About
In today’s episode, we talk with the co-founder of FOSSASIA, Hong Phuc Dang. FOSSASIA develops open source software and hardware solutions with a global developer community from its base in Asia. They also host a number of Open Technology events each year.
Some of the topics we cover in this podcast include:
– What’s the state of open source in Asia?
– What is innersource and why should companies care about it?
– How to build strong open source communities
Transcript
hi everybody i am henry badgery and i’m
really really excited to welcome you
back for the
sixth episode of open source for
business
in today’s episode we’ll be talking with
hong fuk
dung the founder of foss asia foss asia
is a global developer community that
works on open source
software and hardware solutions and they
primarily have a base in
asia foss asia also hosts a number of
open technology events every
year some of the interesting topics
which we’ll be diving deep
into today include what is the state of
open source in asia
what is in a source and why should any
company care about
it and last but not least how do you
build great
open source communities this podcast is
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let’s dive right in
[Applause]
hong thank you so much for joining us
today i’m very happy to be here
awesome awesome well we want to
get started by really getting um to know
you a little bit better
can you take us back and give us an idea
of how you got here today
yes sure so my journey
started back at the time when i was in
college
i still remember at that time
i used to have a windows device i think
that was the year of windows xp
but i had a copy version of windows on
my machine back in vietnam
where i drew up yeah
and so last year i got to move to
singapore to continue my study
and for some reason my laptop broke down
and you know in singapore it’s not
possible to get
anything copies or pirated version
and i did not want to spend a hundred
dollars
on the version of windows so
a friend of mine who who was a very
active member in the linux
user community in
nus so they um
they helped me to install ubuntu on my
machine
so that was the first time i got to
learn about
open source and decided to use an open
source um
operating system when i started to get
on board with
1.2 i realized that um
it’s not as difficult as i thought so
it’s very easy and i really
enjoyed the fact then download the
software
easily through comment like and i was
really amazed about this right
so i started to
to become regular members of the
linux user group so i think they have i
remember they have i think once a week
getting together
i joined the room i went there just to
listen and get to know people
and over the time i get to engage more
and more
but i want to emphasize it wasn’t the
software
that got me buying into the community
but the people
who involved in the community i remember
i met very inspiring people who
contributed to a certain
open source project over 15 20 years
and was very excited to talk about these
projects i was
amazed how people were voluntarily but
very happy
with their work and i still remember
people spend several hours sitting out
with me
trying to slam to me a problem and try
to
guide me how to code invite and like as
a very beginner
and these people got me inspired and and
think that i
want to be around them i want to learn
more and
i want to to get into this community
later on um
into my study right so i get to
get to know more communities
and i also realized the
potential of open source so what i
learned is
there is an endless learning
opportunities
that the community offer to you
you can learn so much you can
collaborate with other people
and i want to introduce this to the
people back home in vietnam
so we coming from emerging countries
like vietnam right people don’t get a
lot of opportunities
internet wasn’t um available to everyone
at that time
it’s difficult for people to to go
abroad or to stay connected with the
local community and i see it is it a
chance for us
to do something so i started to organize
an event
the whole idea to bring people together
to bring
developers in open source communities in
the west to come to vietnam
talk about their project and connect
with local community
and after that first event we got a lot
of uh
support from the local community from
the people
in the country and we started to
to build up on this basis we
began to to have like user roof
get together we continue to organize
this event
annually and over the year
i am the community continue to grow
and at one point i founded foss asia as
an organization as
universally mentioned in the beginning
try to
bring people together develop technology
that have to improve
lives of people from asia and everywhere
so that was my journey and
as many years of engagement in the
community
and foster open source in asia i got
invited to collaborate to speak at many
different places
and last year i also got elected to be
on the board of the
open source initiative what i want to
say is open source has given me so many
opportunities in life and i couldn’t
imagine
how my life would have been without open
source and i also met so many good
friends
through this community and i’m feeling
lost i’m happy
that’s awesome that’s really great and
and your story just
it relates to so many other stories that
i’ve heard in the past
where a lot of people you know end up
adapting you know like open source
because of the community because of the
people involved and it seems like that
was a huge part of you
becoming an open source advocate um
and i know you mentioned a little bit
about force asia during your
introduction but i love to go a little
bit deeper
and and and if you could please tell us
a little bit more about foss asia
and some of the projects that you’re
