An Open Letter to the Thai IT Minister has been released in response to his claims that Free and Open Source Software is lacking in IP and offers Thailand no value.
To the Minister of the Ministry of Information Technology and Communication
Re: Clarifying the facts about open source software
According to your declaration of the department's policy over which you have authority and the newspaper reports regarding your reasons for not supporting open source software development, we, who are software developers and users in Thailand, even though we don't oppose your use of budgeted money for a more important reason, we think that the reasons that you gave are not accurate according to our experience and cause public misunderstanding about OSS, which will affect our work which, we are trying to accomplish for the betterment of our country. We are doing this on our own without requesting money from the government.
We'd like to point out these facts with reference to the Bangkok Post report on Wednesday, Nov 15th, 2006 covering the following points:
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 If nobody can make money from it, there will be no development and open source software quickly becomes outdated," he said.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.
We will cover the issues point-by-point below:
- The work that we have done was not done blindly without direction. We studied well the various conditions about OSS development, including the law, development methods, project accomplishment, and the effects on the economy. We saw opportunities for our country, which we will clarify later. We are therefore trying to work in the private sector to support the government's projects.
- There is a misunderstanding that open source software is public domain without copyright because, according to current law, every piece of open source software has a legal copyright holder. It is only the generosity of the copyright holder which gives others special rights under his or her license, which uses copyright law itself to protect the holder's and user's rights to edit and distribute the software. If someone fails to follow the conditions of the agreement, they can be sued. This is an issue which open source projects take very seriously and try to monitor in order to prevent copyright violations.
- Open source software can generate revenue because the license allows one to do so as long as one doesn't violate the license. Therefore, you see open source software in many kinds of hardware, such as routers, firewalls, mobile phones, and PDAs, to start. Because of the availability of the source code, the software can be adapted freely to many different kinds of hardware. There is also after-sales service, such as system installation and integration of solutions. The use of open source software reduces the start-up cost and is amazingly adaptable. The seller must offer the user the same right which the seller has (transfer). In other countries, the seller uses part of the revenue to support the development by sponsoring, donating , or hiring the developer to develop new features for the software. They may possibly simply employ the developer. All this is the reason why open source software is being continuously developed. In Thailand, this happens occasionally, but isn't common, because the open source mentality hasn't caught on here, but if it does catch on and is supported, it is entirely possible that process will be supported in the same way.
- Like normal software, open source software has to survive natural selection. If there are enough users, the software will be advanced and developed forever because the open source process encourages communication between users and developers more than proprietary software, due to the availability of the source code. Some of these users are able to send in patches to the main tree. This means that open source software has many more developers available to it than the equivalent proprietary software. Other than the Linux kernel, which has passed through this process and reached great heights, there are other projects, such as Firefox (browser), Apache (web server), Squid (http proxy), MySQL (database), PostgreSQL (database), PhP (web programming), Mambo (CMS), Drupal (CMS), Gnome (desktop environment), KDE (desktop environment), X.org (GUI windowing system), ... etc. These projects are developed faster than leading proprietary projects.
- There are many reasons why people who write good code might want to give out their code for free (under license). If you don't count the love for human society or self-satisfaction, there are also economic reasons.
- Netscape Communicator, which lost market share to MS Internet Explorer, decided to reopen the browser wars by releasing the source code as the Mozilla Project. They received a lot of help from developers on the internet and it became the Firefox web browser, which is stealing market share back from IE perpetually. The cooperation of the Mozilla Project with outside developers has benefited both sides.
- Businesses which use open source software and modify it in-house incur a increased cost every time they upgrade because they must patch the new version. An easier method is to contribute the changes back to the main tree for inclusion and to tell their customers that they are supporting OSS and making further modifications easier for their clients.
- The availability of the source code help in education by allowing the student to work with real code and develop extensions to it instead of simply reading a textbook and following the exercises within, only to learn how to really develop later on, increasing the rate of collaborative research.
All these are possible because of the new availability of legal, large-scale, collaborative development which respects the IP rights of others. The open source model also credits developers in various ways.
Other than these, we see the following economic advantages in adopting open source software:
- Reduction in the piracy rate. Due to the high cost of software from foreign countries, any attempt to reduce the rate of software piracy by purchasing only the required elements would result in a large amount of money leaving the country. A new solution to this problem is to use FLOSS. The quality is not lower than the other software.
- Supporting the development of technology in-country. The collaborative open source software process mentioned previously is a efficient tool to help develop technology in Thailand at a faster rate. It reduces our dependence on pricey foreign technology and allows us to solve our own problems instead of paying for expensive foreign support.
- Increasing the potential of Thai developers. Generally, code in open source projects is of high quality and superior design because the developers take great care to protect their images. Good design is also much more important in the collaborative model and attempt to increase the size of the project. That Thais join the process (there are some already) doesn't only cause foreign developer to acknowledge the Thais, but also is a great opportunity for us to learn software engineering concepts which are more advanced than what we are using now.
Regarding your concern over the income of developers, we, who are the direct recipients, are equally as concerned as you are. We believe, however, that when open source grows, the economic channels will open similarly to those in foreign countries. It is a chicken-and-egg problem -- we either wait for the result before offering support or we offer support first then wait for the result.
We choose the latter because we have foreseen the end game -- we will not stop working, whether or not the government supports open source or not. We can only hope that if you don't support us, you will at least stay out of our way and not interfere in our work like you did in the interview.
Presented for your consideration.
With respect.
