been declared Free and Opensource Software Week. The Sri Lankan FOSS community will celebrate it with an array of events to bring FOSS to society. The Sunday Observer talks exclusively to Dr. Sanjiva Weerawarna who is the founder, chairman and CEO of WSO2, and is also the Co-founder and Executive Director of the Lanka Software Foundation. He is well-known around the world as an influential opensource guru.

by Ranga Kamaladasa

Q: What's your main attraction to open source software?

A: From a company aspect, I see free and open source software the only way to make something that will stand up to be a global brand today. What we (at WSO2) are trying to do is make a product that everybody uses. We want to do what apache web server has done to the webserver market. We want to do what Windows has done to the desktop market. Basically if you turn on your desktop, cellphone, enterprise Java application or whatever, we want that to be our stuff.

That can never be achieved through a proprietary product, with a large marketing budget and that kind of stuff. It's impossible for us to achieve that with the limited resources we have.

The only way you can get that kind of dominance is by having something that is really good that the developers are even proud of. The people of course have an incentive to use it because it's free. There's really no other way to do it.

Q: So you're saying that if a software company starts in Sri Lanka and aims to go high, they have to go with Open Source Software?

A: I'm saying this for companies that start anywhere in the world. Not only in Sri Lanka, anywhere in the world. If a middleware company is going to make it anywhere big in the present day context, opensource is the way to go.

There are certain technologies that expand horizontally. Like technology that everyone uses, like operating systems. As you go up and up in software the horizontal goes down. For example, you don't need an ERP, I don't need an ERP. But maybe a big manufacturing plant does. In the case of operating systems, everybody needs an operating system.

So if you are developing a horizontal product that is used by everybody, then Free and Opensource software is the ticket you have to become a major player in the game.

MySQL is an example, if it charged $10 or even $1 for its use then it would've never achieved what it has achieved today. Market share doesn't depend on money it depends on usage. So how do you get there?

If you want to get to that point where everybody uses your product. Then the only way is Opensource. Being in Sri Lanka it's doubly, important because you'll have to spend tremendous amounts of money in marketing if you want to go the propriety way.

Q: Sahana, Apache Axis, Sandesha and Kandula, there have been a lot of opensource projects done by the Lanka Software Foundation. Tell us more about the work done there.

Maximum impact

A: The Lanka Software Foundation's mission is to take opensource as a vehicle to create a global consumer market for the Sri Lankan software industry.

Opensource has a lot of potential. We Sri Lankans have an opportunity to develop some specialty in it. The reason being, we have some of the critical skills to follow opensource, and also the knowledge where to put our effort into.

What we've done is we've created an environment for people (software engineers) to come into the organisation and work on the available projects and those projects we carefully managed and channelled in to the right places. Not only managing in terms of the technical world, but also managing in terms of how we can use those projects in the global opensource world and really use them in a way that would make maximum impact.

What we've achieved in the case of apache for example is that Sri Lanka is now the largest single contributor to the Apache software foundation, apart from Europe and US. It's not India, China, Singapore or the Philippines. It's Sri Lanka.

Apache is a well known foundation and is one of the most powerful opensource foundations in the world. We have a lot of projects that are named after our own Sri Lankan names. We were the first to do that. Before any other ethnic names we came up with our ones.

Q: And those were...?

A: Apache Sandeesha, a reliable messaging service. Apache Kandula, a transaction system, Kandula is meant as a sign of strength and reliability because secure transactions are carried out. Then we have Apache Neethi, a policy system and so on. Then of course we have also contributed to projects that don't have Sri Lankan names as well.

Q: So Opensource has really made a name for Sri Lanka?

A: Yes absolutely. There's a perception -it's not real- but there's a perception that Sri Lanka has the most per capita opensource contribution in the whole world. Within the large opensource world, there's a lot of work done by us. And we're not done yet. We have a long way to go. As I said it's just a perception, not a reality yet. We want to make it a reality. Opensource contribution

We want come to a place where the majority of the opensource contribution is done by us. The entire software industry is moving to opensource software. It's just a matter of time. We want to be the leaders of it. Not go behind it.

Q: The popular search engine company Google giving the Lanka Software Foundation Rs. 2.5 million is definitely a sign of appreciation.

A: Yes. We got $25,000 from Google in recognition that LSF is doing something in the opensource arena. They appreciated the fact and wanted LSF to do more work.

Sahana was another one of our projects. Sahana happened just after the tsunami. There was no software available anywhere in the world for disaster management. Sahana was initially created to meet specific local needs of course, and there were up to 80 people who contributed to Sahana. All of them worked on a voluntary basis.

We got together and within a week of the tsunami we finished phase one of Sahana.

Q: But Sahana didn't work out?

A: It did work out. What happened was it didn't get fully deployed in Sri Lanka. It got partially implemented in various places.

But now we've redone Sahana from scratch after the initial rush and now Sahana has become a global standard for disaster management. It's currently used in Pakistan, Philippines, in some parts of India and several other places as well. There's an effort to put it in a part of the US as well.

There are efforts around Sahana to add more functionality to it. There are a lot of options around Sahana.

It's a completely Sri Lankan brand put together by the Sri Lankan community, so it's something to be proud of. It came from within us. When the tsunami took place there was nothing like this. So we went and did it.

The important thing is many other countries did similar projects as well. India did most of the development, Indonesia made an effort but all of them have gone away. Sahana is the only one that's making it through.

Q: The reason was FOSS?

A: No. Actually the reason was LSF. LSF put together the correct infrastructure to keep it going. Of course, opensource was a critical thing. If it wasn't for opensource then no one would've implemented it. Who has money after a disaster anyway?

Q: But the software developed in other countries were opensource as well.

A: People have two myths about FOSS. Number one is that you don't get paid for writing opensource software.

Q: To sum it all up, FOSS, FOSS Community, Software as a whole, what can you say about these in a Sri Lankan perspective? What will the future hold?

A: I'm a firm believer of judging people by the level of passion they put into their work.

There are people who just work because you have to work. That's not passion.

Passion means you do it yourself. A lot of passion seen in Sri Lanka for FOSS is unmatched globally. That's hard to believe, right?

I'm very thorough with the opensource community. I'm on the board of the opensource initiative. I'm strongly affiliated with the Apache Foundation and I can say without doubt that there is not one other country that runs the kind of events that we run. We do it with a completely voluntary group of people.

And the level of passion you see here is unmatched. Of course passion means people get angry. Passion means people get emotional. People do all sorts of things. But otherwise it wouldn't be a passion right?

This year alone we have 15 different events. This week we have six events. To me if we can retain the passion and pass it down on to the next generation, get the Universities involved, get the school children involved, then the potential for the Sri Lankan software industry is immense.