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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."
I love the smell of Linux in the morning. Smells... like victory.
.Net
Lieutenant Torvalds in Apocalypse
...can be found on the AsiaOSC Vietnam page.
There's a interesting presentation linked to from there also.
The Army reading list
This would completely eliminate government agency piracy in Vietnam, so why do I get the feeling the BSA's equivalent in Asia isn't going to be very happy about this?
We had to destroy IIS in order to save us^H^Hit.
You are not the customer.
Ok so we're going all open source, who's next? OSX? OS/2? Maybe a Linux distro because it's too "proprietary?". Frankly freedom of choice, even if it is the MS route really needs to be preserved. Thoughts?
...in bed
Before you start asking Vietnam for Linux licesnces, remember they are Communists.
And they would require all computers assembled in Vietnam to be sold with open-source products installed on them."
Well, that could lose the country some contracts for companies that might want to build facilities there to assemble computers..... As much an advocate I am for open source, this sounds like a bad implementation of law.
Visit Jonesblog and say hello.
While I think it's good that Vietnam wants to move to open source, I think that forcing computer vendors to ship only open source products is not the way to go.
Open source is supposed to be about freedom and choice. Seems counter productive to me, to force people to use open source. If open source advocates try to encourage this kind of behavior, how are they better than Microsoft?
Cuong, Microsoft's Vietnam representative, acknowledges that open source poses a threat to commercial software companies. ``They give away innovation,'' he said.
.. it's like dominos.
Giving away innovation smacks of Communism. We need to invade Vietnam before this "giving away" idea spreads throughout Southeast Asia.
Soon Cambodia may start giving away innovation, and then Japan and Australia will be isolated and they'll fall as well.
My god
Where are Robert McNamara and Henry Kissinger when you need them?
Or maybe it does now. The two terms are used interchangeably.
Nation's solution to software piracy: "Eliminate Microsoft"
Surely this will only shift the piracy to open-source applications. Why, by 2005, I'll bet there will be hundreds -- nay, thousands! -- of copies of Redhat and Mandrake circulating around Vietnam for free! And thousands of applications too! The horror!
Why is a regulation like this even necessary? Why not do the traditional thing like evaluate competing solutions on their relative merits (initial software cost being only one of the factors). I could understand requiring all data to be stored by default in an open format, but a single-vendor ban is silly.
"A pirated copy of Windows and Office goes for no more than $10"
That's still a weeks pay for the average worker by their figures, Microsoft's greed seems inordinate expecting people to pay $140. Well, they seem to have totally priced themselves out of this market.
president Tran Duc Luong announced the renaming of all citizen named Nguyen to NGNUYEN. .. ...
6E8C 8721 B3D9 5269 5A9B 1122 00C3 C03D 99A7 1CFC
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.
Yet another commie or socialist country adopting OSS. Hooray!
This is the inevitable result for most Microsoft forays outside the developed world. Add to that Microsoft's problem of having saturating the markets in the developed world and, as a public company, needing to continue an unsustainable double-digit growth rate. Add to this their market extensions into non-computing markets are lack-luster and largely failed. You have to be worried if you own a lot of MSFT stock or if you are overly invest simply due to being an employee.
Love my Panther (he says writing this on WinXP!)
JGSki
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!
They don't seem to care about stealing from Microsoft. I doubt they will honor the GPL either.
Blar.
In October 1998, the United States announced a new Executive Order directing U.S. Government agencies to maintain appropriate and effective procedures to ensure legitimate use of software. In addition, USTR was directed to undertake an initiative to work with other governments, particularly those in need of modernizing their software management systems or about which concerns have been expressed, regarding inappropriate government use of illegal software.
The United States has achieved considerable progress under this initiative. Countries that have issued decrees mandating the use of only authorized software by government ministries include Bolivia, China, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, the Czech Republic, France, Ireland, Israel, Jordan, Paraguay, Thailand, the U.K., Spain, Peru, Greece, Turkey, Hungary, Korea, Hong Kong, Macau, Lebanon, Taiwan and the Philippines. Ambassador Zoellick was pleased that these governments have recognized the importance of setting an example in this area and expects that these decrees will be fully implemented. The United States looks forward to the adoption of similar decrees, with effective and transparent procedures that ensure legitimate use of software, by additional governments in the coming year.
