What would you do with 10 million dollar?

This question "What would you do with 10 million dollar?" stroke my mind when it flashed out from the presentation slide of David Axmark during his talk about “Persevering in a FOSS business valued at USD$1 billion” in FOSS.my 2009 conference.

David Axmark is the co-founder of MySQL, the great database management system in used by many websites and applications nowadays. Somebody asked him this question few years back, before MySQL was sold to Sun Microsystems for US$1 billion.

David Axmark told us, by the time he was asked the question, he had no idea, though he sensed the investor might expect the answer something like "grow it to 100 million or more".

So, if you were asked the same question, what would be your answer?

Some of the possible answers might be...

• Employee: retire immediately and enjoy your life
• Businessman: grow it to 100 million or more
• Investor: possibly the same answer as businessman above
• Kind person: charity and social welfare, eg. build a school, setup a charity fund, help the unfortunate, etc...
• Traveller: go around the world, take a lot of pictures and videos, then produce books, films, etc. to share with the whole world about your discoveries
• Scientist: fund research to bring a better life to mankind
• Environmentalist: fund for activities to save the mother earth!
• Politician: fund for contesting in election
  
• Movie director: well, that's probably not enough to make a great movie. Too bad.
  
• many many more possibilities of answer (put in my comment page if you are generous to share with my readers...)

Keynote speech of Richard Stallman in FOSS.my about free software movement

Today is the 2nd day of FOSS.my 2009, a Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) conference organized and supported by grassroot communities in Malaysia, and the high tide being Richard Stallman's keynote speech about free software movement of more than 2 hours, right before the delayed lunch.

Well, the lunch time was delayed due to a slight delay on the keynote speech, and more importantly was mainly caused by overwhelming Q&A with some strong debates.



During this session, all the seats in the big lecture room in APIIT were full, and there are people standing around. Several hundred audiences attended his talk today.

For those who still wondering who is Richard Stallman, well, a.k.a. RMS, he is an American software freedom activist and the founder of GNU Project as well as Free Software Foundation. He is the first person who talked about software freedom back in the 80's, and also the first person who put it in action to bring the free GNU operating system to us.

If not of his great philosophy and numerous hard work, the history might changed and, the subsequent emergence of Linux kernel and numerous free and libre software might not be going as far as today.

RMS is very humerous. Guess what he wore on his head? (Hint: it is an IT product, probably obsoleted by today.) However, when come to his principal of software freedom, we see the very strong perseverance, no ambiquity, never compromise side of him.

RMS strongly disagreed some of the terms imposed by proprietary software vendors, such as "piracy". He said "piracy" is about attacking ships which is very bad, but copying and sharing software with friends is of no way be valued to compare with the act of attacking ships. We should be given freedom and encouraged to do so, for the good of the entire society.

RMS has reemphasized his philosophy on free software in his speech. He believes that free software is a matter of the users' freedom to run, copy, distribute, study, change and improve the software. More precisely, it means that the program's users have the four essential freedoms:

• The freedom to run the program, for any purpose.
• The freedom to study how the program works, and change it to make it do what you wish. Access to the source code is a precondition for this.
• The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help your neighbour.
• The freedom to improve the program, and release your improvements (and modified versions in general) to the public, so that the whole community benefits.

RMS also differentiates clearly free software movement from open source movement, and he strongly against being labeled as the "father of open source". He said free software value things from ethical perspective, while the open source is a practical movement which might compromised his philosophy.

Perhaps not all of us agree with RMS' free software philosophy in 100%, but his speech did stir up our mind to think more in-depth about our freedom in software. We need great warrior like him to keep us awake about our rights and freedom that we should pursuit for.

Comparing MalFreeMaps, MalSingMaps and City Navigator (which one is better?)

Today I'm going to compare among the map of MalFreeMaps (MFM), MalSingMaps (MSM) and City Navigator (CN) by viewing exactly the same location with the same detail setup. Then it is very obvious to immediately figure out which one is better.

Maps used for comparison (click to enlarge them):

• MFM 091019
• MSM NT 2009.30
• CN Southeastern Asia NT 4.50

The order of the maps below will always be MFM, MSM then CN. Here we go!

First we go and take a look around Mid Valley Megamall.

Then we go to smaller place, like Teluk Intan.

How about Melaka?

Lastly, we look at higher place, such as Cameron Highlands.

Now, do you agree with me on the following?

• 
  MFM and MSM have far more POIs than CN.
  
• 
  MFM has more beautiful map than the other two.
  
• 
  MFM uses better and more precise icons to display the POIs.
  
• 
  MFM has more detail lane coverage, especially in smaller town such as Teluk Intan.
  

So you should know who is the winner.