This year's Gnome Asia is in Depok, Indonesia, and attending it this time is a special experience for me.
Before going, I didn't have many imaginations for this trip. I knew that there is a Indonesia local Linux distribution called Blankon. However I have no idea about how open source community and culture is running in Indonesia.
The result surprised and amazed me.
First, in schedule, several sessions attracted me. For example -
- Open source in software in shoes industry -- by Iwan S. Tahari
- My Experience as a Farmer, Trader and Principle of Village Affairs in Contributing for BlankOn Project, GNOME-based Linux Distribution -- by Rahman Yusri Aftian
- BOSS - Business on Open Source Solution -- by Jeffery Ananta
- It is really challenging to move people from Windows to Linux -- by Shobha Tyagi
- Using Linux for basic education -- is it feasible? -- by Muhammad Edwin
- Making Music with GNOME -- by Kukuh Syafaat
- Blankon installer -- by Herpiko Dwi Aguno
They covered many aspects of open source -- education, business, promotion, ... etc. Far beyond my expectations.
I'm especially interested in knowing how open source promotes and works in education and business. I'm surprised and excited to know that in Indonesia there is really a long project trying to use open source software in different classes. It is what we are doing all these years, but we seldom see other countries doing so.
Also, from this year I'm also trying to promote open source solutions and culture in enterprises. I'm trying to discuss and find out about business model for open source. The session "BOSS" by Jeffery mainly introduced OpenBravo, an open source ERP solution. I'm very interested in it.
Besides education and business topics, I learned a lot from the Blankon community.
Blankon is an Indonesian local Linux distribution, and have been developed for more than 10 years. Unlike ezgo, which is just a derived and customized distribution from ubuntu, Blankon is very complete. The developers in Blankon is very skillful and active. I learned a lot from them, and I believe that I also need their help to make ezgo more solid.
In my session, originally I wanted to talk about ezgo development, about how we made ezgo before and now, from "dirty hack" to "debian-ezgo blends". However, after the first day, I noticed that most of the audience may have no idea about what ezgo is. So in the evening of the first day, I decided to changed the main topic from ezgo development to introducing ezgo. Fortunately I did. The audience liked the idea about how we promoted FOSS. From the reaction and feedback I believe that our way to promote FOSS in schools and in Taiwan is correct. Time will prove our insistence. We are not alone.
I hope that we can work with Indonesian community about FOSS in education and business. I believe that we can do something together, to promote our ideas and projects to other countries. I'm happy to attend Gnome Asia 2015.
