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Chinese Linux Developers Allegedly Violating Licenses
sasha328 was among several to submit a story about problems with Chinese Developers allegedly violating licenses by not re-releasing their mods to various open source projects. There's not a lot of evidence presented, but a lot of points made without telling us what code and what license. But I'm sure we'll see more of this in the future.
We've had reports of racial profiling in the USA, female inmates raped by corrections officers, peaceful black immigrants beaten and shot for getting their wallet out, high school students shooting each other, Japanese fishing boats destroyed by American subs, bombing the Chinese embassy, government politicians having affairs with interns, a mother drowning her five children one by one...damn where do I stop?
Nobody is forcing Nike or Hasbro to use overseas labor. Perhaps there is a reason companies use cheap labor. Study economic development before you open your shithole. If you want to do something about it, don't buy items made overseas and write to your elected officials. I'm sure they'll do all they can when they're not busy screwing interns, smoking pot or getting C's in Yale. Peace, nigga!
eeh. Dumbass, America really is more important than the rest of the world. We consume more and buy more than anyone else. We buy somewhere along the lines of 40% of the Earth's goods. We kick ass, and when you take away our buying dollars you basically face shit-storm poverty.
I'm the anonymous coward who posted the message you replied to.
I did live in the East in my youth, and I learned this: I will never be wise enough to have a good opinion about China. One day, I would meet the kindest people, who would give me dinner and teach me games, overcoming my shyness. The next day, I would be attacked in the street and treated like an animal.
My post went: You can try for cultural transferrance... but that's just patronizing. The '...' part was (e.g., Chinese are really undeveloped Westerners with a bad government and different faces). The meaning was that it's unjust to apply Western standards to Eastern society.
On the whole, though I disapprove and say that I disapprove of Chinese culture, I'm very nice about it. I write, Simply put, Chinese have [a sucky culture] when viewed from a Western perspective. If it helps you, I don't say this because I hate communism or Chinese people. I say this because nobody ever gives Western culture credit for its major strength, which is individual freedom and recognition of single people as valuable. It's always zen this, acupuncture that, exploitive British something else, white man's burden this and that. There's a tangible good mixed into the whole Western problem.
You, as an Easterner, can point out how Westerners were still burning cows as witches while China had already enjoyed 2000 years of enlightened civilization. As Robert Bly says, Follow your bliss.
$12 a year? Either you left out a K or the Chinese economy is _much_ worse than I thought it was...
No "system".
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Well, if you want to say it's capitalist, despite the fact that most of the so-called "capitalist" economy there, and all of the important bits, like telecommunications, are owned by the government, or the party (same thing) or the army (same thing)... I guess it's one of those dividing line things; communists like to think a system could have majority government ownership and control of the means of production and still be capitalist instead of communist. Capitalists don't. I'm more inclined to believe the capitalists about this than the communists.
(currently testing something about signatures here)
There is NO LEGAL WAY these people or companies can close up the source and sell stolen open source programs in the United States or other US license/copyright treaty member nations (read EU, Japan, etc). And if they just try to sell their program in China, they'll probably receive just as much respect for their license as they showed to for the GPL.
I realize this is of little comfort to those who put in the hard work, but if you assume their motivation in stealing your source code was to make money, rest assured that they won't see any.
If I came over to your house to borrow a cup of sugar, would you pack it in a five hundred pound, ten-foot-cubed crate, and tell me I'd need to take the whole thing? Even if you professed to be part of a food-sharing movement?
I know, it's a lousy analogy, but it more or less works.
Where is this account? I am talking about July 03 2001 not the massive outage.
I am sure that several of those who wrote in submited the link from linuxtoday.com. What wasn't that link posted, after all linuxtoday had the story YESTERDAY...
Also, why was slashdot unresponsive for several hours during the US afternoon?
Nope, only to people you give the binaries to have the right to obtain the source.
Nope, only to = Nope, only the
Why get all up in arms over this? Its *going* to happen, and you cant exactly use a US court to force anybody in other countries to do anything, especially over something like the GPL (is it enforceable in court, anyway?) I'd think there would be more important things to devote time and money on, than worrying about people adhering to licenses in other countries that dont even obey copyright laws in the first place..
Allow me to disagree: How the Chinese government runs China is the business of the Chinese people.
