Thai ICT Minister slams open source

[Uncle Che]

Source:
http://www.bangkokpost.com/151106_Database/15Nov2006_data001.php

(Bangkok Post has a tendency to drop articles in a day or two so check quickly)
Most important quotes:

On the subject of open source software, he said the current government plan was a case of the blind leading the blind, as neither the people who are in charge nor the people in industry seem to know the dangers of open source software.

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 If nobody can make money from it, there will be no development and open source software quickly becomes outdated," he said.

Apart from Linux, he claimed that most open source software is often abandoned and not developed, and leads to a lot of low-quality software with lots of bugs.

"As a programmer, if I can write good code, why should I give it away? Thailand can do good source code without open source," he said.


So what are these dangers of open source software???????? Microsoft doesn't make as much money?


The new ICT Minister expressed his belief in censorship and said that even the most avid freedom of speech advocate would change his mind if he sees doctored pictures of his daughter's head on a naked body posted on the Internet.

The ICT Ministry will soon put forward draft Acts to the National Legislative Assembly on cybercrime and on web sites that are pornographic or considered lese majeste, allowing officials to arrest, fine and imprison offenders.

In case some of you Americans are unfamiliar with lese majeste, it simply means that you can't say anything against the king. If you do, you can be imprisoned and they want to cover the web as well. Next if you post on a Yahoo Group anything lese majeste, you can be imprisoned.


Sitthichai also called the e-Auction regulations a mess and a pointless show of technology, with no real impact on preventing corruption or collusion. However, as much as he would prefer paper auctions, he cannot do much as e-Auctions are now part of the Ministry of Finance regulations.

Paper auctions were dropped because they were not transparent and were easily manipulated by nefarious individuals and lots of room for bribes was left.

Now I am thinking, attacks open source and wants to revert to pro-bribery ways?? Hmm. has me thinking. Tea money anyone?

[pichalsi]

looks like he didnt really know what he was talking about...

[sweemeng]

politicians is like that.........

what do they know....

many people(non-techie) seems don't know that originally software is distribute in source form and is modifiable, and there is huge advance. Internet c, as the result of how software distributed that time. also we have some of the most flexible operating system, unix, we have some of the most stable OS, again unix, and the some of the most powerful OS, okay unix again. all because of the way unix is distributed. at the time when opensource or free software don't exist yet.

and now they slam open source. i hope they study more history.

"IP" thing is ****, yet this is all they know. if PARC holding their "IP"(assume they are like what it is now except they holding their IP), we will not have GUI, garbage collection, object oriented programming, notebook,pc, printer.......................

i'm not sure what are they thinking, everyone knows that software price at the region is ridiculously high. and we can practically only get illegal copy of software. what an idiot they are

[Tomosaur]

It is a misunderstanding of the nature of software. It is quite possible for open-source software to make money, but that is at the desire of the creators, rather than the CEOs of Company X who did not actually contribute to the software's creation. Open source technology/software benefits everyone to some degree, since the principles and practices involved with one project may have advantages which can be used readily in other projects, which leads to improvement across the whole spectrum. If Company X wants to keep all of its code, research, etc a secret, then so be it, but they shouldn't complain when the real will of the people, for freedom, free things, and general good-will, stops them from making unnecessary amounts of money. If everything was the best it could possibly be (which is what open-sourcing of anything would lead to), then surely that is better than a handful of people owning the vast majority of the wealth and doing nothing worthwhile with it?

[DC@DR]

It's sad that he's elected as the ICT Minister of Thailand. I don't know if he will do smth to disable/cancel Thai's OLPC plan or not :(

[Rhapsody]

It seems he's exhibiting a fairly blatant lack of understanding about free software. I can generally forgive this in joe-six pack who barely knows the difference between hardware and software, but seeing it in an elected official whose job it is to know about these things makes me despair.


On the subject of open source software, he said the current government plan was a case of the blind leading the blind, as neither the people who are in charge nor the people in industry seem to know the dangers of open source software.

