 So the question for this is how can open source help to build as a sustainable world? and it's we've sort of looked in the past about economic and Environmental issues. We are now realizing this perhaps a biological issue that none of us have thought about prior to about eight weeks ago How can SMEs and organizations would generally leverage the skills future initiatives here and how can open source build? sustainable solutions I think it's an evidence-based discipline and and to discovery of Fundamental phenomena and principles and how things work and and building on that discovery that kind of knowledge We can then transfer into technology that can help solve problems So many of the things that we enjoy now we have to say because of science. So science is inherently important to us science is inherently Driving force in our civilization and and and the part about How science can come in? From the science center perspective we've been shouting this slogan especially about among our young people that made Made a power of STEM be with you We want to empower our young people to understand The importance of STEM science technology engineering maths and in recent time We are also putting on this notion of stem plus stem must plus something else values ethics Accountability integrity all these are important things that we should bring in and stem is now moving closer and closer to integrate with social sciences philosophy and thinking And we have to start from young And science center is really Putting in a lot effort to to want to raise the awareness a precision To empower our young people to know how to use stem for sustainable Development for the goodness of the world and There's reason why science center when we were introduced to force Asia We were we have been a strong supporter behind all this and early on we saw Mario very emotional. I'm talking about how Open source is a way to help to make so-called sound inaccessible science and technology discovery and IP especially I Know I came from a university usually or you must protect it. You know must you must make the IP Money-making machine, but now the world is telling us that that's not the only way of moving forward and sometimes science and Technology need to be shared in the open way so that we can actually help the world move on like the crisis we face now So, yes science center. I Identify with that that ethos That is important. This is an apparent parallel that scientists have known for centuries since the beginning of journals about the importance of Importance, but the fact that if you have not published What is you say you've discovered and how and what your evidence is and how you obtained that evidence? We're not only can it be reviewed before it's published, but where other scientists can reproduce it or Find holes in it to meet the one reputations Then science wouldn't proceed that for forcing to is that's how science researchers how science has proceeded software did not it was pure commercial Tool and it's the open source in the last two decades has drastically changed that and it's always the same idea It says okay if you're making software, it's the user for the thing you're using before But actually it then needs to be in the hands of others rather than everybody starting from scratch So it's yeah, I the parallel is interesting I mean I'm always conscious of time otherwise we'd see it for hours So That's one you've been Previously, you're not no longer right the the sort of driver here at li I don't even know how to pronounce the name of the company. We are not see us at origin. It is origin For the benefit of the audience the G has been replaced with a nine Or a nine in but okay origin very funky The name has been folded it's origami. Yes very good and Addressing skills gaps in life-long learning Life-long education is seen as a central success factor for society And it's great to see this in Singapore What impact could you observe or have you observed? About programs and initiatives for life-long learning on recent years. What what stands out? Thanks. Thanks for My perspective I used to be in skill future and had been started my career after my MOE stint In workforce development agency. So from that aspect the past 14 years. I've been working on workforce development as well as life-long learning. So in this perspective, I think Related to the question. I think life-long learning as we all would agree is increasingly if not More important than ever with the fact that Continue education is something that we all should Continue to aspire and and to to develop ourselves So from from that aspect in terms of the program that the past years You could have seen some progress or at least from the government perspective. I think skill future Initiative is one which we could probably take the opportunity to also elaborate the fact that the government in Singapore has been very proactively trying to put in place a system a national effort and a national movement to ensure or at least to encourage Every individual citizens and permanent residents to really adopt this life-long learning mindset In fact, life-long learning is not new. In fact, it's been around since we can remember The fact that even as a nation in fact life-long learning Nation-building is based on life-long learning if I may just in the if you may just indulge me I can kind of give you a bit of a brief history about Singapore since independence Till today we actually have been really adopting what life-long learning