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 If nobody can make money from it, there will be no development and open source software quickly becomes outdated...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

How was it delivered to our eyes?

[Anonymous Coward]

Hmmmm... By what means was his message delivered? What kind of server?

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Thu, 16 Nov 2006 07:15:11 GMT
Server: Apache/1.3.27 (Unix) PHP/4.2.2
X-Powered-By: PHP/4.2.2
Connection: close
Content-Type: text/html

No suprise.

[Don_dumb]

A country that doesn't like open government, doesn't like open sourced software.

They did have democracy, but the military 'closed' that.

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:He had a point!

[Kangburra]

I think the Mozilla team have proven you can code for free. internetnews [internetnews.com]

Re:Appointed by a military junta, BTW.

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

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

I don't live there, but I have friends who are in the royal family (it is a big family) and that's the impression I get too. The guy who was ousted appeared to have gone a little too far in indulging in american-style government/corporate bogus-free-market kleptocracy (the "socialize the costs, privatize the profits" kind where he and his family were majority shareholders).

Thai, but otherwise unrelated, I just saw Citizen Dog [imdb.com] and loved it. Along with Bangkok Loco [imdb.com] and Shutter [imdb.com] the Thai film market has been showing some real potential. I hope this "regime change" will continue with the economic circumstances that have encouraged recent local film production.

Re:Money?

[dalutong]

I don't think it's just for the love of it. I know that I contribute to OSS because I could never write a full (pick your app/framework/daemon) myself. So something can be, in part, "mine," without me having to be either a genius or part of a great software team.

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

a thai's take

[ghort]

An authentic thai told me:

"open source" has almost no meaning in thailand because 99% of software you can buy is pirated

it's true though you can buy "Microsoft" Windows for like $5

at what seems like a real computer store

Re:Reward for Open Source?

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

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.)

Because the whole is bigger than the sum of its parts.

The vast majority of people who write free software ARE compensated. Lots of students do it for the educational value (for example, Mosaic the proto-netscape, was written by undergrads and graduate students at NCSA). Lots of software developers do it in support of their daily job - for example, the guy who writes a module for Apache because his employer's website needs that functionality, or the guy who writes perl because he needs a better way to process log files at NASA, etc. Or they are paid specifically to work on it, like the hundreds of developers at IBM and HP and Redhat.

Most developers of Free software realize they have the choice of starting from scratch and reinventing the wheel, or standing on the shoulders of the people who have gone before them and getting the results they need so much faster with a much higher level of quality. Since their jobs aren't about monetizing software creation, there is little to no upside to starting from scratch.

While the "altrustic" streak is there, just like it is in the proprietary software world (look at all the people who spend man-months of their life giving out free support for proprietary software users on various web forums) Free software as an economic model is solidly based on the self-interest of the developers who use it to as a tool, not an end unto itself.

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?

The GPL prevents that. Any improvements that are distributed beyond the improver him/it-self must effectively be made available to the community in general. Other licenses, like the BSDs do not protect against that sort of free-rider problem. (Which is one reason MS is so very anti-GPL, but pees a little every time they talk about the BSD license).

Re:Are the some Netcraft links I missed?

[zotz]

"Does the amount they contribute back exceed the amount they gain by benefiting from the work of others?"

You know what? It's not a zero sum game.

Secondly, I would guess for most heavy users of Free Software, the amount they contribute back doesn't exceed the amount they gain by benefiting from the work of others.

That is a good thing. I can put in a little and take out a lot. Cool. I can also put something in once and a million people can take it out five million times without me having to lift a finger from there on. Cool. This digital realm has some amazing properties that it seems many don't get or don't want to admit to.

That said, I am not sure I know of any big coproration that I think is all good when it comes to Free Software or that I would trust in the matter.

all the best,

drew
http://code.google.com/p/drsoundwall/ [google.com]
dRsoundWall

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.

