Thai IT Minister Slams Open Source 520
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 If nobody can make money from it, there will be no development and open source software quickly becomes outdated...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."
Are the some Netcraft links I missed? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
in other news (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Are the some Netcraft links I missed? (Score:3, Insightful)
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?
How much was paid? (Score:1, Insightful)
His statement, "As a programmer, if I can write good code, why should I give it away? Thailand can do good source code without open source," shows that he does not know the true hacker ethic. A true hacker writes code to be proud of, not because he/she is being paid but because of pride in code.
budget whore (Score:4, Insightful)
Seth
Fud or just dumb? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Are the some Netcraft links I missed? (Score:5, Insightful)
What a strange quality for a politician, don't you think?
Thailand? Gee, didn't I hear about them recently? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:OK. Let's pack up and go home (Score:3, Insightful)
How about citizenship? (Score:3, Insightful)
And you, mister politician, why should you serve your community? How about telling your people that you are looking for money, fame, and power? Fortunately, there are still people in this world who are not in it for the money.
Political situation in Thailand (Score:2, Insightful)
He had a point! (Score:2, Insightful)
Money? (Score:5, Insightful)
clueless gibber (Score:4, Insightful)
Neither. You don't get it. (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Are the some Netcraft links I missed? (Score:1, Insightful)
If I understand correctly, Google makes money using its closed-source page rank algorithm and closed-source adword. They may use opensource software but it's in fact the closed-source stuff that is actually making money. Sun/IBM also make money from closed-source software and/or closed-source hardware.
I also understand that a good number of Microsofties make millions or billions with their closed-source software. I rarely hear about opensource champions becoming rich. Linus and most of the people who contributed to opensource don't really see much monetary returns for their work. Certainly not on the scale of BillG or the Google guys.
Say what you like about how wonderful opensourcing is as a principle. The minister is correct about opensource contributors not making much money from their contribution.
Reward for Open Source? (Score:4, Insightful)
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.)
Re:Are the some Netcraft links I missed? (Score:3, Insightful)
Which is complete nonsense.
Re:Reward for Open Source? (Score:2, Insightful)
How far we've come! (Score:2, Insightful)
The good thing is, he's an idiot politician who knows the terms "open source" and "source code" and can use them more or less coherently in a sentence. This shows that these concepts are becoming more mainstream.
Better, if a politician makes a comment like this, it starts a debate. People who didn't know what "open source" means might start to want to find out.
Even better, his arguments are ridiculously confused and easy to dismiss. "Public domain"? He may have power in Thailand, but governments in other countries looking seriously at open source software are not likely to be swayed by anything he's said. If Microsoft really were bribing him, you'd think they could have fed him some more convincing lines.
The only thing left is to look forward to the results of his policy. If for any reason things don't go as well as planned... perhaps it will be time for a different approach.
Re:Reward for Open Source? (Score:1, Insightful)
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.
In open source, one thing is always true (Score:5, Insightful)
If it's needed, it'll get done.
Re:Reward for Open Source? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Fud or just dumb? (Score:1, Insightful)
"Should we regulate mobile telecommunications or allow the market to decide technical issues?"
"Do we support the concept of software patents?"
"Should we encourage the use of Opens Standards? Should we encourage the use of Open Source?"
"Should access to the Internet be a human right?"
"Do we support the prosecution of Microsoft?"
by the way, I'm German and haven't heard of any IT ministers in Europe
Really? Norway, Poland, Czech Republic, Hungary, United Kingdom...that's just a short list of the top of my head which I was able to verify in a couple of minutes on Google. Outside of the EU almost all of SE Asia also have their own IT ministers, as well as Pakistan, India and Australia. Canada has one, as do most South American countries. I suspect Germany has one, but I wouldn't know what their office would be so I can't tell you; I'm sure you're better qualified to look it up than I am.
Re:Reward for Open Source? (Score:3, Insightful)
This is actually one of my favorite topics. The presumption is that a company that makes changes in an open source package won't submit the changes back to the community. I'm not sure that that's true.
If the company makes changes to the open source program and does not submit the changes back, then the next time they update from the source, they lose their changes. Then they have to reintegrate their changes with every update. It's *cheaper* to submit the changes back, as it puts the onus on the next updater to integrate the changes. Note that this works for both new features and bug fixes.
The same thing works at launch. If your company writes software that fills a common need, it can make more sense to open source it. In particular, if your implementation is not quite appropriate for everyone (such that others will need to customize it), then it is likely that you will pick up an active community.
What happens if you do not open source? If it's a common need, then eventually someone writes an open source version. Once that happens, it is often cheaper for new implementers to use that version than to write their own. Unless the closed source version is especially profitable (e.g. Microsoft Windows or Oracle), chances are that the open source version will eventually get more feature complete than your version. Once that happens, your work is essentially wasted. Meanwhile, if you had open sourced, they would be using your version and you would be getting the benefits of these new features (that presumably you hadn't previously needed).
