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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 If nobody can make money from it, there will be no development and open source software quickly becomes outdated...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."
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.
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!
Unfortunately, not many scientists publish in journals everyone can read. Most journals require hefty fees. Not that the scientists get rich, of course. Some journals even ask for a submission fee.
When the policeman of the tie, rule you violate, hello punishment of the kitty?
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.
Not sure where you're coming from. I was one of those scientists (worked in an academic research facility) for a while and my pay wasn't so bad... I wasn't living a rock star lifestyle off of it but I was reasonably comfortable. 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).
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. They get a bargain by tossing you a few $100k and you practically get indentured servants (in the form of graduate students). In return, they don't have to (potentially) hire employees and buy equipment. Researchers bill their salaries out of those research funds. It's a lot like a service model. The cost of your research is amortized across several similar research contracts so you can charge less per contract than if you were only did it as a one shot project.
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).
Then you miss the most important projects where OSS shines and Closed source can not follow.
MythTV and other PVR's that intentionally do what the user/consumer wants and NOT what the corperations and laws want.
My MythTV box can rip my Cd's share the mp3's throughout my home to my audiotron, Crestron AAS on my whole house audio, etc... Even my daughter's ipod picks up the files. Now I can record Tv shows that automatically skip the commercials, rip the recordings to mp4 format for my daughter's ipod and evne generate a RSS feed so her itunes automagically gets the files for her.
I can name numerous other projects that are 100% impossible under closed source and a business model. If you made and sold MythTV you would be sued out of existance by the media companies for destroying their profits and violating the license you "agree" to by watching TV. Then the law woud get involved because those pissed at you would get laws passed, somehow you would run afoul of patents, and other bullshit that the corperate world likes to create to force companies to do things their way or put you out of business.
Open source is the LAST bastion of freedom for invention and innovation. REAL innovations get done in OSS because they can. More often than not a OSS project get's closer to the goals a customer wants than a closed source corperate product. If the apple ipod was easy to hack and put a new OS onto there would have been people doing it and making a better ipod without any DRM. (They did it with other mp3 players, for some reason the ipod is either harder to work on or has some kind of locking on it.. I am so hoping the Zune is hacked and a new OS for it is released that has no MS DRM on it... that will probably save that device.)
OSS helps you learn if you are not a "edumacated" programmer, but it's biggest reward is that it can dare to go where no other model can dare to tread.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.