is about from learning To survive in the early days when we got our independence in the 60s all the way to early 70s and then if we actually go on the next phase of learning to Stay ahead as a as a nation as a country a small country. We have no natural resources Obviously the human capital human resource are the only resource that we have and if we don't capitalize on it and to ensure that workforce development is in place and every individual is a talent by their own rights and how they can be Develop and harness in terms of their very best then as a country We will be doomed so to speak and henceforth from there on we find that We move on to learning to stay ahead to learning to compete because as we learned about the tricks of things and we learned about how we can survive and how to stay ahead next is naturally learn to compete among the neighboring countries and even at the global stand Henceforth we can see that the next phase in the 80s to the 90s We also go into the phase we call learning for life and today at the latest phase Which is skill future. This is learning for a new world Obviously to this various phases of learning as a nation We actually kind of progress from a low-skill low-wage country to now to date as one of the developed country where we are adopting innovation based economy and Obviously trying to also stay to survive in the industrial revolution 4.0. So to cut yeah to kind of address the The question is that how this program actually help actually from from the perspective of a Nation you find that it works only because there is close Collaboration between the government and the private sector and if this collaboration is not strong You'll find that there's always this issue about you know policies not being disseminated right now very clearly to the man in the street and obviously at the company level you can see that if the bosses or if the Employers are not Vocators of lifelong learning then the staff in the way will not be able to really harness their potential and to learn what they need to learn to be Upscale every scale so that they can cope with the uncertainty in the economy and right down to even community if you can see There are successes in in Singapore in the sense that the communities are working together with the Community Development Council every region every districts are if you can see there are learning opportunities Where people work together with the businesses the education institutes as well as individual resident in a particular constituency So these are just some success story as I could see that how as a nation we can push this lifelong so I have a Sort of brought a context question And this is I actually don't know this because obviously I've lived in Singapore for a decade, but there certainly was a Cultural norm growing up in Australia that Education was the thing you did in your sort of childhood your teens and your early adulthood and then once you had whatever level of Sort of bachelor's or master's perhaps doctor that you pursued unless you were staying in academia You kind of sort of stopped at that point and then we did something real With the continuing professional education obligations that that members of professional societies have That's fine, but even those are fairly fairly modest Is there a change in Singapore in the mentality has that mentality exist in the past And is it now a need to teach people not just at Singapore as a society has to learn But that individual Singaporeans have to switch from I educated my childhood teens and early adulthood to it's a soul engagement throughout my life to learn new skills and your approaches Yes, of course, that's the change. In fact, they were also saying that because of this Especially now 4.0 where you know disruptive for technology things are just I mean new things are popping up and so on right So if if you get a degree and think you can set it out in a career and then for life That's that's going to be a miss note. Good luck. Yeah, okay fair enough Harish I have an entire suite of things I could ask you but I Look one of our own Areas of concern is this top militia. How can open source help? Make the world more ecologically sustainable what are the other things that open source communities and organizations can do Well, I mean, you know, you the answer is obvious. I mean if you don't do open we have a huge problem and we have seen it already Defaulting to open across the board. I mean doesn't matter what it is whether it is science research work publications People learning about stuff teaching one another the content is open the more people get it the better it becomes. I mean, we have seen it empirically it's not a Wishful thinking in that sense. So we know that works and this event itself in many ways Everything that we are doing here. A lot of it is built on open technologies of one form or shape or manner So having said that I think the the the question that you're trying to probably ask is about how do we sustain it? It's this is a bunch of connected questions, but yes It's it's it's economically How do we sustain the only way we can sustain is by educating by getting people to understand what is available? What is out there talk about different ideas and and the challenge that I think jidmeng has in in the university is You know the notion that I have to protect my ideas Otherwise, how do I monetize it? aspect which is going down a path, which is actually Sadly, that's not really the a fully thought through process. What