It’s refreshing to see that NZ is not the only country that can appoint clueless monkeys to ICT government departments:
http://bangkokpost.net/151106_Database/15Nov2006_data001.php
A quote from the article:
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 If nobody can make money from it, there will be no development and open source software quickly becomes outdated,” he said.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.
Hmmm…. “most open source software is often abandoned” apart from Linux?
How about…. Firefox, Thunderbird, OpenOffice, JBoss, Netbeans, Eclipse (huge), Jetty, Tomcat, Spread, Azureus, BitTorrent, Audacity, 7-zip, Abiword, etc, etc, etc? Go to SF.net’s statistics page and see the huge number of downloads of some of these projects.
In regard to low-quality software, I seem to recall, from an ACMqueue article a few months back, that there is no correlation between numbers of bugs and open source software. In fact, here’s a relevant quote:
This type of development has both advantages and disadvantages. In various cases OSS seems to have solved many of the problems of traditional software engineering methods, since it has been possible to produce reliable, high quality, and low-cost software in a brief amount of time. The existence of a large pool of testers and developers facilitates debugging and the true peer review of the code results in better code.
In fact, to say this guy is a clueless monkey is a bit of an insult to the clueless monkeys out there. My apologies, clueless monkeys!
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