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Vietnam Going Open Source
An anonymous reader writes "Great article today on SiliconValley.com about Vietnam's solution to software piracy: eliminate Microsoft. Government tech officials are promoting a plan that would require all state-owned companies and government ministries to use open source by 2005. And they would require all computers assembled in Vietnam to be sold with open-source products installed on them."
Or maybe it does now. The two terms are used interchangeably.
If the Vietnameese government can't enfore the licensing terms of propritary software, why would they enfore the GPL or any other Open Source license?
The real problem in Vietnam (and most other countries run by communist, oligarchical governments) is that IP laws are treated as optional...something that you vaugely enforce in order to appease trade policy negotiators from 1st world countries. Switching to "Open Source" won't fix that problem.
Given the following:
a) this move will greatly reduce software piracy, and
b) we all know that Microsoft loses zillions of dollars per year software piracy
Does it follow that Microsoft will be supportive of Vietname moving to Open Source solutions?
Funny situation, because it puts Microsoft between a rock and a hard place - continue losing money in the conventional way (piracy), or lose money in a new way when the few paying customers stop buying MS products altogether. Sweet!
I think one point that is often overlooked in the crusade of eliminating Microsoft from the software landspace (very unlikely, but still worth the thought) is the impact it will have on the US software industry (global perhaps??).
Just blink for a second Microsoft filing chapter 11 tomorrow. How many people will lose their jobs? System integrators? Partners? Businesses that rely on them for support? Home users of ma and pa homes? They have build a co-dependent ecosystems that kept the sofware business afloat in these past couple of years of economic hardship.
Just worth a thought to think a world of tomorrow without Mr Gates.
Open Source will change the balance of power in the information age between the industrial first world nations towards the poorer third-world.
As more industrial and post-industrial nations put patent and copyright restrictions on software (or, as the case in the USA with SCO vs. Linux, try to make open-source illegal altogether), development will shift to areas of the world where the amount gained by bringing in the open-source software industry is greater than the amount lost to entrenched software companies.
In the long-run fifty year period, efforts by the first-world to restrict dissemination of information by means of the Internet will backfire as the new on-line libraries of data shift to distant locations that are less affected by the legal means used by monopoly media corporations to shut them down. As the libraries shift, so will the technical expertise migrate to the third-world. And, as the technical expertise of the information age moves away from the software cops of the media monopolies, so with the creative community that is now locked to the media corporations.
In the long run, the RIAA, MPAA, BSA, and other enforcement arms of the first-world media monopolies will destroy the very media conglomerates that they are trying to protect.
It will/should reduce piracy, enforce the notion opensource applications and operating systems are viable MS replacements on servers and on desktops.
One thing concerns me though.
I'm just worried that the situation will move from one form of infringement to the next.
I mean, what if GPL isn't respected? Will the Vietnamese government act? If they couldn't control the piracy in the first place, doesn't that raise any doubt with their ability to uphold the GPL?
Or, will Vietnam abandon GPL'd software for "truly free" (bsd-style licensed) software later on?
It is an alternate history of the world from about 1200 to way into the third millenium. The premise is that the medevial plague wipes out ALL of europe and the (amerindian) new world and east asia duke it out. Sorta.
All this stuff happening hints to me of Asia Ascendent: The china space launch, Vietnam switching over to a software economy totally independant of the west, (can't think of more examples).
Anyhoo, sometimes it seems like the west is falling behind, and the book may come true.
-- ac at work
I doubt it, if anything it will increase business, companies will be "forced" to adapt to continue to work in a cheap "slave" labor environment. This is a brilliant forward thinking step to take. I think that they will be proven correct in the step that they have taken. Vietnam may make a name for themselves and change their appearance to the ignorant. .02 anyhow.
My
:-( --- argh. Despair, I owe again.
>> The real problem in Vietnam (and most other countries run by communist, oligarchical governments) is that IP laws are treated as optional...
This isn't a communist thing. It's a developing country thing.