Countries which convert to free software become compliant. The alternatives are converting to free software, paying millions (sometimes billions) to Microsoft, or facing trade sanctions by the US. That makes free software look really good.
The whole Special 301 process may thus backfire against commercial software vendors. Microsoft is going to have a fit over this.
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.
From the Article:
I wonder if Microsoft brings makes more than 40-50 million a year profit in Vietnam? If not, this new policy could save them money! :)
In other words, Windows and Office costs a third of your annual income. According to the Bureau of Economic Analysis the per capital annual income of the US in 2002 was $30,832.
Therefore, Windows and Office would cost you a staggering $10,277. It is not surprising that piracy is rampant!
Also assuming Thailand has the same per capital annual income as Vietnam, then even when Microsoft reduced the price down to $40 it still would cost slightly a nasty $3,083 in the US.
Avantslash - View Slashdot cleanly on your mobile phone.
"Me love you long time."
(Mod me -1 Troll!)
The surprise isn't how often we make bad choices; the surprise is how seldom they defeat us.
Linux is the premier OSS product as far as most of the world is concerned.
It's like Coke being just another carbonated gut-rot drink, one of many, but many people generically refer to all pop as "Coke".
And for the GNU/Linux fans, sorry. Just be proud that GNU is the secret sauce of Linux. But don't expect Joe Sixpack to refer to _the operating system_ as GNU/Linux.
.sigs are for post^Hers.
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.
They need to the the piracy rate down so they can meet previously-agreed WTO and WIPO limits. They are having lots of trouble stopping piracy because of (I guess) cultural reasons, the population simply don't recognize "piracy" as being wrong. Mandating OSS is percieved as the only realistic way of achieving the desired reduction in piracy.
Kinda ironic really, that the WIPO are basically forcing OSS onto them :-)
The U.S. could take a cue from this and eliminate social security payments by terminating the elderly.
Next, we could reduce air pollution by 99% by destroying all the cars and walking everywhere!
Progress!!
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?
I shall go and tell the indestructible man that someone plans to murder him.
Your average Windows user knows nothing about computers. It seems to take a few years before even basic things like "My computer", "drag and drop" and the fact that "The computer", "The operating system" and Microsoft Word are not all the same thing sink in.
I see very little difference in ease of use between a (well) pre-configured Linux computer and a Windows computer. If anything, a Linux system can be easier to use for a beginner than Windows. No virus worries, for example.
We're not talking about compiling the kernel here, just Internet, Office, mail and IM (which covers 99% of usage).
But Microsoft products are everywhere in Vietnam, and very few shell out the money for licensed copies. Almost 97 percent of the programs used in Vietnam have been illegally copied, costing Microsoft an estimated $40 million to $50 million a year.
It's not costing Microsoft jack, because that $40-50 million never existed. If you could have never had the money in the first place, then it's not costing you anything.
The global war between the richest entity in the world and an invisible, omnipresent network of loosely affiliated die-hard extremists who live off untraceable sources of funding, wage a near-religious war, and threaten to topple a hegemony that has ruled for twenty years.
Yes, it's the Talinux and Osama Gnu Laden, striking fear into the hearts of Microsoft dealers and agents everywhere.
Seriously, how many such battles can Microsoft wage at once? OK to send the shock troopers to Munchen, to Costa Rica, but it's starting to become a conflaguration.
Laugh, but I predict the last stronghold of Windows will be the US, while in a few years only the rest of the world will have gratefully converted to Linux and FOSS and forgotten the dark ages of 'software license fees'.
Ceci n'est pas une signature
It is something unique about software that very few people get.
Hell if everyone actually paid for their copy of ms software I think they might have a huge problem in finding a bank big enough to keep all the money in.
So to answer your question MS is losing here. Just one more corner of the world where that 95% is just getting a tiny bit smaller. Is this going to mean MS is going to go bankrupt? No of course not. Don't be silly. But an MS with say "only" a 80% share is going to mean that you can no longer just assume that every one uses Windows. Oh everyone can read this Office document.