Now, cultural relativism is fine and all, and China certainly has a lot of unique problems to deal with. But I think there are some cases where the line must be drawn. If the government is deliberately putting its own interests above those of the people it supposedly serves then I for one think the moral imperative to "meddle" exists, at least through non-aggressive means such as lobbying and trade restrictions.
You are wrong. Not only did Al Gore invent Linux, he invented China too!
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I certainly think that's a reasonable thing to do.
Now, if they refuse, that's a real violation.
This is what I don't understand. Why should China, or any other nation, have to abide by our laws? GPL gets its teeth from US Copyright law and, as far as I can tell, China is not a territory of the US.
Still, this person was making a generalization about a nation, not an ethnic group. China is made up of many different ethnic groups; so your comment is a generalization and, *according to your interpretation*, potentially racist :|
RedFlat? Are you implying RedHat is gonna buy out Red Flag Linux? ;) Good strategy! Talking trash about them will drive their stock prices down..
Seriously, I didn't grok that paragraph at all.
Racist? Pah! 'nationalist' maybe. Last I checked, the Chinese didn't constitute their own race. Be careful with those accusations.
They are doing something tanks can't stop ... they're packing their bags and leaving. Everyone in China wants to get out.
Uh...how did Canada come into this beyotchi?
Precise definitions aren't what I care about.. I care about popular definitions.. the ones everyone actually uses.. and the popular definition of "racism" is would definitely include discrimination of any group from a particular country. (Also, Chinese people can definitely be easily physically distinguished from those of other countries, which seems like "race" enough to me.)
Anyway, my point is that if anyone were to say, "I hate all Chinese people," or, hell, "I hate all Canadian people," no one would hesitate for a second before calling you a racist, and they'd be right to do so.
Which of course why conditions in Iraq have fallen drastically since before the war, when Hussein was already in power, why many top UN officials have resigned in protest of sanctions, why even Bush is trying (though not hard enough) to create "smarter sanctions", which means even those most in favor of sanctions recognize that there are problems.
Right on.. We're already scapegoating China, let's not scapegoat the US as well.
Uh.. yeah.. the Chinese gov't is going to see a random individual on Nightline saying something negative and HUNT THEM DOWN? Actually, amazingly enough, there is quite a bit of dialogue about changes needed to the government in China, especially in Hong Kong, without any smackdown. The gov't pretty much only cracks down on really popular dissidents these days, which is certainly still a bad thing, I agree, but your average citizen voicing discontent is hardly in any danger of harm. I just want to state the facts here, having been there recently and having relatives there.
One thing people forget when they cavalierly talk about the importance of letting the local population decide their freedom is a little something called the American Civil War.. The North wouldn't let the South secede.. and actually DID go to war over it. I personally don't really have an opinion on the Taiwan issue, but I just want to point out that secession is rarely a simple issue.
Yes and no. I mean, it was religion-based in the same sense that witchhunts and the Spanish Inquisition were.. That is, religion is just an excuse for selfish behavior.
I think it's far to simplistic to say "China doesn't value human life." The line the Chinese gov't feeds is that what they do is needed for "stability", that "having food and shelter is an even more basic human right". Yes, this is in large part bullshit, but it does have some merit.. Look at the collapse of the Soviet Union. Russia has been in deep shit, in part because of the lack of stability caused by the collapse.
The upshot is that there is a balance between moving toward more ideal human rights and dealing with practical problems, between short-term and long-term goals. I personally think the Chinese gov't should focus on long-term goals much more than they currently do, and I agree that many of the human rights abuses are extremely excessive and counterproductive, but to say that the gov't doesn't value human life is going too far.
Please read my post again.. My whole POINT is that by embargoing Iraq, we punish NOT those kingpins, who have plenty of money anyway, but the CIVILIANS, who have done nothing wrong!
The whole POINT of my post was precisely to show that by making statements like "fuck Iraq", you're condemning no one but the innocent, that you need to separate the government of a country, especially when it's not very democratic, from its people... That just because Hussein's a bastard, and there are Arab terrorists, you don't condemn the population of the whole country and the whole race.
Basically at the company I work for any mods or bugfixes to OS software we do we send back. The real pragmatic reason to do this is that you will never not upgrade to a later version and it is more cost effective to send those patches back for inclusion in future releases than to have to manually repatch everything again.
By not sending mods back you just set yourself up for a lot of pain in the future.
"Because we are not employing at entry level, offshoring will kill our industry stone dead."
