Malaysian open source growth

I read an interest article on one of the Malaysian wires last night about the continued and future growth of open source in Malaysia. The expectation is that the open source economy will grow from RM420 million to RM800 million over the next two years - an impressive rate of growth. In part this growth is being stimulated an RM10 million government stimulus fund.

Two things interest me in this. First, that the growth of open source in the Asian markets continues to be strong, across the board. As countries in the Asian area continue to grow their economic wealth their demand for software and hardware will increase. If their appetite is for open source rather than for traditional commercial software then the balance of the entire global software industry will swing towards open source even more than it has already. Second, is that appears to be a link between the levels of software piracy and the growth of open source. As we've seen from the BSA analysis of software piracy there are still significant levels of software piracy. The question is "Are these levels driven by a desire for free software or more by an inability to pay prices which are high by local standards?".

I'd really like to see a few of the big software vendors bring out really, really cheap versions of some of their products - say at the $5-20 dollar level - available only in the less developed markets. We'd then see if the open source advantage was real, or whether the ability to pay was a greater practical obstacle than any theoretical or philosophical preference for open source.