do I mean by not fully thought through is because None of those researchers and People in the university are the ones who potentially may be turning it into a commercial operation. They are not the ones They will depend on somebody else to do the job for them in the meantime between them creating whatever that was created and They hide it that they keep it to themselves and it goes out in the industry the lag period is indeterminate We have no idea if it ever goes out there So if I use that as the starting point so when I talk to Organizations and a lot of startups that I help consult with as well from an open perspective, right? They say oh we have Stuff that our VCs have asked us to pattern to protect from an IP perspective blah blah blah We don't share ideas. We want to keep it for ourselves and so on So in the end I my question to them would be so you are a so this is a startup scenario a startup You create stuff and you want to patent it. You're gonna spend a lot of money The people who end up getting the money who'd probably be the lawyers and Assume $60,000 goes to layers. It's a lot of money. They are the ones going to get the money While while you may have gotten a piece of paper saying that this has got a patent and it's got x number of years or whatever What are you gonna do with it? Oh? We're gonna keep it or are you my question there? Are you going to actively license it to somebody else? Oh, we haven't talked to that yet Yeah, because the unestated business model is it's all gonna get piled up And we still a lot of money so you're not openly sharing with it So the the the startups that I help explain to them I say why don't you just go ahead and open it up and the point about it is not about holding it back? It's but if your ideas are in you and you don't execute on it. It's useless You may have the best idea in the world Execute they say oh, I cannot present this at this event. I cannot present it in the universe I cannot write it in the paper because somebody's going to steal my idea if the person stole your idea and Executed on it kudos to him or her by you not sharing it You have you have you couldn't execute so you failed it and so that's really but and that's also the broader problem that Getting a thing out into the world costs resources, which generally means you've either got to have enormous grants from somewhere Or you've got to build a business and in practice The execution on those two things is usually that the more uncertain That's right task and so the idea of I've got an idea and it's valuable So yeah, I've seen that it's a toss up because if you are not If you don't get it seems to be an aha moment that happens with people about sharing It is when you share it For whatever it is that you shared and then you benefit from it somehow not directly That's sometimes where you say oh that was good that I did that It takes some time for that because As as as a as a as a species we share a lot of things we grew up sharing things That's how we've always been Somewhere in that system The the sharing stopped And that became a problem, but why was it stopped and why what was the motivation for the stop Wasn't it's kind of forgotten in in the midst of and more is better I'm reasonably certain that patent trolls are responsible for a lot of this not directly but because their existence creates an aftermarket for patents Spoken investors who are very very keen To have the patents because that gives them a thing that remains if the business fails And You only have to think a very short period realize what the value of that is the only value that has So the investors perspective is if I put in you know jamie denbuck's into building this business and It collapses then I walk away with nothing But if patents were secured then I've got a thing that's valuable Why is it valuable because I can sell it to someone for money what who can you sell it to for money a troll? The only people who buy generic patents who that's where the problem comes in Yeah, but that's what I'm saying but the so the it's not just this It's a bit like the arguments about copyrights and music. It's not in fact about benefiting the creators Sorry, I'm becoming a panel member other host But it's actually often this secondary market that that no one thinks about that Is changing the behavior of investors not for their own benefit Because they want something to monetize if the business fails and that distorts All of the behavior of the technicians. It's it's a sorry It is it is sustainability That is some area aspect of sustainability that doesn't feedback positively into the rest of the ecosystem Anti sustainability. Yeah, it's actually a negative Thing into the system. Let me invite audience members like these three rather interesting gentlemen here Do any of you Have questions you'd like to pose in this sort of broad area about how We use openness Finuppas also for in particular but openness generally And the the access of access to it in educational setting To address questions of sustainability Is this No, okay, maybe if I were to pause a question Sorry, oh dear. I apparently I have an urgent message. Oh question. I see yes because we have people remote God, it's like we have all this technology that's an open source and we have forgotten to use it To work out which phone has it I Too much technology sometimes right so We're all into it here we go question could Could the Singapore government open source the government code Especially when it was done