Remember only zealots want MS destroyed, or if they are windows zealots linux destroyed. The rest of us simply want to choose the best for their needs and be reasonably sure that most data can be exchanged freely between systems.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Nguyen is a common name in Vietnam, and GNU is FSF/Stallman's Unix replacement project.
I'm not exactly sure which side wins here.
While pirate copies of Windows might not be the best thing that could happen to Microsoft, it is surely not good to the free software movement either. Getting a lot of pirate copies of Windows replaced with free software will be an advantage to the free software movement. You know the major problem in the computer industry right now is, that there are way too many Windows systems. There are so many Windows systems, that you more or less have to make something compatible with those. Microsoft knows that, and they make it as hard as possible to interoperate with Windows. Getting rid of copies of Windows will decrease the amount of power Microsoft has even if it doesn't immediately give Microsoft less money.
Do you care about the security of your wireless mouse?
In these cases, they need specialized, very vertical market software where there isn't a viable open source alternative. What do they do?
Write one? Or spend a little of that IT budget they just saved millions on to pay someone to write one?
Do not meddle in the affairs of geeks for they are subtle and quick to anger
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
Don't compare the average of what people make in both contries than figure out the proportion. Take the incomes of all the people who own computers in both countries and do that. Then you'll realize the numbers are quite different. Why? Because most of the people in places like vietnam make almost nothing. But there are a few rich people who make a lot of money. Those are the people who own computers and who are potential customers for microsoft. In this country where possibly more than half (not sure exactly, but we'll assume for now) own computers and pay for at least windows can afford it because our standard of living is much higher.
You can use statistics to prove anything. But most of the time people just prove themselves wrong.
...but they're most certainly aware that, if someone wasn't going to pay for software in the first place, they're better off if that person is running pirated Microsoft software than Linux. Because the more market penetration Linux has, the less reason there is for other people to buy Windows. So while Microsoft's estimated losses will plummet under this new plan, its real losses will rise. Funny how that works.
"Microsoft Windows and Office cost at least $140 in Vietnam -- way out of reach for most people, where the per capita annual income is roughly $420."
In a country where the general population simply can't afford Microsoft licenses open source is a sound solution. Especially considering the anti-piracy agreements made between the US and Vietnam. They have to do something or face consequences.
I found this interesting:
" But Microsoft products are everywhere in Vietnam, and very few shell out the money for licensed copies. Almost 97 percent of the programs used in Vietnam have been illegally copied, costing Microsoft an estimated $40 million to $50 million a year."
Given that the per capita annual income is roughly $420 there is no way that the piracy is costing Microsoft anywhere near $50 million a year. This is the same kind of logic that the music industry uses to try to justify and push through draconian laws.
A company only takes a loss when they actually lose a sale not every time someone pirates their product.
The race isn't always to the swift... but that's the way to bet!
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
You can code, or you can surf!
"Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival."
--Dr.W.Edwards Deming
I think it's pretty safe to assume that you have never been to either Viet Nam or China. If you had, you would know that a lot of American and other foreign goods are purchased there. I'll speak mostly of Viet Nam, because I know it well. My wife is a VNese-American, and my work took me to VN for the best part of a year.
What do you see on the streets of Viet Nam? Foreign motor vehicles, everywhere. Mostly Korean or Japanese, along with some European ones (chiefly Mercedes Benz) and a few American ones, including Harley Davidson motorcycles. Buy a cell phone there? It will be a foreign brand; they don't have any domestic ones. Coke and Pepsi and their assorted brands are big there. IBM, HP, and Cisco are all there, and they all sell hardware. All the other computer hardware in VN is foreign, too. There are no domestic makers. I bought my first Philips monitor there, and it was great. Philips became my brand of choice in monitors, edging out even the Japanese makers.
VN mostly exports raw materials and semi-finished products to the US, not finished products. They import finished products back.
If you want to talk about fairness, ask me about the catfish debacle. Thanks, I'm glad you asked.
