[Foundation-l] New Thai ICT minister slams open source, says it is useless

[Walter van Kalken]

Hello everybody here an interestin intervieuw with the new Thai ICT 
minister part of the "interim" government. He makes a number of strange 
statements. Basically he admits he will lie to the foreign press, he 
says open source is useless and he favours netcensorship!  I will put 
the quotes underneath here, for the whole article go to:

http://www.bangkokpost.com/Database/15Nov2006_data001.php

I will keep a copy on my pc in case people can not open it.



The quotes:

/Lying to the foreign press:/

"I see no reason to put CAT or TOT in the stock market, but I'm saying 
this to a group of Thai journalists. Tomorrow I will be talking to 
foreign journalists and I will tell them that CAT and TOT will be put on 
the market at a suitable time, which is not now,"

/Open source is useless:

/"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becomes outdated," he said."

<>"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."

/Favouring netcensorship:/

<>"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."


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