I disagree with the apparently prevailing notion that chinese people are all a bunch of malicious ripper-offs. The piracy condition was once so severe that an individual cannot completely grasp the guilt of him/her buying pirated software, since everyone is doing it. A
ll these stories about Americans going to Hong Kong and buying pirated software only attest to the universal pettiness of human nature. Rule of law has never been a big part of Chinese culture. If some chinese kid wrote a program using GPL'd code but he concealed his code because he didn't read the GPL, because he attaches no great importance to that piece of document, or because nothing in his culture makes him think that he should care about that document, should we condemn him as a criminal?
He is a criminal, by the letter of the law. But is that the main issue? Like with many other things in China, this boils down to a matter of education. Threatening trade sanctions and etc only helps isolate China, and millions of good coders (potentially useful to the opensource cause). Open dialogues and pats-on-backs among fellow coders can go a long way. I hope people take these points into account.
"We generally won't mess with another country,.."
Oh please.. Where have you been the last decade or so?
There's a fine line between patriotism and sheer ignorance.
~dlb
Wait! Microsoft beta tested their activation in China.. perhaps thats the way to go eh? ;)
I have the feeling this Mr White is not happy because Redhat can't get into China market easily (by taking the existing customization patch) and made that comment.
It's only speculation, though. No evidence at all.
A sig is redundant.
"Don't forget: North Americans Know Better!"
That's not true. Americans know better. Canadians and Mexicans have the priveledge of living very close to us and get to absorb our amazing culture the most.
Could any other country in the world have produced Rocky IV?
If I lived in Hong Kong, and Nightline stuck a camera in my face and asked me that question you can bet your life I'd answer China also.
--- Mercutio was right.
Ah, now you've done it. Called him a nazi, and now this discussion is officially over :)
--Gfunk
Send lawyers, guns, and money!
Oh yeah, buddy. Executing murderers is *exactly* the same thing as running over peaceful protestors with tanks.
If you were me, you'd be good lookin'. - six string samurai
A lot of Chinese have net access, but many sites are blocked by firewalls at the few gateways in and out of the country. Sites that are blocked include CNN, BBC, most newspapers, babelfish(!) and *anything* to do with the Falun Gong.
China essentially has its own internet with gateways to selected outside sites.
ah wai
I live in HK and it's still very easy to get pirated software and VCDs. There's been a clampdown of late and getting Microsoft products is more difficult (it might take 20 minutes instead of just picking it up off the shelf) but games are eaily obtainable.
There are now large fines for businesses using pirated software, but not for individuals. Personally, I think that's fair.
dave
Actually, many people were nervous about the reunification and many professional people fled to Canada, Britain and the US the got foreign passports.
One thing you have to remember is that in China, there is no rule of law. If you make a nuisance of yourself, you'll just disappear. In Hong Kong, the British Common Law system still applies, although it's getting eroded constantly. Recently its been revealed that many laws don't apply to the offices of the National (i.e. Chinese) Government, even if they apply to the HK government.
It's going to turn into a typical corrupt Chinese city eventually.
ah wai
They've got some very nice beers of their own, actually.
Try some Tsingtao or Harbin sometime. ah wai "hic"
I though Nixon invented China...
A lot of you out there actually disagree with a concept of intellectual property in its entirety. But since acting like IP doesn't exist will solve nothing in jurisdictions that that enforce IP, the GPL was created to counteract IP by turning IP laws against themselves.
Chinese law doesn't support IP, and therefore the GPL is uneeded there. Isn't this what all of you want eventually?
There is a fine line between being a cultivated citizen and being someone else's crop. - A. J. Patrick Liszkie
Executing people, even retarted, is against Human Rights
This misunderstanding of human rights is actually quite symptomatic of this age. Human rights are not a universal concept. A person has as many rights as the law of the land grants him, no less and no more. In particular, the United Nation has a number of agreements on human rights, by which the states who signed them must abide.
Nowhere does it say that executing people is illegal. The Universal Declaration on Human Rights does grant a right to life; in particular, it says: "No one shall be arbitrarily deprived of his life." Notice the arbitrarily.
People always say these days "people have a right to this," "animals have a right to that." Bullshit! The only rights people have are the ones explicitly listed in legislative documents in effect.