Why hasn't open source taken over the world? Well, for some problems, there are a large number of people willing to spend a small amount of money. MS Windows is an example. The problem is expensive to solve (Vista is a multi-billion dollar project); however, Microsoft is able to spread this expense over hundreds of millions of users. As a result, they can release a high feature, self supporting product.
Open source works better for problems where there are a smaller number of people willing to spend a lot of money. Further, open source works better for smaller feature sets that need customized than one grab bag feature set that is one size fits all.
The Oracle/MySQL competition is interesting. Oracle has a rich feature version that makes them lots of money. MySQL has a smaller but growing feature set. Will MySQL eventually catch up to Oracle in features? For some problem spaces, it's actually easier to use already (Oracle is expensive to tune and maintain). In some ways, MySQL actually helps Oracle. It hooks people on databases and Oracle (or IBM or Microsoft or...) cashes in once they outgrow MySQL's capabilities.
Re:in other news (Score:3, Insightful)
But on a serious note: There is also the possibility that he is neither, only doing his job (although in a slightly weasly way).
"Follow the money" is a useful game, but don't just pick an obvious trail and ignore all others. Seeing as they have an IT minister at all, they obviously value the sector as a strategically important industry. Since they do not have the important software houses and those are unlikely to pop up overnight, it would be natural for them, at this stage, to focus on growing the industry by means of code shops for foreign publishers to outsource to, just like India. Encouraging use of commercial software is simply a bid to preserve or expand his market. The statements about open source are silly, sure, and sneaky. Some might say immoral. But no more so than what just about every CEO and governing politician in the world does on a daily basis to protect the interests he is entrusted with.
Re:OK. Let's pack up and go home (Score:3, Insightful)
I would hardly call it exploiting. It would be exploiting if people were forced to do their programming in a sort of sweatshop. As it is, it is a deliberate choice to share your code.
As it is there are some very compelling reasons for a coder to make open-source software:
I for one am rather positive that most companies give back to the community one way or another, by employing OSS developers, giving back code, and by paying money. As far as I have heard Apache is quite healthy; and has big deals with large corporations, and I suppose this will be the case for many of the 'core' projects.
If you are concerned that your code will be abused by the big corporations, don't open-source it. The license is clear.
Strange comment .. (Score:3, Insightful)
AFAIK, Thailands' universities have quite a decent track record in Open Source, with various school projects targeting low cost IT for schools (a bit like what happened later in Spain in the Extremadura region) and I think they have decent code for OpenOffice as well, with algorithms to support spell checking for a language where spaces between words appear more or less optional.
In summary, I think some people shouldn't be allowed near the press for their own good..
Re:In open source, one thing is always true (Score:1, Insightful)
Linux with Microsoft-IIS?. (Score:4, Insightful)
The Netcraft link you posted does claim that it was running Linux in September, but it also claims that the web server was still IIS. Perhaps this is me mis-interpreting the way that Netcraft presents its data, but how does one run IIS on a Linux platform? Unless it was something like Apache temporarily configured to report that it was Microsoft-IIS, but I can't see the point in doing that.
The IP address is also radically different, so my guess is that the domain was temporarily redirected to another hosting service in September that had a server configured quite differently, and possibly wasn't reporting its state as accurately.
Re:in other news (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:hmmm (Score:5, Insightful)
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.)
Re:Reward for Open Source? (Score:2, Insightful)
Work on a project for a long time and you'll become an expert.
Be an expert and you've got something someone else hasn't got: expertise.
Not just in programming in general but also in the workings of the project. Then you can sell support like MySQL does. Or build modules for bounty. Or write a book about the software.
Contributing to something that becomes a standard makes you a guru and a celebrity. Guru's sell advice, support, books, even short talks at seminars for big $$$.
Re:Reward for Open Source? (Score:2, Insightful)
But you're missing the point of journals. It's not about saying "I've been published". It's all about peer-review! That's why this level of organization is necessary. Without peer-review, science is nothing.
Re:OK. Let's pack up and go home (Score:5, Insightful)
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 [apache.org]. 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.
He's right.... and wrong. (Score:3, Insightful)
If companies providing support and training for Open Source were to better advertise themselves, they would capture far more of the market. As it is, neither Red Hat nor SuSE nor Mandriva advertise much in public. The joke is that Ubuntu gets far more mainstream media attentions than any of the others, and that without Microsoft type of FUDvertising (word coined by me).
As for Thai companies providing good code, they may do so in Thailand for the Thai market, since localization to Thai is probably not high on many companies' priorities (it's ironic that Open Source support Thai better than most closed source software packages do), but they certainly don't have much say in the market outside Thailand.
Re:Reward for Open Source? (Score:3, Insightful)
One thing you are missing is that you can cut costs with Free Software. Your costs. (Your tools can cost less for one.)