Using public funds, but this is not a crazy question. This comes up a lot Um, I think actually that when I might start what have you this seems very close to your Yeah, it is close to my heart. Uh, I can't speak for the government And I don't know whether you can speak for government, but as a citizen As a tax-paying citizen I want the code that government writes that is built using tax payer money to be open sourced Very simple All of it Sorry all of it all of it Subject to national security requirements So I I don't want necessarily to say oh everything the ministry of defense does or defense science technology agency does or Any of the defense or security related stuff necessarily to be opened up But anything that is done from a public perspective for example Parking.sg As a as a it's a it's an app that allows you to Pay your parking Fees wherever you park in Singapore great open it up Let me add some stuff to I don't know what I want to add, but maybe I can maybe I can't but maybe I can check I don't know what it is, but do it. It's easy to do After all it was built using offer source tools at least one of lta's was the the on-demand bus The question I don't recall I know there was some something But again, it's got to do with I as a taxpayer as a citizen I think we should because it is our money that have went into it. However You know, I I can only speak as an individual And naturally I'm biased because of what I believe in and I think this makes a lot more sense. However, I pass it on to I'm not speaking on behalf of government but I came from university and I understand the discussion The protection of IP and the value of a pattern and so on and regards to this perspective for whether whatever that's funded by the government should be Given out for open use and so on I think there's there's a fine line to to draw right because somebody got to pay for this development and some development costs a lot of money So I guess there there should be some kind of value to say How much is in there and who is paying for it? And how can you in a way balance the At a science centre, we always talk about how do you balance doing good and doing well Doing good means you do for the goodness of the larger community But you must do well because you must be able to bring in money to sustain your doing good If you continue to do good, but you don't do well very quickly you run out of money You run our resources. You can't even develop new technology. So how do you balance that? So is this about perceived additional costs involved in making source code open or is this about giving up the opportunity to commercially exploit something it is both it's both because to to sustain that Creativity the innovation you need investment And somebody's got to pay for it And if the product turned out to be something that can benefit everybody, but there's no return one way or another So so The next question would be then how do you measure the return? Is the return in terms of dollars and cents or Or the return in terms of the wellness and the sustainability of the ecosystem So that you don't have to go and do damage control. So if let's say the return is everybody's very happy And so so you don't have to you can't buy happiness right money cannot decide Strong social capital So how do you count them? How do you put a value to The innovation that justified that huge sum of money coming in So that's one aspect another aspect is would somebody then use your your technology and they are clever enough to twist it around To make it something that you're to pay for them to sell you back I think that is another equation That's that's exactly where we turn the opportunity into how you make it available the licensing model the open source licensing model So, you know what we can do like for example, I mean I just cite a very simple example happened a few years ago Where the prime minister he wrote a a bit of court I believe it was in python if i'm wrong or not wrong on how to Play And yeah for his wife And he published a code. So when when he published the code I saw it and I said Firstly, there are few issues with the code Okay, because he didn't put a license statement on it I said, please put a license there. How am I supposed to share this? How am I supposed to use it? How am I supposed to fix it if I want to fix it? Eventually he did publish and I put it on to he didn't put it on to any specific Repository so I put it on my repository and make it a public site and put his email response to me As part of the repo as well to say, okay, this is the prime minister's code This is the code And then he said this is on mit license fine So the point about is we need people at Government level at the highest possible level understand some of these things because at the end of the day, it's about licensing When you create something as you just mentioned that what if someone takes whatever we have we have all created collectively created and then it turns it into A solution now it cost me a lot of money to even use it and then they close it up Well, the starting point is what is the license that you create that you put your whatever your creations on in the first place Uh, I personally, you know, I'm biased towards a a A a gpl type of license because you cannot close it up end of story Any other license is not necessarily in my favor in the long term It is in favor of whoever expands on it and then, you know closes our parts parts of it, which is Yeah, it's still open part. It's not So