Dumbness is a gift...

Dumbness is a gift…

Today while browsing slashdot I've read that Thai IT Minister was slamming Open Source. Curious about his statements and intentions I followed the link that was on slashdot and checked Bangkok Post article.

I was shocked while reading the ministers statements. There's not a full quotation of everything he has said, although there are a few. I took the liberty to post them here.

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 If nobody can make money from it, there will be no development and open source software quickly becomes outdated.

Could he be more wrong?! I don't think so, this is what happens when people talk about things they have no clue. I think the minister should read some books and see some company case studies such as Sun or IBM to see that people can make money with open source and that development doesn't die.

I know what I'm saying, I work as a software developer for an open source project, I'm paied to do it (and let me say that it was the best job proposal I had) and it's under heavy development since 4 years ago when it started.
But let me give real life successful examples, Java Virtual Machine, Open Solaris both from Sun or the Eclipse IDE from IBM.

Yes, indeed there are open source projects that become outdated or even plain vaporware. But we also have plenty of mature open source projects alive, with heavy development and excellent quality. Sometimes much better than closed source.

You might be thinking why I haven't mentioned the linux Kernel on the successful open source software, well because of this:

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.

At least he recognises that Linux isn't as bad as he is saying open software is in general. But lots of bugs?! Wrong again!

With open source you have more people looking for bugs and patching the bugs. Do I have to remind how much time does Microsoft takes to patch their problems against how much time does a mature open source project takes?

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

Because you don't know everything, because there are always ways of getting your code better, because you always leave a bug behind.

The minister accuses the former minister of being blind due to approving open source, I myself think this minister is the one being blind.

Maybe the biggest problem for him is that if the government adopts open source he doesn't get money from companies to "help" him decide wish software company he should choose.

Oh well just another minister that has no clue on what he's saying… The typical politician.