Thai ICT Minister slams open source

[Polygon]

yeah cause programs like firefox, thunderbird, gaim, openoffice, songbird, xchat, and a bunch of other programs that are opensource dont get developed and they are full of bugs

another person who has no idea what he is talking about. The whole point of open source is that everything is in teh public domain. And the point is not to make money from it, but rather have the community help you with creating and improving your software so you get people working on it then just your programming team.

but of course its a place where everything is censored, what can you expect.

[DoctorMO]

ขอบคุณครับ *sarcastic*

I find it ironic that as I was showing my Thai friends how well Ubuntu supports the thai language (hey you can have file names in perfect Thai! and almost every app is in thai too) that this fool of a fool is shuting off one of the biggest avenues for Thailand to make money for it's self.

I notice he didn't say he was going to enforce global copyright. :-/ what a suprise.

[Miguel]

THat minister is an idiot. I wonder what would have happened to the human being had science been developed like proprietary software.

You know, it's not like I can't take a Physical Review Letters article and improve over it. License? I have to give credit. I suppose there is also no intellectual property in physics. Oh, wait! There is a thing called... the nobel prizes.

Also, if I apply an abstract idea* to an object, I can patent that object... so that others *know* the way to apply that idea. Of course, I will recieve some fees for a limited amount of time if someone else finds *my concrete aplication* interesting.

* note that code (especially algorithms) is actually an abstract idea, like maths.

[Tomosaur]

THat minister is an idiot. I wonder what would have happened to the human being had science been developed like proprietary software.

You know, it's not like I can't take a Physical Review Letters article and improve over it. License? I have to give credit. I suppose there is also no intellectual property in physics. Oh, wait! There is a thing called... the nobel prizes.

Also, if I apply an abstract idea* to an object, I can patent that object... so that others *know* the way to apply that idea. Of course, I will recieve some fees for a limited amount of time if someone else finds *my concrete aplication* interesting.

* note that code (especially algorithms) is actually an abstract idea, like maths.

I may have misunderstood you completely here, so please forgive me if I'm incorrect!

You agree with the practice of patenting some end-result and forcing people to pay you when they achieve it themselves? How about this:

Patent:
A software which takes input from a user, and uploads it to a website. The more users who upload input which matches that of the initial user, the more prominent that item becomes. The software may also be interactive, and display information of to users when some action is applied. The data may be that the initial user uploaded, or a culmination of data gathered from the subsequent users.

What's this software? I can think of hundreds of things which would fit this concept. The person who applied for this patent may have had a Tag cloud in mind, but this 'idea' could also be applied to a forum, or virtually any other user-content based app. Are you seriously telling me that being able to patent such abstract concepts is acceptable? Are you telling me that this is acceptable? Or this?

Microsoft tries to patent anything and everything. Software isn't like a car. I don't like this idea of paying for a 'way of doing something'. Don't get me wrong, I don't support theft. If somebody actually stole Microsoft's code, then yes, they should be compensated, but copying the result of the code (either purposefully, or accidentally) shouldn't be punished. The underlying code may be completely different.

[Miguel]

I may have misunderstood you completely here, so please forgive me if I'm incorrect!

I think you have. Don't worry, though. I'm a bit stressed these days with a "M.Sc Thesis" (a small thesis done in the middle of a PhD), so I could have written something undecipherable.

Do you agree with the practice of patenting some end-result and forcing people to pay you when they achieve it themselves?

I agree with patenting concrete physical implementations of abstract ideas. If you make a machine M that does A based on idea I, the exact implementation of M is patentable to me. Please note that competitors are aware of the existence of M when it is patented, so a patent doesn't work to hide information.

If another one makes another machine M' that also does A based on I shouldn't pay the corporation of M unless M and M' are demonstrated to be the same. If M' is a novel implementation, then it's patent-free.

The cases you mention are patents on ideas which, in my opinion (and the FSF), are immoral. If Schrödinger had patented his equation, we wouldn't have lasers (think CD's), microchips, transistors (the guys that invented the transistors were physicsts*, and these can be understood via Quantum Mechanics) and so many more things.

BTW: Note that in the last paragraph of my previous post I specifically mention the concrete application not the idea behind it.

I will end this post with a George Bernard Shaw quote:

If you have an apple and I have an apple, and we exchange apples, we both still only have one apple. But if you have an idea and I have an idea, and we exchange ideas, we each now have two ideas.