Reminds me of a Valenti quote

[wk633]

"A public domain work is an orphan. No one is responsible for its life. But everyone exploits its use, until that time cretain when it becomes soiled and haggard, barren of its previous virtues. Who, then, will invest the funds to renovate and nourish its future life, when on one owns it? How does the consumer benefit from that scenario? The answer is, there is no benefit."

-Jack Valenti, quoted in "Digital Copyright" by Jessica Litman

Thank god Hollywood has stepped up to save Shakespeare et al.

Open access to science

[xplenumx]

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.

Actually most scientists publish in journals that everyone can read. Most of the top scientific journals (in the biological sciences anyway) allow for anyone to read the articles one year after they've been published. If you want to read the latest research, you have to pay. If you want to read anything that's been published between (typically) ~1998 and one year ago, you're usually able to do so. Secondly, most university libraries have subscriptions to the top journals. I've never heard of a university library that turned away the public.

FYI, all journals (that I've published in) require us to pay to publish our articles. The last article we published (in the Journal of Immunology) cost us ~$2000.

Re:In open source, one thing is always true

[ESOB]

There is a necessity to eat, hence, you need money. So don't doubt profits push on invention.

Re:Reward for Open Source?

[t0tAl_mElTd0wN]

Aye. I agree with this 100%.

I am currently employed as a programming intern in Product Support for a large company (not a software company, but I do software, so whatever.) I got this job because I'm good at programming. I got good at programming not by being in other jobs or taking classes, but by doing independent work. I don't think there are many people who can say this, but when I'm finished at work for the day, and have been staring at code for 8 hours straight with the occasional bathroom break, I go home and sit down at my computer and work on my own coding projects.

It was asked "What's the motivation?". My motivation is that I write code for precisely the same reason an artist creates art. Nobody becomes an artist for the money - they all do it because they love to create, and express themselves through a non-traditional way. I create code because I like to. I enjoy solving the types of problems that come up when I'm learning how to create windowed applications with GTK+ (http://www.gtk.org/ [gtk.org]) or something. I enjoy figuring out the best way to structure my application so that I can make code as reusable as possible. And as for "is code an art?" It depends on why you do it. People work on open source projects because they like to code. For this reason, commercial software will never extinguish FOSS, simply because there will always be people who enjoy programming and who want to work on the software that they use every day. These people are artists of their trade because they do it for the love of it, and nothing else. The person who goes to work every day, bounces back and forth between writing code and watching the time, and in general choses to be a programmer for the money, is no more an artist than anyone else who goes into their field for a reason other than just because they love it.

Re:Reward for Open Source?

[bb5ch39t]

I used to feel as you do. And I still agree with you, in principle. But after 30 years of working in IT, and watching it be taken over by either "management" who are "empire builders" or only looking for advancement and "programmers" who just want a pay check, I've "burned out". At least at work. As I have time, I still write little utilities for myself at home for my own amusement and learning. I tried to work on a "large utility", but found so little time after cleaning up the shit programmed by others that I've given up on that as well. Perhaps my cronic illnesses have something to do with my attitude as well.

Wishing everybody joy and happiness in their chosen profession. I used to have it.

if I can write good code, why... give it away

[nightsweat]

"if I can write good code, why should I give it away?"

Because no matter how code the code from your one set of eyes is, it won't be anywhere near as good as the code that's been reviewed by 100,000 sets of eyes?

It's Good to Be the King

[Doc Ruby]

That's what you get from you IT minister when he's appointed by a military coup directed by the military dictator ("king") against your too-popular Prime Minister.

Then again, when your PM uses his family's telco to steal over a $BILLION from the country, it's no surprise his IT director will be fired, and the old IT policies discarded.

Re:No suprise.

[pudro]

Exactly. The whole point was that there wasn't a democracy to overthrow because a corrupt PM had stolen it.

And to your last line I will add: why do we criticize Saddam? After all, he was democratically elected wasn't he?

And I'll also add this quote:
"It is enough that the people know there was an election. The people who cast the votes decide nothing. The people who count the votes decide everything."
- Josef Stalin