Nah To Open Source

Traditionally governments were symphathetic to the cause of the open source movement and were pushing some open source solutions for their selective usages. I was very surprised to see the ICT minister of the new Thai government saying that his government’s 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 If nobody can make money from it, there will be no development and open source software quickly becomes outdated," he said.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.

Please read this confession on linux from one of its chief protaganists. Sometimes good sense comes from the most unexpected source!! As I wrote recently, with open source solutions, the service providers/consultants need to take a massive leap of faith - more so with massive/time-compressed/aggressive/critical deployments planned - one that would be seen from first principles to be fraught with fundamental risks.