working on right now
yeah sure so um basically
um our goal of asia
the whole idea you may as i mentioned to
you we want to create opportunities to
people
around you we want to provide
access to open technology to sign an
application and to
knowledge so people can help themselves
enable people to adopt
and change technology and and make it
their own
ideas and come true yeah
so enable people to um
to bring their ideas and dream to
reality
um through a very open accent
approach um some of the projects that we
do at first asia we develop
open source software and also hardware
so you might have heard
the pocket sign lab which is the um
[Music]
open source hardware device that we
built for
um student to learn
um science experiment the entire
device is open source from all layers
from the software to the firmware
and we also release the hardware online
you can find more information on the
github page of asia beside hardware we
release
a number of open source projects from
event management systems
ai technology uh we built our own
uh desktop environment we also have our
own
uh search engine of course it cannot be
compared to google also
technology we make it possible that we
you can do your own
your own search um and we
make a very beautiful desktop
environment for our local
community so these are some of the
things that we develop in the first asia
community
apart from development we also
run many events throughout the year and
the most popular little one is the first
asia summit in singapore
and it’s been around for over 10 years
this is the it’s happened every year in
spring this is a an opportunity where we
bring
um developers from different projects
together to
to give us an update and need to connect
with um communities in asia
apart from events we also do um
education programs so we run coding
program online
like our code hit contest
the whole idea of running online program
or contest is to guide
a beginner how to contribute to
open source project not only in for asia
but in the entire ecosystem so i would
go in to train
people not like through um
school or group online lesson but in a
practical way so people can
participate by contribute to
our repository online to open put
requests
or to create an issue and get feedback
directly
from mentors on the real project
that’s fantastic it’s a very inspiring
story to hear that it started
your love for it started really at a
congregation of people who loved open
source
in vietnam and that was the thing around
was it 2009
that would have been yeah 2009
and so learning about that and hearing
that the fos asia open source summit’s
been around for 10 years now i’m really
interested in learning
from you what is the state of open
source in asia
the state of open source in asia yes so
it’s
been like changing a lot uh since 2009
right
um but i want to make one highlight here
so from being user of open source
software
companies in asia now are becoming
active participants in the open source
ecosystem
yeah if you look at the example of
alibaba
or tencent this big company contribute
a lot a lot of code in the open source
community you can check out
on github and see they always on the top
of the contribution
and again if you look at these services
you see a lot of open source
contributors are actually coming from
india and china at this day so they
playing
a very big role in the entire ecosystem
yeah
that’s it in terms of corporate and also
in terms of individual
contribution i want to give one example
about singapore because i have a special
connection with singapore i study there
possession summit is based in singapore
as you know the the singapore government
technology agency recently
open sourced their contact tracing
protocol
so based on this the protocol people can
read ar
for instance they trace together as an
effort to stop
the spread of coconut virus yeah and
earlier i think about two years ago
singapore government
um also released an application
in the uh transportation uh sector
that’s called rely so there’s a lot of
effort being done in singapore
and a lot of digital transformation
happening now in the banks and fintech
sector as well yeah and it’s like going
on all over the news
but i think i’m gonna stop here i don’t
want to go too much into detail
so i want to shift gears now a little
bit and ask you because i know this is
something you specialize in
for those listening what is in a source
and why should companies care
yes so um inner source is
the adoption of open source best
practices
within your company so similar to
um archive development approach right so
this is the way
how people develop software and in the
source
is a new form of development
that follow the open source approach why
should companies cared about this so
there’s many benefits of doing inner
source
first of all if you are a tech company
that operates
with many teams right you want to break
down the silo you want to encourage
internal collaboration you want the code
to be shared across the company
to avoid um duplication yes you want
people
engineered in the company to reuse the
code
that being built or developed by another
teams or
within the department and at the same
time it could help to
accelerate your delivery you can deliver
delivery faster to um to the market
if you have a very harmony internal
collaboration model yeah so
that’s why companies should look into
inner source
that’s really amazing it seems like
inner source is a very valuable part
of um adopting open source within an
organization
um and and that really follows my next
question which is
why should companies add up open source
in the first place
why because you don’t want to reinvent
the wheel
why should you start to build everything
yourself
off if your problem can be sold
by a solution that available out there
