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Thai IT Minister Slams Open Source
patiwat writes "Thailand's newly appointed Information and Communications Technology Minister has slammed open source software as useless and full of bugs: 'With open source, there is no intellectual property. Anyone can use it and all your ideas become public domain. If nobody can make money from it, there will be no development and open source software quickly becomes outdated... As a programmer, if I can write good code, why should I give it away? Thailand can do good source code without open source.' This marks a sharp u-turn in policy from that of the previous government."
It's not the government coffers he is thinking of.
A Thai friend once explained to me why Bangkok has both a monorail system and an underground railway. I think the same principle is at work here: a new government always abandons the projects started by the previous government, and starts new ones.
You see, bribes are always paid at the start of a project, during the vendor selection phase. This person is looking to get a large sum of money from Microsoft in exchange for abandoning some open-source projects and switching to Windows.
The ICT Ministry will soon put forward draft Acts to the National Legislative Assembly on cybercrime and on web sites that are pornographic or considered lese majeste, allowing officials to arrest, fine and imprison offenders.
lese majesty also lèse majesté (lz mj-st)
n. pl. lese majesties or lèse majestés
1. An offense or crime committed against the ruler or supreme power of a state.
2. An affront to another's dignity.
However, it is interesting to note that it was running Linux about a month ago.
I understand why you listed Google and IBM. But why is Sun in your list?
If you hadn't heard, Sun just open sourced the entire Java compiler, virtual machine, and JIT compiler. That makes Java one of the most popular open source projects in the world. And then there's the tens of millions of lines of code for OpenSolaris. So far, Sun is the largest contributor to both of those.
I'd almost be willing to say Sun has released more open source code than any other company.
Maybe not
And OpenOffice.
Netcraft confirms: IBM, Sun, and Google make boatloads of money off of the countless unnamed and unpaid developers who write the code that they use. Does the amount they contribute back exceed the amount they gain by benefiting from the work of others?
Even before I join Google I never minded the idea that some corporations would benefit from the work I did, it is totally ok with me. In fact I would get really worried if that were not the case, it would mean I failed to make something useful. Speaking as an open sourcer, I always expected the companies you mention to contribute something back, firstly because it is in their interest to do so (offload the maintenance, get further free development, etc) and secondly because it is the right thing to do, and there is no underestimating the PR value of being seen to do the right thing. The "balance of payments" doesn't really matter, what matters is that *something* comes back, enough to keep the ecosystem healthy. As it turns out, all three companies you mentioned are contributing way more than I ever dreamed possible. Halleluja.
Have you got your LWN subscription yet?
I hope that James Clark will be able to help correct the situation.
In case you haven't heard of James Clark, he wrote groff (for displaying man pages amongst other things), XSLT, the expat XML Parser and the Relax NG schema language. I'd be very surprised if anybody here hasn't used his stuff... Take a look at his bio.
-Dom
Anyway the only people who make money from commercial software in Thailand are the pirates. Its been a few years since I visited but Pantip Plaza was literally a 6 story high mall where every single shop sold pirate cds, dvds and software. Thailand should embrace open source as a way to get Microsoft and others off their back. If businesses do business on Linux, if governments run off Linux, there is less market for the pirates and the problem will simply recede through less demand.
The PrePub Archive (xxx.lanl.gov) have become a standard (a non-Peer reviewed standard) in physics.
...
You could say that with a real journal you pay for the higher standard: good peer review, an editor,
The price of academic journals is a real problem, to be sure---but don't German universities have Interlibrary Loan? (I'm not asking rhetorically, I am curious.) Here in the US, at least, if I need a journal article from a journal my university doesn't have, the librarians will request the material from a peer institution. (If it is an article, I usually get a photocopy; if I need a book, I usually get to check out the book like I normally do.)
Academic philosophers have begun, slowly, to try to fix the situation by creating a high-quality, peer reviewed online journal called Philosopher's Imprint. The Mission and Rationale can be found here:
http://webapps.itcs.umich.edu/blogic/about.php
"Every decent man is ashamed of the government he lives under." - H.L. Mencken
You are missing the fact that you don't have to use OSS.
On the other hand, if you had some code that would benefit you financially but you did not have the energy, time, or money to develop a full fledged application that clients required. You could always add your code to an FLOSS project and benefit financially by supporting the final solution.
When people put their greed to the side and look for a fair solution to a problem we all benefit. As can be seen by Microsoft borrowing code from BSD to get stability in Win2000. It would have been nice if Microsoft would have contributed back to the BSD code that they so gladly borrowed. But greed is greed and Microsoft missed the point.
Due to this attitude people who believe that we can all benefit and not have to impoverish one to benefit another release their code under GPL. If we all can benefit we can all be financially comfortable and secure.
What are you missing? I don't know but I don't always work for financial gain. I live comfortably in a 11 room house with a garage and 3 washrooms. I have friends who helped me fix the roof, paint my house, move,... I find this compensation enough when they require a hand.
DRM? No thanks, I'll just get it somewhere else...
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
Plus, getting published increases your equity in yourself and your pay can increase because of them (become noted in your field and you can have your pick of better jobs and more pay).
It works the same way with open source. The best open source programmers end up working for large companies like Google, Redhat, and Novell.
Most, if not all, of the research (and the money that the scientist makes) in an academic facility is funded by contracts with commercial companies.
The OSDL funds Linux kernel development and is comprised of several large commercial companies. This is very similar to payment for research and development.
Then... if you do good enough research and find something interesting, you sometimes have the option to be hired by the company that funded you or you can spin-off from the facility and start your own company doing things similar to what you did for the research (which is what I did).
If you're lucky this can happen in the OSS world too.
Giving away software for free is a choice. Taking away that choice would be worse in any situation, especially when governemnt does it. Governement should be open and auditable and open source is really the only way you can do that effectively with software.
If good programmers want to get paid they will whether or not they write open code or proprietary code. There are already several large open source companies that have hundrends of open source programmers working for them. We still need programmers in the open source world and if their services require payment then someone will pay them. The cat's already out of the bag; open source has already been shown to be viable and it is here to stay. I guess I just don't understand how some governments determine that open source isn't viable when cleary that line of thinking has been outdated for years now.
Time makes more converts than reason
The military handed power over to an interim government very quickly, headed by a chap who the local press, media and people all seem to support.
The local press is completely unfazed by the soldiers and tanks all over the place, I presume? Sorry, but I find the claim of support unconvincing, to say the least.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."