Right so today saw a very interesting announcement in the Bangkok Post about OpenSource and Intellectual Property. Now I have lived in the Middle East, US and a few countries in Europe and found these views at a national level quite interesting especially if you transcend these into the HPC environment. Below is a clip from the article and the URL so you can review yourselves:
http://bangkokpost.net/151106_Database/15Nov2006_data001.php
"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 If nobody can make money from it, there will be no development and open source software quickly becomes outdated," he said.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.
If senior figures such as the ICT Minister for Thailand has questions and queries around the protection of IP within the OpenSource world, should businesses also have those legitimate concerns when writing OpenSource based applications for HPC? This raises a few more questions:
· Can competitive advantage be obtained from great software code and as such should that be shared?
· Do HPC applications deliver first mover advantages to the businesses that write them?
· If so, does that not question why you would want to write them in OpenSource?
For those interested in our coding environments check out this link: http://www.microsoft.com/uk/msdn/visualstudio/default.mspx
The more I look into HPC I see it as tackling some of the most important things this planet has to solve:
· Climate change solutions
· Vaccines
· Engineering for complex structures
If HPC is there to solve complex business requirements then they have an intrinsic value, so all more reason to heed the ICT Ministers words...
Enjoy!