in the community
and if you look at the linux kernel
thousand thousand of developers from
companies from so many companies as well
contribute to the link of kernel
when you have so many people work
together
from across the border so you can have
um you can trust in the solution and
it’s better to use something to adopt
something that being viewed
by many people are short across the law
yeah yeah yeah wow
well and and and yeah go ahead
yes and it’s also a very um
beneficial model for small and medium
business with the same benefit to
usability
so we want to encourage the usability
and
using open source uh project
they already have maintenance in in the
community
so you don’t have to worry so much
maintenance
cost or security issue because you have
hundreds of eyes
looking over the project yeah
yeah well it definitely like it is it’s
not a new
a a new thing to say that companies
should adopt open source because there
are so many advantages
for those companies to do so and we have
seen a huge growth into the adoption of
open source
by startups all the way to fortune 500
companies
but one thing that we still here is you
know several companies
use open source um and i’m sure a lot of
them want to contribute back to the
community but maybe they don’t know how
so what would be your advice for
companies on how to contribute back to
open source projects they use
you can start simple by sponsor
open source event level station let’s
stay of the source
sponsor support open source project high
open source vendors
encourage your developers to contribute
back to
your upstream projects or
make a big step to release something
that you develop to the open source
community
asu all the adult open source the work
of the community
why don’t you reduce um sorry why don’t
you release your code
so that people can also make a use of it
if everyone
follow the sharing model we can serve
the world a lot of resources
and another thing that companies also do
is they actually build their own
communities
around projects and like you said maybe
it’s a community driven project
and they would increase their influence
but on the other side of the spectrum a
lot of companies are actually open
sourcing their
own proprietary code and making that
available to the public
so just on that note how can you build
or
how have you found is a good way to
build communities around open source
projects for companies
for company so um
first of all you need to open okay so i
want to say that
open as early as a possible so people
engage in the open source community they
want to
um to not only receive something that
you
push out there and ask them to use but
they also want to
um the earlier the people engage they
feel more connected with you yeah
they made them feel more connected and
um
in order to attract the the communities
as you know
the successful of any community is the
people so the people is the the key
yeah so you need to do to have
the driver of any initiative any open
source project
they have maintenance they have
contributors they have the people who
are taking care of
uh desired educate documentation so you
need to make sure that you have the
right people
who can who can drive your
community management and to make sure
that you
have a very um
symbol i i wouldn’t say simple um
you have a draw uh um the
um a good open source governance
that enable people um
in different backgrounds to join the
community and also you know
there’s a lot of things that you need to
make it very easy for people to join for
instance you need to take care of not
only
the code but the documentation you need
to have very
responsive maintenance for instance if
people
want to contact your project or want to
contribute how are they
going to contribute do you have it laid
out very clearly
um to the public some companies they
really open source but they do not
actually
accept contribution from the community
so it
it’s very difficult to draw the
community this way so it always
needs to be a two-way of
an approach so you give something you
receive something but you also give
other people a chance so that they can
engage
further and be responsive to the
community yeah
i like that idea if you give and receive
i think that’s definitely an open source
ethos
which has driven this this huge growth
and it’s been amazing because you’ve
been here for the last decade and you’ve
seen i guess so much change
which is really really exciting but what
are you most excited about with regards
to the future of open source
the future of open source
[Music]
open source now not only seen in
software
but it’s seen in other
product development as well so in
firmware in hardware and sa
um and as we heard about the term inner
source right
it’s not only around a certain
technology but it’s a way of working how
people working together the whole
idea of sharing and open collaboration
could help us
people around the world to create a cool
and exciting product and if we look at
the city situation right now around the
world the pandemic
how can governments across the continent
working together the example very good
example how singapore
government released their app so we need
more examples like this
where people willing to bring
the idea of open and sharing
uh come together to fix problems
in our society so this is something that
makes me very excited about
well hon thank you so much for sharing
all these insights today and thank you
for your time we really appreciate it
thank you very much for having me and
all the best to the open teams
thank you thank you thank you um to
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episode we will be talking to paul chang
the manager of open source enablement
and compliance at synopsis
stay safe everyone and until next time
thanks for listening
[Music]
