The Red1 Story

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From farmhouse to world stage - the story of red1

Imagine that you stay in a farm 30 km from town, and having lots of monkeys straying in your huge backyard where your children plays every evening. And you spend most of your time on this rented farm in Kuang, where u planted some of your own food and rear Tilapia fish to boot. You been living like this for 3 years since the last dotcom crash in 2001. Your unstable income comprised mostly part time private tution and fixing up small networks and PCs in people's offices. Sounds like a heaven for a wealthy retiree. But this doesn't seem a sustainable lifestyle for 4 young growing children to feed and you re still far from the retiring age.

One day a Telekom contractor came visiting and activated a broadband service to this farm house. This long, lone thin telephone wire is probably the only resemblance of modernity, having travelled through some kilometres along the semi dirt road, passing through a cemetery and mostly old rubber trees. In this farmhouse in 2004, Redhuan D. Oon, then 43, wondered why the Telekom contractor asked if he wanted the broadband connection when he has left the IT world for dead. That DSL line gave him a change of life that was previously unimaginable when he registered his cybername as 'red1'. Through that line, he then became the leader of the ADempiere Bazaar, a top-ranked Open Source ERP project in SourceForge. Most of the project members hailed from all over the world such as USA, Europe, Latin America as well as Africa and Asia that pooled together the best skillsets, experience and track records in the business. Now 'red1' is almost lost in his world, mostly online to anywhere these people or businesses are. He sometimes chat all round the clock organising his far-flung cyber-empire of http://red1.org. He can now make connections, establish alliances and close deals that sounds straight from a futuristic epic novel. They hardly met each other in real life, and yet they reached the world stage of an Open Source project. This autobiopic series is how a Malaysian got the chance to play their benevolent dictator.

Chapter I

Been A King in your own Garden

Today, you can find red1 spending most of his time online in his farm home with his family of wife and 4 kids. He does not rush out in the mornings to work because he has no office to report to nor any job to hang on to. He is what most people call a freelance consultant but he would prefer not to be called that either as he hated work and the suspense of waiting for pay cheques every now and then. All he wanted was freedom and time with his family, choosing when to work and where to work, which is mostly, you guessed it, home. He also wants to earn enough so that he can prolong this freedom to walk in his backyard garden of overgrown spots of lemon grass, angled beans, pots after pots of flowers lining up free zones for his wife cannot stand the sight of empty wasted land. The land his small 3-room house sits on is two acres, rented to him by a friend who kept asking him now and then what is his income to sustenance ratio.

Most mornings red1 can either choose to send his kids to school, then have breakfast with his African born wife of 17 years, then take a short walk around that wife-controlled garden figuring out what interesting blogs he can pen onto his self indulging Red1.org blogs. He has been sustaining himself from overseas projects entirely secured via the lone thin copper wire that provided him the broadband service. He would get an email or a skype log from anywhere in the world, and he has to either divert them to members of the online bazaar that he monitors based on geograhical location or skillset relevance. He has done jobs right from this farm home without ever meeting his clients and associates from far flung places such as New York, Chicago, Brussels, Bonn, Sydney, Helsinki, Sofia, Cyprus, Sarajevo, Mauritius, Cape Town, Medan, Jakarta, Cebu and of course Kuala Lumpur. Yet his actual preference is to only spend time associating with people of his genre - who goes crazy contributing all they know in software codes and documentation guides freely to the world so as to attempt to bring down giants such as Microsoft and Oracle.

So far red1 regards that target of kicking high butts a couple of years away. But at the rate things are going with this online bazaar at www.adempiere.org, it might be sooner. The ADempiere Bazaar is shaking at the proprietary ERP world with its explosive huge base of Open Source applications that can handle what most business operations want. From Point of Sales, Customer Relationship Management, Inventory, Sales and Purchasing up to Supply chain, Shopfloor scheduling and web interfacing. One SAP blogger, Axel Angeli has even mentioned the name ADempiere twice as a possible looming threat in the Small and Medium Business (SMB) arena.

Previously Open Source or freely available sourcecode software was confined to base level utilities such as Linux and MySQL. Now with ADempiere it has moved up the rung into more high-worth business applications that SMBs can really use. The worldwide consultants that join ADempiere are either those who are using it for their own companies or are doing it for their clients. They pocketed the earnings or contribute back by soliciting other seniors' time-based resources in the bazaar. Much learning and improvements are also contributed in tandem with each release. In many ways, it houses its own economy of supply and demand of expert services and huge pool of users that so far is holding out as a still ungovernable freewheeling social business model that Eric Raymond, one internet guru has termed such phenomena as 'The Bazaar'. Eric called the conventional model of producing software as 'The Cathedral' where progress is slow and much innovation is lost. Whereas in the Bazaar model, information flows freely, and members derive octane-high satisfaction by just topping each others' codes and know-how.

Red1 lifestyle of not wearing suits and unkempt hair in attendance seems to fit well into the pyjamas of a king that just enjoy the fresh air of his backyard garden. It is a humble and decent life, free from pretensions and trappings. However it has its ups and downs, and sometimes his debts just piled up and on some moments he wondered if he is crazy and should just change his lifestyle to a normal 9 to 5 traffic hogging commuter. We shall then meet the person in closer detail and see how sometimes the law of Karma blesses those who choose to contribute rather than to possess.