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 If nobody can make money from it, there will be no development and open source software quickly becomes outdated...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:Appointed by a military junta, BTW.

[bjprice]

The coup was obviously undemocratic, but Thailand is now actually in a far better situation than under the previous regime. I live here.

But yeah, this chap clearly has no idea what he's talking about.

Re:Reward for Open Source?

[macklin01]

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.

True, open source contributions may work against your future earning potential. On the other hand, it can also help build it in a number of ways. In my case, I'm not a formally-trained programmer. I learned C++ on my own out of books and trial/error for my scientific research. As such, I didn't have a lot of confidence as a programmer.

Starting an open source project helped me to gain valuable feedback that improved my programming skills in a way I could never have done on my own. I also got a helpful confidence boost--I'm no longer ashamed of my coding, or scared of letting others see it. This has been liberating, and has helped me to improve as a collaborator. In my case, the improved skillset gained through open source contributions will most certainly add to my future earnings potential.

For those who already have all their skills and couldn't possibly gain from feedback (whoever that may be), open source could be viewed as the equivalent of pro bono work done by lawyers. Lawyers often do pro bono work to help the poor, etc., and possibly to keep certain skills sharp on things they may not do on a day-to-day basis. For a programmer, open source gives the opportunity to practice something new or out of the daily grind and get valuable feedback on it. Or to work on a larger project that they wouldn't have time for otherwise.

And then as mentioned above, there's the resume aspect. When I was applying for an NSF postdoc fellowship (still underway), I was asked for "synergistic activity": ways you contribute to the maths/science/engineering community or education beyond your normal duties. Being able to say "lead author of a project used in undergraduate education and industrial and academic research in North America, South America, Europe, Asia, and Australia" was certainly a boost, considering many graduate students can only claim making better handouts for their classes or the occasional presentation.

So, there's another perspective. ;-) -- Paul

Re:Reward for Open Source?

[heroofhyr]

... What am I missing here?

My guess would be passion for what you are doing. For people who really love what they are doing, compensation for it is just the icing on the cake.

Why do I get the feeling the grandparent was one of those types I recall from uni who studied programming because they read in a magazine in secondary school that IT was the wave of the future and wanted a piece of the cake? I think what the GP is "missing" is a satisfaction for what they do. There have been times when I was hired to do a freelance project on the condition that I only get a paycheck if it can be accomplished, clocked 100 hours per week on it for a couple months, find that the task is too complicated or too grand for the platform, and felt that I didn't deserve to be paid merely because I had failed--in fact in those cases I was more upset by the fact that I couldn't succeed than by the lack of a wage. I doubt the people who program just because there's (sometimes) good money in it ever feel like this. When I'm working, the only motivation to get paid comes from my wife and the bills that come in the mail. If neither of those existed it would probably never occur to me that it's payday until those occasional weekends where I feel burnt out from 28 hours without sleep or food and feel like buying a DVD or run out of smokes.

Any profession where a person only puts in the bare minimum and has no emotional or intellectual connection to what they're doing is probably not their "calling." Unfortunately, I also think the majority of people have no real calling and therefore can only put in the bare minimum in whatever they do--in which case it's almost always irrelevant what job it is (the exception being scientists and civil/social services where an emotional and intellectual attachment to the job should be, in my opinion, an unconditional requirement).

I feel lucky that in all the workplaces I've been in, the software department has always been full of people wholly dedicated to solving problems and figuring out answers rather than "buying cars" and bottom-lines. These people are good programmers but terrible businessmen, which these days I tend to see as a plus when interviewing for a new job and visit the IT room(s) of the company. The programmers who are good businessmen but not passionate tend to be mentally lazy, stick to solutions that work, and are incapable of seeing the problem to be solved as anything more than a way to make money. In those environments I often find myself doing the brunt of the labour. I don't think such attitudes are inherent to open source or nonexistant in closed source, but people with this type of personality and attitude towards their work tend in my experience not to "get" open source software.

The minister of IT quoted in the article was formerly head of the University of Technology and is a millionaire. Go figure that he views open source software with mistrust. It probably goes against everything he's ever believed. It's funny, and I think I mentioned it once already in another discussion, but the professors I had at school were two kinds of people. There were the mainstream classes for introductory topics, which were always taught by die-hard Windows professors for whom nothing outside the realm of Visual Basic and MS-DOS programming even existed (these types remind me of the parent of the poster to whom I'm replying), and there were the more theoretical professors who always forced us to do every homework assignment on a Sparc station and seemed to brim with disgust at the "introductory" professors and the students who would take some Java and VB courses and spend the rest of their degree period falling asleep in class and dreaming about the day they have that sweet Microsoft job with the cabriolet and the trophy wife and Sunday schmooze trips to the golf course.