that is an argument and discussion that we have to have at government level. So another was the quote put out by government But it's also a project by project different projects have different economics and different different Yeah, because the starting point is different. I agree. But the thing is anything that I mean going back to what you just said that there's a cost involved in creating it agree But the cost was from where from tax dollars So it's your tax money my tax money and people around this room tax dollars to pay for that not something else So now for example, uh, all of nasa's imagery and and mission data Not all mission data, but certainly imagery collected during the Apollo program All of it is in the public domain But more than that everything that nasa does for that matter is in public domain Turns out there may be some Special values of the word everything but The overwhelming majority yes Is for the greater good and from their point of view, it's it's more than the united states It benefits all of us in many ways. I mean gps is another example of it. Yeah, you know, uh, we can use the data for free No issues there, but the point of I'm trying to make is that uh, opening it up Because of the source of funding to create it in the first instance Is my argument By opening it up. How are you making it available? We don't we shouldn't be in the business of we as in in this case Government for example should not be in the business of trying to create a license for whatever use what is already done It's already been thought through there's enough experience with people The legal community has been switched on to to us to an extent that is that they can understand some of the nuances They're also just significant internal costs. So look at things like one map Uh, which continues to persist in using the the nokia Engine at enormous cost. Yeah, and the reasoning is oh that way we get to keep everything secret because that way we can make money Wait, what? It's that way you can give money to nokia. I don't this doesn't seem like it makes any sense but talking to a group who implements stuff for one map for multiple government bodies on a contract basis They are pushing for Up in street map and the response is always this whole honor. We have to protect it You're just protecting your ability to give money to nokia Sorry, I don't want to beat up nokia. You're just putting to your ability to have to then go and buy a really costly commercial tool so it's It's not even It's not even that you should argue about where to draw the line. This is an example where so far as I can tell The things are turned on its head a lot of times. I've noticed that The aha moment happens like in that scenario could happen When nokia disappears, yeah, okay at which point Oh What do I do? I'm stuck. I can't fix this. I can't update this. I can't do whatever it is that I need to do That's the other it's a it's a hedge against. Oh, I'm stuck That's nothing new happening. It's it's the mother of all hedges against supply chain risk Like you don't have any brilliant. Is this an area that you would like to weigh in on? Yeah, perhaps from from my own personal perspective is that I may be wrong because the open source community I mean the awareness of the use of open source perhaps in Singapore is not as strong as in elsewhere And henceforth, I thought one idea is that if practitioners or open source subject matter experts can actively Profile their contribution or maybe tap on existing Government funding in terms of like innovative fund where institute for a lot of learning always every quarter or half a year Have this invitation to get people to come and provide solutions learning solution For example, and they can actually come together and create Open source solution perhaps and that can offer to the companies out there And then they give something like 200,000 as a development fund So I suppose there's also the awareness of what can you tap on in terms of the schemes the government already put in place likewise Even encouraging SME to go into nationalization internationalization Obviously, there are also SMB and startup trying to leverage on some of the funds to produce produce solution for for any particular industry needs that could also be an avenue for People to explore using open source solution rather than you know the more traditional That I suspect is probably going to be a more bottom-up thing as it was in corporate America 20 years ago I think if for example, even when I was in lifelong learning institute We have a fund because encourage learn SGC fund or go that cannot monetize monetize your product But essentially is to encourage others to to know about what's open source What are the magic that you can generate and ideas like what uh, mario has mentioned You can start to proliferate these two that more and more people can come together And with a common consciousness the government may take notice that actually there are a lot of potential in open source And they can actually help these people who are passionate about this area to really do something At this point in time, I suspect I made the wrong that they do not see that that that active You know kind of promulgation of the idea of open source and how we can help SMEs who are fund Straded and so on and now government cannot really help everything But if there are people who actively create open source solution and SME can use it almost for free if not for a low cost I'm sure there will be traction