Well...of course! What do you expect from a group of people where a vocal subset of the group openly supports violating other licenses and calling it "fair use" and "free speech", but when you violate THEIR license they want your head on a platter.
I want a new quote. One that won't spill. One that don't cost too much. Or come in a pill.
Erm, no. The GPL's basis is copyright law as defined by the Berne Convention. Almost every advanced country is a signator. Without the author's consent, no one is allowed to distribute or modify copyrighted software. The GPL simply tells you the terms under which the author is willing to waive his rights.
Regards,
The GPL is not an "intellectual property" license, since, legally speaking, there is no single thing called "intellectual property". There are copyrights, patents, trademarks, unfair competiton laws, and in different countries, different kinds of sui generis ("in its own class") laws, covering plants, circuit layouts, databases etc. The GPL is a copyright license, which grants the recipient some of the rights held by the copyright owner, under copyright law.
Note that this is quite different to a contract, which is a voluntary negotiated agreement between two parties.
Because some things (eg the right to use a progam, once you have it) are not controlled by copyright, lots of proprietary software companies try to use End User License Agreements (which are actually contracts) to enforce onerous conditions on their users. Of course, since the agreement must be voluntary and negotiated, many courts would regard a click-wrap contract as non-binding. Hence UCITA.
It is actually possible to do interesting copyleft-style things using contracts (see the free world license, for example), but it seems very clear that the free software community stands to loose much more than it could gain by the general application of contracts in software distribution.
Fixing copyright
Communism has always been a system of economy.. obviously everything else outgrows from that....
China is NOT a communist state.
If you can imaging "revising" Communism until it becomes Capitalism.. you'll get China today.
Those who rule there merely hide behind the "Communist" label to keep them in power.. it's just a dictatorial regime.
If the BSA figures of "1 in 3" pirated applications being used today are anywhere near correct
As one who has dabled in piracy I think I should clear up this myth.
BSA's figure of 1 i 3 is way off the scales. Look at MP3s. A lot of people I know have *huge*, 100+ CD collections of MP3s. Do they listen to all of this music? Would they have bought all of it even if they had the money? No way. And it's the same mechanizm with software. I don't know a single person who would have Illustrator, Freehand and Corel Draw installed at the same time if they had to buy the software.
What China is doing is not producing traditional pirated CDs, which - unless you are blind or really, really dumb - you can not mistake for the original product. They are producing forgeries, packages of pirated software designed to look exactly like the original and - in the same way - to be sold as originals. That's why a lot of the BSA's anti-piracy advertising is along the lines of 'are you legit?' If you're buying Bulgarian 10-in-1 CDs filled with apps you know you're not.
A lot of companies have a 'no foreign software' policy. You cannot bring in your favorite app/game from home because it might be illegal and your company has no intention of paying for your copyright violation.
jedrek
Welcome to Earth, third rock from the sun. This is what happens when sub-culture goes mainstream.
"Please don't waste your time on creating these patches. These things are functional in the "vger" tree" - Geert Uytterhoeven
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Moderator's essentials
Yes, and they call it communism... Wait, communism only means sharing within their own country?
If you believe in reincarnation, killing people for terrible crimes often lead to them being reborn almost at once as "uncurable" offenders ("devil child", pathological killers etc). While keeping them alive outside of society gives them time to contemplate their actions and hopefully wisen up.
IF you believe in reincarnation that is.. Just some food for thought. Who knows for sure? Can't base laws on fiction either.
- Steeltoe
http://www.debunkingskeptics.com/
He said he thought human rights issues to be more important. At least that's how I understood it. It's subjective though, depends on what values you regard.
- Steeltoe
http://www.debunkingskeptics.com/
Yeaaah, maybe next they will pirate free beer.... Oh No!!!
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Bizar technology?
Dude, the problem is that the communists just don't know how to share and are behaving like capitalist pigs. You can help them by going to work in China. You might even make some good money there.
Take this personaility test.
OK, so it's probably true - I had a mate who worked in Hong Kong just before we (the UK) gave it back, and he came back here with dozens of CDs worth of unlicenced software that he'd bought over there, but please try not to go overboard about this story, huh?
First...how in the hell do you 'pirate' something that is free? Second...if it's in chinese, it's pretty well useless for 99.9% of us, isn't it? So, who cares! My only experience to date with chinese software was NT chinese edition and I'm not in any hurry to repeat that experience. The reds can keep their mods with my blessings, I have no use for them.
