[dipetik dengan kebenaran dari Blog "The Naked Truth"]

Written By: Muhammad Yunus  - www.muhammadyunus.wordpress.com

I will not write a whole blog on the finals of the English category. But I could tell you this though, funny arguments from the affirmative side which their case was to make open source softwares mandatory across government offices : (1) The country spends 20 billion in purchasing software licenses to be used in government offices - Response: Nonsense! 20 billion would logically perhaps be a one whole year budget for the Ministry of Education. (2) We should make the usage of open source softwares mandatory within the government domain as it will allow the government servants to programme the software applications for his or her own special use - Response: Not all government servants are tech savvy. In fact, none perhaps are. Yet even if there are a few tech-freaks who could do this, why should they be doing it unless the government is paying them just to do specifically that. (3) It will curb piracy among government offices – Response: That’s a non-issue. The government is already using original goods. But even if, pirated softwares are rampant across government offices, the introduction of open source softwares does not automatically translates to the extinction of piracy as not all applications that people love to use are available for free or readily in an open source format. And (4) it will be a lot cheaper – Response: Microsoft and Apple are already giving heavy discounts to 3^rd world governments. In fact, if you are already using the original goods  like the Malaysian government, an upgrade would be exceptionally cheap i.e. To upgrade Windows XP to Windows Vista is less than RM30. Furthermore, open source softwares would probably need to be fine-tuned and the cost would probably lie there. But the delicate issue that was raised by the negative which was ignored by the affirmative side was why the heck a government would want to use a volatile format that could potentially jeopardize national security?  

To make matters worse, affirmative had a hung case – by then, I was at the brink of vomitting. My stomach was suddenly churning poison and concentrated acid. The second speaker brilliantly decided to highjack the direction of the affirmative from his prime minister and spoke about one particular technical software called ‘Katia’ – hope I spelt that correctly, which was never mentioned by the PM and which he claimed was used to design the KLCC towers. So, this is what instantaneously ran through my head – What the *!@#. Why the heck are we even discussing something so insignificant?

But check this out. Suprisingly enough, there were 3 out of 9 adjudicators in the final that bought what the affirmative said. Unbelievable.

Well, congratulations Alam Shah and keep up the good performance all the way to the Prime Minister’s Cup.  

As for myself, IIUM Inter-School Debate 2007 would be worth remembering. For a person with 10 active years of debating and adjudication, the experience of being allocated to Scandinavia on the fourth round to adjudicate two teams with 0 wins, brings back unpleasant memories of the first AUDC. And despite the clarification and explanation from someone, I was still very close to smashing that someones face with an iron rod for stupidly telling me that it’s a bubble round room when both us know that he knows that it’s not. But thank God I met up with my baby B, who magically turned up and cooled my burning chest with her amazing smiles and laughs. Ah…*Bliss*.