Kaeru's Online Journal

Partnerships are common in most fields for large projects, when you need to divide up specialization or need to combine capacity.

I use the term partnerships here, because everyone is working together in an open and transparent manner.

There are a few barriers when it comes to partnerships in Malaysia between FOSS business:

• Different competing technologies
• Hugely different capacity and culture
• Not FOSS (developed code not made available under FOSS license)
• Sub-contract and lack of transparency
• Competitors in same market

Different competing technologies

You can't combine capacities, when one company does RoR, another on Zope and another on PHP.

Different capacity and culture

There is a huge difference in technical capacity of engineers with FOSS culture (upstream development and participation, transparency) and those that work in a closed manner. If the gap is too big, and it often is, there is no benefit for company with higher capacity as knowledge transfers are one way. There are no productivity gains, as the specializing company just cannot do the job they're supposed to do.

Not FOSS

Advantages of code and module sharing, reuse does not work. No incentive to jointly improve on code in future.

Sub-contract and lack of transparency

Not a barrier. This is not a partnership. Lots of hidden problems also with lack of transparency.

Competing in same market

If there is potential to cannibalize partners' income, then you become competitors.

So finding a partner in Malaysia is probably not going to happen for Inigo. Finding a partner in EU/US is harder because, we probably are the lacking partner in terms of skills capacity. There is also the issue of time and travel. I see a lot of EU FOSS partnerships, because it's easy for them to easily meet and collaborate.

With low-cost air travel, similar time-zones, non-competition (for domestic markets) and similar capacities, can FOSS project partnerships work between ASEAN companies, when no suitable domestic partner is available?

I think it can.

It also may be the solution to some risk issues we have with growth for larger projects, for a self-funded employee owned company.

The risk that we're facing is that we need to do larger projects that are proportionally much larger than what 1-2 people can do. Finding 20 fresh graduates won't work for our model. We need 3 more that have similar capacity, skill sets and development/engineering culture. Try find 3 good FOSS people available locally, you know, the usual suspects. Then try to find if they're interested in working with the same technology. Then factor in their salaries/fees.

A partnership would allow us to avoid chicken and egg problem of large projects and building human capacity.

We're going to give a few tries at this and share the learning experiences. If it works, then we should be seeing more EU and US style FOSS SME development and collaboration happening in our region. GTUGKL has already shown what's possible. Now to extend it to other FOSS technologies.