Does government have intention of fostering SW industry?2013-06-18Hit:4540
- 첨부파일
“Creative economy” is actively
being discussed by many people these days. I do not want to bring up the
subject of creative economy again and argue pros and cons of it here. However, what
is clear is that ‘innovation’ should be promoted to achieve creative economy.
Innovation becomes valuable when we come up with new ideas, embody the ideas,
and get the outcomes of the ideas in a market. “Innovation is not controllable.
The only thing we can do is simply to remove factors which hinder innovation”,
the former director of Von Fraunhofer Laboratory in Germany said. It is easy to
sympathize with this view. However, we now seem to be going in the opposite
direction.
There were few mobile applications which had gained huge popularity not long
ago. They can predict bus arrival time and compare the price between gas
stations. They also check newsletters from school. All of these applications
were created by students in high school and university.
However, public institutions and public companies plagiarized the students’
ideas and launched the same applications. It’s a waste of budget as well as a
behavior that kills students’ creativeness and ambition.
There are many other examples of unfair practice. The most notable case is that
the government developed software (S/W), which a company had already launched
in market and exported overseas, and distributed the software to the public for
free. It is a behavior that infringes copyright and hampers corporate
activities.
When the government fosters hardware (e.g., electronics and automobile) industries,
it sometimes prevents domestic products from being attacked by highly
competitive and cheap products of foreign companies. Actually, there are many
policies that help domestic products be appreciated well.
On the contrary, the government keeps taking the opposite stance for software
industry. For example, On-Nara System (i.e., a governmental system) has developed
software that was on sale in the market at that time and distributed the
software to the public for free, which has in turn made a serious damage to the
company that originally developed the software. The government is also making
attempts at the Integrated Control System for disaster management as well as
ERP system for national universities.
It is important for government to have the will to cut down budgets. However,
we need to analyze thoroughly which one is ultimately the best interest of the
country when considering industry promotion and budget reduction at national level.
Still, the debate on this issue remains inconclusive.
Some advanced countries with a
strong SW industry have actually put tremendous efforts into fostering SW
industries. It looks like a desirable example that we should learn.
It is no exaggeration to say that SW industry has first begun from U.S. Defense
Department which used to purchase and use software that private companies had
developed at that time. It may be asked whether the present status of SW
industry can be achieved if IBM didn’t ask MS to pay the price for a unit DOS.
We are not living in a monarch-governed country. The country is operated by
taxes of the people. If the government breaks the individuals’ will to start
their own business and destroys creative companies, there’s no way for the
country to survive. As long as the country is operated by taxes that the people
paid, there’s nothing that the government can possess. Except for the
information that requires tight control for the national security, the majority
of information should be open to the public.
The government should encourage people to pursue innovation. It should start
with opening information that the government possesses to the public and
removing obstacles that may break the people’s creativeness and hinder innovation.
SW is the core of creative economy, and innovation is the most important
factor. The government should lead the movement to protect copyrights and
creative ideas in order to promote SW industries.
Eun Kim, Director of Software
Management Lab, Professor at the Graduate School of Business and Information
Media
eunkim@kaist.ac.kr