there as well Places to improve We've got about eight minutes left Questions anyone none Okay, sorry a question only please. I'm not I go with three panelists Is so is it appropriate? Is it feasible? to Put open source tools and systems in the hands of students when they're learning about I think this is I think this let's start with tit man certainly open source Can be and I think it is open to to students who who can't appreciate understand How to use them? So that that's back to where we say we need to start young to empower them and let them Understand and open to this open source so-called And I also want to build on what that's one say Sometimes that is the communication is the understanding If we could let more people understand what open source all about And in a way also show that young people can also understand it's not about how old and how smart you are It's a matter of understanding how to use it You empower them to go in there and open up their mind open up their world open up their applications And I'm back to the point a little bit because we need to talk about the business model that value protect or not I also want to build on what does one say Probably the open source community should also educate the larger community because There's this fear that yeah, you want me to open to you, but you're keeping something in secret Right, I let you know I even contribute in open source, but you are the one monetizing it without me knowing Right, so that could be also that mistrust so-called. I think the starting point for that I'd suggest the whole discussion by itself is This One of the major areas where open source has been successful Is all of the plumbing For any given technological artifact There's a bunch of stuff That has to work technically But in commercial setting does not affect the decision of customers to buy And often this is the overwhelming in software the overwhelming majority of the software is in this category And in that environment the not invented here syndrome is is really harmful And so it's that if nothing else Corporate in that space, and this is what I meant by bottom up I think you'll find it's already happening It was 20 years ago. It's happening in corporate America that You know Bill Gates was saying no customer has ever asked me about Linux and then it became apparent that every single 1400 company This is the same year was using Linux in some mission critical role at which point the world just went Oh Wait and the the the mine shift occurred and occurred very quickly But it was that was actually more a grounds up thing a bottom up thing that engineers getting a job done We're just picking up open source components To get it done and of course feeding back fixes because it just makes their their life easier So that is a sort of strategy for getting it in Happens by itself and is working, but the there's high level Yeah, how to address the hey, are you treating me? Am I missing something? How are you profiting? Yeah, that's a that's a real one. I think that is a very valid extremely valid constraint and concern as well I I let me I'm not going to toot the horn for red hat, but I work with red hat But I'm not pitching that in any sense, but there are some learnings and lessons that I'm more than happy to share Everything that red hat does It's it's it's all open source stuff. We work upstream. We call it upstream. We work upstream Every single product that we ship there is an open source project and an open source product A product is what we ship to our customers The product is based on an open source project and it is a two-way street Things that happen in the project goes into the product improvements in the product goes back to the project so it's a two-way street and The key message there is that we work upstream. We want to make sure that a project is successful And then we do what we need to do to make it work for the customer But in doing that we are part we are we are opening up everything to say. Hey, look, Mr. Project This is what we're doing with the project. This is how we're fixing it This is how we're doing whatever we're doing and we tell the customer This is coming from the open source project, but we are accountable to you This way you can come to us for any kind of liability We our neck is on the line for that and that's why you pay us for that And so this way it is a very transparent model and I feel I feel very happy to be in that kind of a space because It resonates with my own personal ethos as well. I'm not screwing the customer in a in a in a bad way I'm not doing bad things to the to the community. I'm trying to make sure everybody's success So it's win-win-win everywhere. So that's really what we need to do There will always be somebody is going to say, oh, you're hiding something Please tell me where I'm hiding. What am I hiding? Please show it to me. Then I'll try and unhide it We haven't so that's really the the message there, but again, it's not easy thing to do We stumbled upon it by magic Oh, that's how we can do it. But it's it's applicable Yeah, it was one of those things that happened You bring the business model out of a hat Well, that is indeed what happened, right? So it happened in 2001 when when when the when the dot com happened uh dot com boom and bust happened How do we make money? Yeah, so trying to figure out. So this is what happened. We've got a wrap As ever panels go fast too fast. I hope this has been interesting. I have a round of thanks for my panelists