It's not a good sign when someone starts off sounding like Steve Ballmer.


"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," he said.

Several things wrong here.

1) Free software licences are not public domain. BSD-style licences are similar to public domain, but are not the only type. The GPL and other copyleft licences specifically maintain copyright with the aim of making sure the code cannot be made proprietary and (in the case of strong copyleft licences) that the code cannot be linked with non-free code.

2) One of the freedoms guaranteed in free software (and open source software) is the freedom to sell the software. This is a freedom given to everyone. In fact, selling the source code is fine too as long as it doesn't cost any more than binaries and is freely available to anyone who asks. It's also quite possible to give the software away for free and make money back on official support contracts (just ask Mozilla or Canonical).

3) I've tried both proprietary and free software in the past. Currently, I'd estimate around 99% of what I use on a daily basis is free (mostly GPLed) software. This isn't just ideological either. The software I currently use is the best I've ever used, is all under active development, and is not outdated at all.


Apart from Linux, he claimed that most open source software is often abandoned and not developed, and leads to a lot of low-quality software with lots of bugs.

This is partially true. A lot of the projects on SourceForge have been abandoned. However, there's a lot of free software projects about. The fact that there's 30 dead projects for a specific task doesn't matter much when there's another 10 that are under active development.

Also, wouldn't Linux be the crucial exception here? If one free (and GPLed) software project can be successful, wouldn't it say that the problem with others is one of implementation rather than philosophy? Of course there are loads of other success stories in free software, so he's talking nonsense either way.


"As a programmer, if I can write good code, why should I give it away? Thailand can do good source code without open source," he said.

Indeed they can, and they're perfectly free to. But they could be missing out on a lot of potential talent that could be helping them. If only there was a public SVN repository...


The new ICT Minister expressed his belief in censorship and said that even the most avid freedom of speech advocate would change his mind if he sees doctored pictures of his daughter's head on a naked body posted on the Internet.

I'd probably give the author of the picture a strongly worded e-mail stating that the original picture he derived his new work from was under a cc-by-sa (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.5/)/GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html) dual-licence, and that their derivative work must be licenced under one or both of those licences.

Of course I doubt this man would believe I'd actually be willing to spread such a thing further rather than stopping it, but then I'd be using the cc-by-nd (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/2.5/) licence if I planned on doing that. Such shops are rather childish too anyway, giving public attention to such matters can only make them worse. Best to just let the kiddies have their fun, they'll just find a new camwhore next week anyway.

[Lord Illidan]

Probably, he's just made a six figure deal with MS about schools and free Vista licenses, and doesn't want to look bad with them. Personally, I couldn't care less what he says!

[dca]

It boils down to greed. C'mon, there was only one person at the right place at the right time and that was Bill Gates...

If you or the King of Siam or whomever the heck said that crap is thinking clearly, fine you wrote a conscript. You want to charge money for it, fine!

Geez, that burns my rear. Granted: M$ Office 2003 and M$ Windows XP are good for what they are. Asides from chronic crashing and being a RAM-hog better than OpenOffice. Better as a $599 software package, NO! Better as a $199 OS, NO!

[Old Pink]

Idiot.

[Uncle Che]

The Thai ICT Minister was previously a university professor. He was not elected because Thailand is currently under martial law and all ministers were appointed by the junta.

Thailand is a developing country. When you buy a computer here, they install just about every conceivable program on it, why? Because all the software is free. One school I know went straight to HP to buy 25 computers, when they were installed, all had illegal software on them. From the OS on up. If countries like Thailand had to pay full price, then they would be singing a very different tune.

Many in Thailand felt that the new military coup would change the way things are done and would be a step in the right direction, now it has turned into the great leap backward. Talking this over with fellow teachers here and we are slowly becoming more convinced that things will become more and more draconian in Thailand.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_in_Thailand

[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 :rolleyes:

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 (http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn5072) is acceptable? Or this (http://www.regdeveloper.co.uk/2004/09/07/microsoft_patents_keyboard_navigation/)?

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.