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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 If nobody can make money from it, there will be no development and open source software quickly becomes outdated...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."
If nobody can make money from it ...
Maybe he would be so kind as to provide links where Netcraft confirms that IBM, Sun and Google are dead or dying?
Spoken like someone without a clue. Sheesh.
"With open source, there is no intellectual property. Anyone can use it and all your ideas become public domain."
I am hoping something was lost in translation, because if it wasn't this guy is not only not getting the idea but totally missing the point. Then one must ask, what kind of country has an "IT Minister"? I bet he gets razzed for that... in fact that my explain this. If the guy can't install anything open source without causing errors, I really don't think he belongs in that job.
Great Intellect...
Let's not forget that Thailand's legitimate government was toppled by the army a short while ago. I'm sure this clown is the least of Thailand's troubles right now.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Maybe, just maybe, people are not in it for the money. Maybe they love to code for "the pure fun of it". After all, millions of people do crosswords, solve sudoku, climb mountains, ride bicycles, and blast apart aliens, for the sheer joy of it. They don't get paid a red cent (or ) for doing it. Maybe they like the recognition of being the one that wrote $widgit$. Maybe they want to put "Accomplishments: Developed $wigit$ software" on their resume. Maybe they're already so filthy stinking rich that a few measly $100K a year isn't worth the hassle of cowtowing to a pointy haired boss with no more imagination than week old oatmeal, who couldn't code his way out of a paper bag if all he had to do is double click on the "Escape from paper bag" icon.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
this guy is not only not getting the idea but totally missing the point.
He is a smart politician.
That means: what he says has little or nothing to do with what he thinks. A politician says something for one of two reasons:
Once you understand this, the world will start making more sense to you.
I've often wondered this myself. What is the reward for developing open source software? If companies can come in and use open source components in their own creation in a way that they make money without violating licenses, but at the same time aren't obligated to give anything back to the community, where's the motivation for new developers to go open source? Not everybody operates with an altruistic "I'm giving back to the community" motivation.
Personally, I don't develop software just so that I can be an anonymous contributor to future technology. I do it to pay the rent, buy cars, etc.
What am I missing here? (And I'm not being sarcastic with that, I genuinely don't understand why anyone would want to share the fundamentals of their creation in a way that would compromise any potential future earnings.)
Necessity, not profit, is the mother of invention.
If it's needed, it'll get done.
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
This is correct; many OS advocates believe Open Source automatically leads to better code. The truth is that most OS coders are just average. Many OS project members believe that when experienced guru X leaves the project, others will follow (or worse, they try to compensate the guru's absence with many average coders). Turns out the good devs are NOT expendable.
However, with Closed Source the situation really isnt any different. The only visible difference is that abandoned projects vanish, and do not reside in freshmeat/sourceforge/etc. But plenty of CS is *bad* code; just look at those ugly telco install CDs, many small shareware apps, many drivers (especially TV card ones)...
That said, big opensource projects usually develop some sort of quality assurance. New code is reviewed, only core developers can actually commit to the repository etc.
The clear OS advantages are security and availability. If I have 2 packages doing the same thing, one is OS, the other CS, then I usually choose the OS one, because I can examine it for buffer overflows, hidden trojans, backdoors etc. The CS package is a black box. (This is the main reason why OpenBSD opposes binary drivers.) Also, 3rd party patches are possible, which touches the second advantage: availability. If a CS software is abandoned, its *dead*. It won't be ported to succeeding platforms, it won't be patched etc. You have a binary copy, that's it. With OS, it is never really dead, you CAN port it (just look at the zillions of Doom ports), fork it, improve it, even if you are not the original developer. This is becoming more relevant in the future, when someone has to access very old files, but the format is unknown, and the only programs capable of reading it run only on machines that no longer exist. (NSA had to deal with this in the past.)
This sig does not contain any SCO code.
Almost all of the money made by open source has been made by exploiting open source. Yes most of the internet runs on OSS. But how many of the billions if not trillions of dollars has made it back to the pockets of the developers of the big parts like Apache? I would guess not much since even Apache has a 'donations' link on their site.
Apache Software Foundation (apache.org) has a donation link on their site because they are a non-profit corporation. So by definition they don't make money. That does not mean they don't get money and resources; it just means that they use it all on improving the product.
That said, the companies listed (and many others) have indeed contributed to as well as profited from open source software. IBM spends billions every year on Linux alone. And where do you think all that code comes from? the magic code monkeys? People that work for these companies are either paid directly to work on open source software or allowed to do so because of permissive policies that derive directly from the fact that those companies are making money from the profit of their labour.
Meanwhile all of this work is shared and the wheel does not have to be reinvented. IBM benefits from the code contributed by Sun as well as Chucky down the street. And it works the other way too. And all of them are making money ... I mean even Chucky gets a job or can do consulting work because he's been working on this stuff all that time. Like when AOL hired all the Mozilla people. Or RMS's consulting, which probably has not made him particularly rich, though he is not exactly starving to death.
There are a lot of ways to make money from open source. Some of the easiest ways involve working with or for companies, but there are others. Still, to focus too much on the aspect of direct monetary gain is to miss the greatest benefits of free software / open source. The best thing about the software is when you actually get to USE the software. Sure, you can contribute code if you want to, and you can customize it for your needs, but ultimately you derive gain from the fact that you can use the software freely, unencumbered by onerous licenses and likely free as in beer as well. That means that whether you need software for your business or for personal use you have easy access to it and you don;t really have to do anything to get it other than go get it.
Maybe your business is making money from free software (lots of people and companies do). Maybe you are doing something else but you use free software to accomplish those ends (way more companies are doing that). Maybe you just use it to learn, or because you feel like it. But no matter what you end up saving time, money, and other resources because you are benefitting from the community, and thus you profit from the use of Open Source / Free Software.