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."

Comments

My worry.....

[icejai]

This initiative by Vietnam seems like a great one.
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? ... like they're doing now by abandoning MS software for opensource (The article says they're going to use mainly linux, which is GPL)?

Re:RTFA!

[sean23007]

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.