Building Sri Lankan Brand: Putting Sri Lanka on the Open Source Map

Sri Lanka, where do we stand?

Positives - High Human Development Index (73rd)- Good education- Good English

People 20m 8m

Land Area (km2) 65,000 41,000

GDP per capita ($) 4,000 80,000

Language Sinhala, English, Tamil

French, German, Italian

Role of S&M Businesses British empire 18-19th century

wanted control over trade. E.g. Opium wars. That is due to 1/3 sales tax on all sales.

Similarly to develop, we need businesses in Sri Lanka- They pay tax- They pay salaries - They bring in foreign exchange

LK Market is not big enough for economics of scale. Most businesses need to look elsewhere for market.

it is just good business

Why SL Brand?Sri Lanka cannot compete on services ( economics of scale works against us, and we are not that poor). - Service companies =>

revenue proportional to number of people

We need product companies - Product => brand

Ceylon Tea has brand, but before Dilmah LK did not profit much

We do lot of textile, but do not own the textile brands

Brand: people need to want to consume your products and services and prefer you as a

place to live and learn--Country Brand Index (2014-

15)

Quality over QuantityQuality let you build a brand

Creative High Margin Pursuits - Protected by Intellectual

Property, Barriers for Entry, High risk

80% of money comes from < 10% of people

"The quality remains long after the price is forgotten”

--Sir Henry Royce

Why IT and Opensource? IT is 3.5 trillion dollar industry

with high margins It touches on every aspect of

our life, and called the third pillar of science

Opensource and businesses - 78% of runs on open source- 64% participates in open source

projects - 66% give priority to a open

source option ( see Simon Phipps’s talk, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I0Dm5W-8psI )

Success StoriesSri Lanka has played a major role in opensource in last 10 years

Two success stories Axis2 and other Apache

Projects Sahana

Have you used Axis2 recently? - Brought something in Web (e.g. Amazon or Ebay?)- brought a Plane ticket - Made an payment - ..

History: Axis MoraAxis, well known Web Service framework

Four of us (Dimuthu, JK, Paven, myself) were, first interns at LSF

Axis Mora- 10X performance over

Axis - Enough to convince key

Axis players to start Axis2

Building Axis2SEDA funding (2004)- Team of 7 from LSF (Sanjiva, Eran,

Ajith, Deepal, Jaliya, Chathura, Srinath)

- Several Axis committers - First F2F and Second F2F

40 committers from LSF, Unv of Moratuwa, IBM, Sonic, WSO2 ..

1.0 release in 2005WSO2 started in 2005 ( now a 500+ people company)

Sahana It originated in Sri Lanka after the 2004 Tsunami

Deployed in over 25 countries

Currently used by 9 different organizations including Red Cross, UN, national and local governments.

Free Software Foundation Award for Social Benefit - March 2007

featured in BBC TV Documentary the "Code Breakers"

ImpactSri Lanka is well known in opensource communities

10 apache members and 100+ committers, most new gradates are now apache committers.

Have about 20 finished PhDs and 40+ reading for PhDs at MIT, Princeton, UCSC, Purdue, Georgia Tech etc. and 10+ going every year (it was about 2/ year when I was graduating)

Impact (Contd.) MRT 1st on Gsoc in 7 years in row ( SL 265 students over 9 years)

Axis2 Broke speed barriers for Web Services

Companies like WSO2 taking on top brands

People who works for top brands (Amazon, Microsoft .. )

People coming back, I talk to PhDs who want to come back very often

https://www.flickr.com/photos/ana_carrington/5165645847

Onward HoNeed to think long term and make big bets

Need to find high impact projects

Need to think global Need more companies, need entrepreneurs and VC funding ( need to think about private sector differently)

We need more from the cream of the nation!!

Questions?