Another is that one can get paid up front for one's work. That is good enough for some and if they go the Free Software route, their work can impact your potential future earnings even if you don't.
The world seems to be going that way and to my mind, that is a good thing. The thing is to figure out how to prosper in the new market.
If you wan't to explore this more, give me a shout.
all the best,
drew
http://www.ourmedia.org/node/262954 [ourmedia.org]
Sayings - Deterred Bahamian Novel
Wherein zotz seems to be giving up potential future earnings
on his "literary" works...
Re:Money? (Score:3, Insightful)
The same applies to a sizable proportion of proprietary software. Especially when it comes to "Government IT Projects". The difference is that worthless proprietary software tends to cost money.
My Strange Analogy Justification for OSS (Score:3, Insightful)
This is where the analogy gets a bit strange. Let's say the two teams were still competing against each other but take the motivation away. Not just a contest, but let's say the goal was extremely important. Now the teams are stranded on a Junkyard Island and *need* to make a device to survive, to remove themselves from the Island.
Do you think they would do a better job individually or working together?
Intellectual Property at this point becomes "my team is better than yours no matter what resources we have, and we're gonna leave you here to rot".
Re:Reward for Open Source? (Score:5, Insightful)
Passion fulfilled.
Right now, there are many projects that I have on the burners. They are on the burners only because I am driven to do them. Some people climb mountains - others code software. Don't ask why - the reason is the same.
Re:Reward for Open Source? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Reward for Open Source? (Score:5, Insightful)
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:Are the some Netcraft links I missed? (Score:3, Insightful)
Which goes to show how much Sun's multi-minded talking over the years has seriously hurt their image with many people. I know it has undermined my trust in them. I certainly have liked some of the things they have done over the years but I have not liked others and have not liked a bunch of things they have said.
Lost opportunities galore there I guess.
all the best,
drew
http://www.ourmedia.org/node/262954 [ourmedia.org]
Sayings - Deterred Bahamian Novel
CC Attribution-ShareAlike
Re:Reward for Open Source? (Score:3, Insightful)
going to improve the global knowledgebase for that application
and that support information will inevitably "bleed" into the
"public" domain.
BTW, IBM has made contributions. So has Oracle. They each
have needs, things they want to get out of Linux or other
projects. In making it suitable for their own needs they
create things that then have to be folded back into the
public version.
Simply by providing technical requirements they can
help improve the product. I can name a project or two
right now that could make very good use of a more
professional eye. EVERYONE would benefit from the
result.
Re:Reward for Open Source? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Open access to science (Score:3, Insightful)
And, to be able to read any of those journals you would have to pay a high fee. Also, given the "publish or perish" culture in the academia now, everyone and their mother are figthing to be accepted in those "high profile" journals which of course welcome the demand very much. This of course is also creating the problem that *anyone* and their mother want to publish whatever they want. Just take a look at the current papers (for exampe www.scopus.com) you will see that 80% of the articles published nowadays are just "whatif" and just a really tiny fractions are articles with *real* useful scientific achievements.
I myself am being pressured by my supervisor (PhD) who is pressured by the department to publish, whatever you have but publish. And just because they want to be qualified 5* at the next RAE and they want more money.
Yeah, the current academia state sucks, I can not wait to finish my PhD and go away from academia. Research is not what it used to be. I remember reading a *really good* account of what has happened by a ver respected Chemist in Mexico, a man with more than 40 years of trayectory in research and he talked about all I have written which he lived by himself.
Capitalism is a bitch, it gets its claws in every place, and it is breaking science development .
Where to begin? (Score:3, Insightful)
Wrong. Wrong. Wrong.
Copyrights and Trademarks fall under that bastard term Intellectual Property and you get to keep them.
Anyone can use it and all your ideas become public domain.
Wrong. Open Source != Public Domain. Anyone you distribute it to can use, modify/improve and distribute it, if they give the same rights to whom they distribute it. Even Playing field.
If nobody can make money from it, there will be no development and open source software quickly becomes outdated...
Wrong.
a.If the code is not useful it is not used/maintained and becomes outdated.
b. If you do make money from useful OpenSource code (as many do, IBM/Apple/Nokia/Sun/RedHat/Novell ), you should use it to maintain your codebase.
c. Ever hear of Dual-Liscencing?
As a programmer, if I can write good code, why should I give it away?
1. If you want to horde your superior code away go ahead.
2. Aren't you a government employee? shouldn't you contibute to the common good of your people?
In summary, You appear to be misinformed, ignorant or waiting for an MS Handout. (BTW, if the latter were the case, you get handouts faster from MS for using open source rather than by bashing it.)
Glad the new Thai government is already advertising its idiots, I was afraid they'd be hard to spot.
You can't do both? (Score:3, Insightful)
It's like being an artist -- you have your day job, and then you have what you like to do. If you're really lucky, you do what you like as your day job. Where's Bad Analogy Guy when you need him?