Viet Nam has lots of catfish. There is a big domestic market, and they have plenty to spare, so they developed an export market, and a lot of those fish go to the United States, where they sell at a very good price. So, what happens next in the US, that great advocate of international free trade? Well, US catfish farmers cry foul, and cry it loud and long to their representatives in government.
In response, the government, that great advocate of free trade, tries to accuse VN of dumping catfish. Ridiculous. Viet Nam is a poor country, and many of the people raising and selling those catfish are themselves poor, and the rest are far from rich. They can't afford to dump. Viet Nam either has to sell a product at a profit or not even produce it. The dumping ploy fails, so guess what they try next?
They pass a law that says you can't call it a catfish unless it is a member of one of the indigenous North American catfish species, such as a Channel Catfish. The VN catfish must now be labeled as "Basa." As a fisherman and person who just tries to be fair, this makes me want to puke. I know perfectly well what a catfish looks like, and I have seen the ones in VN. They are definitely catfish. Any icthyologist could tell you the same, so I'm sure many of them are also busy staring into the porcelain aquarium.
I'm embarrased that my government, arguably the world's greatest proponent of free trade and the WTO, only wants to play by the rules it forces onto others when it feels like it. If WTO rules would ever not be advantageous to the United States, the government will cook up some scheme to make an end run around them. I don't believe they are alone in this, but as the world's greatest economic power and greatest advocate of free trade, the violations and hypocrisy seem particularly egregious.
The reasons the United States has trade deficits with Viet Nam, China, Japan, Taiwan, and a host of other places, include simple economics (the United States is rich and things are relatively expensive; Viet Nam is poor and things are dirt cheap, so we can afford to buy their stuff a lot more than they can afford to buy ours), and the fact that US companies voluntarily "outsourced" (a code word for "screwed American workers and the U.S. industrial base by sending their jobs and our manufacturing capacity overseas") production of practically everything they sell to China and other countries with low labor costs. No foreign government, democratic or otherwise, bears any blame for this; it was entirely voluntary. Go into a US store and try to buy some electrical or mechanical appliance that wasn't made in China. In the event that you should succeed, try to find one that was made in the USA. You will almost certainly fail. If it was made here, it was probably onl
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 $50 million a year."
I doubt many, if any, of these people would pay such a large portion of their annual income for this software. Microsoft would never get this money, they should at least appreciate the exposure. After all, Microsoft is 90% marketing and 10% functionality...
Ahh, random statistics make me feel so impotent... er, um make that important!
What is this about?
The Vietnamese government has a problem with software piracy indeed, but they're trying to do something about it by encouraging open-source software, which is a perfectly legal (and human) way of producing and releasing software...
- They are NOT saying:
"Fuck the US, fuck the West, let's copy M$ software like nobody has copied before."
- They are NOT violating any international rules of trade by encouraging open-source software.
And then you come around, calling them greedy communist dictatorships. *confused*
Do you actually want to FORCE Vietnamese people to buy M$-software? Then here's a hint for you: a trade embargo on Vietnam might not be the right way to do it.
(P.S: boy am I crazy to reply to a troll like this)
"Hell hath no fury like a hippo with a machine gun."
I'm embarrased that my government, arguably the world's greatest proponent of free trade and the WTO...
I'm sorry, but you've bought into the propoganda of the US and the WTO. "Free trade" has never been anything but a weasel word along the lines of "bipartisanship." What the person who says it really means is that they want things to go their way, and they want a nice word to demonize their opponents who don't knuckle under to their demands. The WTO basically exists to ensure the continued dominance of the Western world over the rest of the planet. Just look on their increasing emphasis on intellectual property laws which only benefit rich countries like America, Japan, and the European nations at the expense of Africa and South America. Particularly, look at the WTO's opinions on medical patents and patents on genetically engineered organisms. The only honest areas for debate in the WTO are when the G8 countries disagree over something, like Europe's refusal to accept GM food, Japan's rice tariffs, and America's steel tariffs.
