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 If nobody can make money from it, there will be no development and open source software quickly becomes outdated...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

Typical idiot.

[Teddy Beartuzzi]

He sounds eminently qualified for politics.

OK. Let's pack up and go home

[El Cubano]

Netcraft confirms: IBM, Sun, and Google make boatloads of money off of the countless unnamed and unpaid developers who write the code that they use. Does the amount they contribute back exceed the amount they gain by benefiting from the work of others?

You know what? You and the Thai IT Minister are right. I don't know how I missed it for all these years.

OK. Everyone, let's pack it up and go home. Some one be sure and shutdown the web servers on the way out. I hear that Best Buy is hiring, maybe I'll try there.

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.

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

And in other news

[BrokenHalo]

"Thai software slammed as useless and full of bugs. OSS community says 'keep your code, we don't want to see the source'."

Re:He had a point!

[Anonymous Coward]

I quote :

"writing software for free is just plain stupid."

So although there are successful OSS projects (by your own admission) these are all run and staffed by stupid people?

If stupid people can make a living while creating free code then why don't you try. You seem qualified...

1976 called.

[oGMo]

1976 called. It wants Bill Gates' Open Letter to Hobbyists [wikipedia.org] back.

Re:Reward for Open Source?

[salec]

At least the GPL coders don't have to pay to submit code under that license.

Mod parent down: "-1 giving harmful ideas to legislators"