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 If nobody can make money from it, there will be no development and open source software quickly becomes outdated...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."

Comments

Re:in other news

[badfish99]

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.

Likes censorship too...

[spiritraveller]

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.

Re:Likes censorship too...

[jaiyen]

I live in Thailand, and there's masses of internet censorship. Although it's not quite to Chinese limits (as all news sites are available), they block as many porn and gambling sites as they can find and anything that fits the rather vaguely defined category of "lese majeste" or "threat to national security" also. Criticizing the decision of a high-court judge is against the law too. On the most popular Thai language forum (pantip.com) you're required to give a valid ID card number to register, and there's often stories in the news of contributors being tracked down for their opinions. I guess at the moment any anti-coup or pro-democracy website could fall under the national security category, it's all a bit uncertain. So much for free speech!

So I guess I'd better avoid giving an opinion of the minister in question in case of getting a unwelcome knock at the door! Regardless of him though, open-source is quite strong in Thailand. The National Computer Center (http://www.nectec.or.th/) has released a lot of open source code and data, and there's a relatively thriving OS community here - linux.thai.net (a thai slash-code site), opentle.org, thaiopensource.org, tosf.org, osdev.co.th etc. It seems unlikely to me these comments will change that much.

Whether these comments have anything to do with an alliance with Microsoft I don't know. Often when you buy a new PC here, they don't want to pay the Windows tax but instead of coming with Linux (or, god forbid, XP starter edition) it's advertised as coming with "Microsoft DOS Operating System" (!). After you pay, the shop staff then load a pirated version of XP pro for you without even asking! I guess it's certainly in Microsoft's interest to get that situation improved.

Bangkok post : Linux Thailand IT ministry: ASP.net

[Bananatree3]

The headers you posted are for the Bangkok post website. However, the Thailand Ministry of Information and Communication Technology website is running ASP.net (Microsoft):

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Content-Length: 8641
Content-Type: text/html
Content-Location: http://www.mict.go.th/index.html
ETag: "4a7c5a4cef2c71:331"
X-Powered-By: ASP.NET
Last-Modified: Wed, 08 Nov 2006 04:35:20 GMT

However, it is interesting to note that it was running Linux about a month ago.

Re:Are the some Netcraft links I missed?

[jlarocco]

Does the amount they contribute back exceed the amount they gain by benefiting from the work of others?

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.

Re:Are the some Netcraft links I missed?

[nathanh]

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.

And OpenOffice.

Re:in other news

[DrXym]

I have to say that Bangkok used to be a steaming hell hole of traffic jams and pollution before the monorail came along. It sure looks ugly but it makes an enormous difference to be travel across the city.

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.

Re:Reward for Open Source?

[Xabraxas]

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.