Back in the late 1700s/early 1800s, the United States had very little protection for foreign intellectual property. In fact, we actively encouraged inventors to rip off English IP in order to jump-start manufacturing in the U.S. From the American point of view, this made perfect sense at the time; we were a net importer, not exporter, of ideas. It wasn't until the U.S. became a net exporter of intellectual property that we decided to push so hard for the rest of the world to play along. From a historical perspective, our strong backing of WIPO and fanatical enforcement of international IP law is only hypocrisy.
If the per capita income is that low but piracy is apparently insanely out of control, wouldn't that imply there are a LOT of computer users there? How do they afford machines to run Windows on if they make so little?
What kind of hardware is available/common in that part of Asia?
Hexy - a strategy game for iPhone/iPod Touch
I've seen a few comments to this effect. No, there is no guarantee that the government of Vietnam will enforce the GPL. But, we don't even know if the US Government will enforce it either... However, the fact that this step is being taken to reduce software piracy is a positive indicator. Why would they reduce one exposure just to replace it with another. On the other hand, the GPL is a pretty subversive document to be circulating among your intelligentsia for a totalitarian regime... Just have to wait and see...
"Talk minus action equals nothing" - Joey Shithead, D.O.A.
"Talk minus action equals
I stopped reading the article after choking on this quote:
"Almost 97 percent of the programs used in Vietnam have been illegally copied, costing Microsoft an estimated $40 million to $50 million a year."
I doubt many, if any, of these people would pay such a large portion of their annual income for this software. Microsoft would never get this money, they should at least appreciate the exposure. After all, Microsoft is 90% marketing and 10% functionality...
Ahh, random statistics make me feel so impotent... er, um make that important!
Communism is NOT good in theory, if you understand what the real theory of communism is. The theory is NOT "collective ownership" or "working toward a common goal". That is nothing but trivial propaganda. The theory is, quite simply, that force is a better social model than voluntary association.
Communism proposes that voluntary association (i.e. free trade) among human beings is evil, primative, barbaric, immoral, and counter-productive to the "needs" of "society". The theory proposes that if human beings were FORCED to "contribute" to a common goal,society will benefit as a whole, and inequality would be non-existent.
(In truth, the foundation and first prerequisite of communism is inequality. Communism could never exist without force, and there is no greater inequality than the "legal" ability to initiate force as a means to an end. And that is exactly what those in power need to do to initiate and sustain the communist state.)
The theory can be reduced to "slavery works", or "freedom doesn't work". When exposed, communism sounds just as bad in theory as it works in practice.
In Vietnam it probably *is* cheaper to fix Free Software so that it does what they want than to purchase software from Microsoft.
That reminds me of the origins of Star Office. Apparently Sun (a rather large organization) looked at the cost of buying MS Office licenses for all of its workers, looked at the cost of buying the rights to a software suite and modifying it to their needs, and realized that it was cheaper to just do it themselves. Of course, there were other reasons, but the economies of Microsoft just didn't make sense.
It's not just in Vietnam that it is cheaper to fix Free Software than to purchase from Microsoft. Sadly, it will be quite a while before we realize that a universal yearly contribution of 25 dollars to an open-source software project would further the industry far more than contributing 500 dollars to Microsoft every 3 years.
The ______ Agenda
They are having lots of trouble stopping piracy because of (I guess) cultural reasons, the population simply don't recognize "piracy" as being wrong.
You don't have to guess. It's quite simple, really, and it's not because of any cultural blindness to the concept of piracy, whether or not there is any such blindness. The reason piracy is so prevalent is solely economical. The Vietnam version of Windows costs $140, while the annual per capita income of Vietnam is $2250. Given the choice, would you pay Microsoft 6% of your annual income, or would you try to get it for free? By comparison, Windows costs $300 in the US, while the US per capita income is $37600. This amounts to only 0.8% of the average American's annual income versus 6% of the average Vietnamese's. Imagine if Microsoft tried to charge the same relative prices here in the US? Relatively, it costs 7.5x as much in Vietnam, so try to think about how many people would pay, say, $2250 for their copy of Windows, and how many would steal it. And then, to combat the rampant piracy, the government would have to act in some way, and it is considerably easier to make a new regulation about open source than to start fining/jailing people for refusing to pay for something that no one in their right mind would pay for. It's ridiculous, and Microsoft should know this.
Lack of eloquence does not denote lack of intelligence, though they often coincide.