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 If nobody can make money from it, there will be no development and open source software quickly becomes outdated...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

Typical idiot.

[Teddy Beartuzzi]

He sounds eminently qualified for politics.

Appointed by a military junta, BTW.

[jcr]

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

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:in other news

[strider44]

I hate it when people always dismiss things like this as paid for by Microsoft. That guy could very well just be a genuine idiot, and yet you're trying to insult him by saying he's corrupt as well.

Money?

[camperdave]

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.

misquote

[The Clockwork Troll]

I was in Bangkok when the announcement was made. What he actually said was:

I'M IN UR MINISTRY
MALIGNING UR SOFTWARE

Neither. You don't get it.

[Anonymous Coward]

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:

1. He/she thinks it will persuade more people to vote for him
2. He/she thinks it will attract money (in whatever form: campaign donations, bribes, bigger budget)

Once you understand this, the world will start making more sense to you.

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: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

In open source, one thing is always true

[Travoltus]

Necessity, not profit, is the mother of invention.

If it's needed, it'll get done.

Re:Reward for Open Source?

[Filip22012005]

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.

Re:OK. Let's pack up and go home

[rifter]

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.

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.

Re:Reward for Open Source?

[fitten]

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).

Re:Reward for Open Source?

[Lumpy]

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.