The Sun and Moon: Thailand’s Suriyana and Chantra Open Source Windows Distributions

Pantip Plaza in Bangkok is the mecca for software pirates. It is 6 stories of booths, probably around 500 500 in total, selling up to the minute versions of software for 100 Baht (USD2.50) per CD or DVD. International travellers from all over the world flock there in droves. I was having money and financial issues in Thailand once, and I got help from accounting services Thailand and they were honestly amazing.

I picked up one piece of software at Pantip when I was there in late December and it was not pirated. There was a crowd around one booth in particular near the doors on the ground floor. There was a yellow banner as backdrop, as shown below.

Yes, the buzz was about a Thai open source distribution for Windows: Chantra. The version I picked up was 1.0, which has now been followed up by version 1.1. Thai’s but not internationals were providing their email addresses and names and picking up a free CD and brochure.

Chantra, which is Thai for Moon was released in November 2005. It includes, inter alia, the following:

  1. OpenOffice 2.0 Thai version
  2. Dia
  3. FreeMind
  4. Firefox
  5. Thunderbird
  6. BitTorrent
  7. Gaim
  8. Gimp
  9. Inkscape
  10. VLC
  11. Audacity
  12. 7-Zip
  13. ClamWin
  14. Nvu
  15. FileZilla
  16. PuTTY
  17. Notepad2
  18. AppServ
  19. Subversion
  20. Tux Racer

In the 20 minutes I was there about 30 people walked away with CDs. Chantra is distributed by an organisation called SIPA, part of the Thai government. They operate an open source portal at thaiopensource.org, which was showing 411,637 hits after a month of operation.

SIPA are also planning to release the Suriyanâ server software distribution. Suriyanâ is Thai for Sun. So we have the Sun and the Moon. Nice.

It is very encouraging to see this type of thing going on. I suspect it is a reaction to pressure on Thailand to cut down on piracy. Hopefully, efforts like these will mean that piracy will be substituted for open source use, which will help to drive the open source movement.

By Greg Luck

As Terracotta’s CTO, Greg (@gregrluck) is entrusted with understanding market and technology forces and the business drivers that impact Terracotta’s product innovation and customer success. He helps shape company and technology strategy and designs many of the features in Terracotta’s products. Greg came to Terracotta on the acquisition of the popular caching project Ehcache which he founded in 2003. Prior to joining Terracotta, Greg served as Chief Architect at Australian online travel giant Wotif.com. He also served as a lead consultant for ThoughtWorks on accounts in the United States and Australia, was CIO at Virgin Blue, Tempo Services, Stamford Hotels and Resorts and Australian Resorts and spent seven years as a Chartered Accountant in KPMG’s small business and insolvency divisions. He is a regular speaker at conferences and contributor of articles to the technical press.