Bruno Segers: "Information Highway in Belgium is empty"

Interesting article for the ICT people in Belgium (sorry only available in Dutch): MS: “Elektronische snelweg in België staat leeg”. Bruno Segers, CEO of Microsoft Belux, motivates his concerns about the lack of software investments in Belgium. It seems that other countries like Denmark, The Netherlands, Norway, … invest up to 30% more in software. So he demands that the Belgian government should simulate local research and development. Bruno also warns that intellectual property is essential in the knowledge society, but he thinks there is a place for open source. I support this view; companies, governments, developers should be able to protect their investments in software development. But I think open source software and communities are also quite important for a company such as Microsoft. For example the .NET community is important for Microsoft, just think about the newsgroups, the blogs, the people that write articles, … They all help Microsoft evangelizing the .NET platform. Open source projects are a vital part of this community, they share knowledge and help other people develop great applications fast.