The WTO is nothing but an undemocratic avenue for the industrialized world's major business interests to foist treaties on us that must be turned into laws like the DMCA or the EUCD.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
The problem is, while the rich countries' labor force is much more efficient relative to poorer countries, they are not as efficient as their wealth suggests (again relative to poor countries.) In a world of completly free and fair trade, you Americans can't possibly ask half the wages you now get. That is doubly true for Europe. It goes without saying rich countries won't give up their relative wealth just because. Restriction of trade is one of the more humane ways of keeping it that way, all alternatives -short of actually making rich people as productive as they should have been, IMHO an impossible feat- involve some sort of destruction of competitiveness of others. Sabotage, terrorism and outright war are time proven ways of doing that.
Gentlemen, you can't fight in here, this is the War Room!
This may have little to do with free trade as oppose to viable and sustainable policy. In simple term, as the government and people's use of computer increases, they do not want a M$ to come in at some later stages and demand million of $ for the software which they could not afford in the first place.
Unfortunately, I think that in enforcing such a strict regime of software, they may end up making M$ the COOL thing to have and a new symbol of wealth within personal computing. Hence the new Merc of computers are the ones running M$ OS/app.
Funny. An attempt to achieve an actuall useful install of RedHat 9 on a P233 with 2.1 gb harddrive failed miserably due to the library bloat in linux these days.
Sure, there are other distros. Suse wont even load on the system.
Mandrake is redhat by a different name.
The irony is that Win98 loads just fine.
----- LoboSoft specializes in Digital Language Lab
Despite the comments in some of the replies, the "catfish debacle" really is an embarrassment to the US. The whole story is also worse than the parent indicates.
s h. htm
First, the Catfish Farmer's of America and other trade groups bought themselves a piece legislation that barred Vietnamese catfish to from being labeled "catfish". There is no scientific basis for this distinction, it was base protectionism.
They also engaged in a public smear campaign stating that Vietnamese catfish was tainted with Agent Orange and other absurd claims that had no basis in reality.
None of this worked. Consumers, in this case mostly large industrial buyers, bought the cheap, high quality catfish from Vietnam anyway.
This is where the story gets really despicable. The industry, at this point quite desperate, brought anti-dumping complaints to the US Commerce Department. The hypocrisy of backing legislation proclaiming the Vietnamese catfish was an entirely different species, while simultaneously claiming they were "catfish" for the purposes of the anti-dumping case not withstanding, the case went forward.
There was no evidence that Vietnamese catfish were being sold more cheaply in the US than in Vietnam (they aren't). There is no evidence that the Vietnamese Government is propping up the industry. Despite this, tariffs of 37-64% were slapped on Vietnamese catfish under the theory that Vietnam was a "non-market economy".
As someone who has been to Vietnam and met a few Mekong catfish farmers, I can tell you this distinction is a joke. The catfish farmers are small businessmen who simply have lower costs and lower profit expectations than it is possible to have in the US.
This story rises above shameful and becomes embarrassing when you consider that for years the US has been pushing Vietnam to adopt free market economics and accept US imports. It seems that we are happy to espouse free market arguments as a matter of principle so long as its in our own best interest.
The open source story is very interesting because it may be another case of being beaten at our own game. The initiative is so young it is difficult to accurately assess whether it will ever happen, but if it does work (and spreads to China, Japan, etc.) the pre-eminent position of the US within the software industry will be seriously eroded. That would be seriously bad news for US industry, government and economy, and you can bet similar anti-competitive forces would marshal to squelch such a threat despite the fact that the open source strategy would be a natural and legal response to the pressure the US has been applying to eliminate piracy.
Be careful what you wish for, I guess. Our just follow our previous pattern, if the wish backfires, cheat.
NYT piece on the Vietnamese catfish:
www.globalpolicy.org/socecon/ffd/2003/0722catfi
The difference is that this mandate is based on simple economics. Vietnam can't afford to purchase the commercial software they are currently using, and they can't get into the WTO unless they seriously curtail their use of pirated software. Vietnam didn't have any choice but to go with Free Software.
In a country where the average income is under $500 a year it simply makes good economic sense to fix Free Software so that it does what you want over paying for expensive commercial software licenses.
In short, this migration is not based in politics. Microsoft (and the other commercial software vendors) really didn't leave Vietnam much choice.