You're using her as bait, Master!
Do you want to invoke Goodwin, or should I?
"Evil company X is threatening to restrict our rights! Let's all get together to stop--OOOH! SHINEY!!!" -- AC
No.
Um... the GPL in no way requires a mod developer to release his changes to the public. If you read the GPL, it only requires that the source be released (freely) to people who have the binary -- the binary distribution can be restricted however you want from yourself.
With mainstream items, like the Kernel, that are used publicly, original recipients are quite likely to pass it on to more people (and more, etc.), essentially making the modification public. For more obscure bits, like a phone-switching system another poster mentioned, people who get the code have little to no incentive or desire to release it to other people who would have no use for it.
To reiterate, a modification not being available to the world at large is not in and of itself a violation of the GPL.
"Evil company X is threatening to restrict our rights! Let's all get together to stop--OOOH! SHINEY!!!" -- AC
Actually, I wasn't being completely serious. But it would be great if they did.
Karma: Bored. (Thinking about resurrecting the "Anyone else is an imposter" joke.)
that'll scare em for sure. china needs most favored nation status so that they can export all their goods to the US.
Karma: Bored. (Thinking about resurrecting the "Anyone else is an imposter" joke.)
If Americans say "don't do terrible things to people in your country", they're blasted for "interfering in internal affairs". Aren't those Americans terrible?
If they say, "what other people do in their own country isn't our business", they're blasted for being so provincial. "You must be American right?", accuses the poster.
Yes, Americans are just terrible. Regardless of what they do (including nothing), there are several million people in the world who will immediately hate them for it.
"Those who have never entered upon scientific pursuits know not a tithe of the poetry by which they are surrounded."
And is also blatantly unconstitutional (if my understanding of the US Constitution is correct). Punishing the guilty for a crime the have already committed is justice. Executing someone because he may (no matter how likely) commit a crime in the future is not a direction I think you want to be moving in.
There's a famous document somewhere that says, "We are endowed by our government with certain inalienable rights". No, wait, that wasn't the quote.... ah, Creator -- yeah, that was it.
Hmm, wonder why they said that?
This is more or less finally true, since the lifting of martial law and the establishment of so-called free elections in 1987 -- and more particularly the latest elections last year when the Kuo Ming Tong finally lost control of the presidency. Prior to that, the ruling party in Taiwan was largely considered a foreign, invading body which usurped control of the island after they lost their war on the mainland (a war which little involved or concerned the people of Taiwan at the time), and was at times hardly less guilty of atrocities and oppression than the communists that had defeated them. The KMT had never been freely chosen by the people of Taiwan as its ruling party; it imposed itself as such by force.
Human rights issues are important, but so are software licensing issues. They are just important in different ways. It's an error to say that because one thing is important the other isn't.
OoO
OoO
Please do not publish outside of
Sure you can, I'm reading it right now in Beijing. :)
Wouldn't it be GNU/China?
Ohh waaa.. someones violating your license? Please get in line behind the RIAA.
Cry about it.
You haven't lived until you've read the source code in the original Klingon....
it is on slashdot you idiot, if you want to worry about those things hang out that ACLU website.
There might be over a billion westerners, but somehow I doubt that's what you meant.
Once you reconcile yourself to the fact that the 'hypothetical Chinese' of the posting also have the right to speak in the first person, perhaps you could read the original comment again?
Despite all the faults of the US, we can still point to China as worse.
It makes me feel better than at least one country...
We in the US tend to forget that we live in a non-US world.
Folks in China are not violating any software licenses, because inside China those software licenses simply do not exist.
Its like my old law professor said: The contract can say anything you want but that doesn't make it true.
Moderating "-1, Disagree" is simple censorship. Have the guts to post your opinion.
*SMACK!* That's the sound of reality hitting you in the face. The open source model (and Free software, and the GPL, etc, etc, etc) works NOW because of the limited base of users and developers. It's along the same lines of "Why should I pay for it when I get it free?" As GPL'd code becomes more popular, eventually there will be a large number of people who use programs, code fragments, etc, for their own uses, then close the source.
People, on the whole, are greedy. Sure, someone who buys into the the Free concept will gladly share modifications and bug fixes with everyone else. But if someone less ethical finds a program that does what they need to do, what's stopping them from altering it so the interface isn't recognizable, adding a few more customizations, and closing the source and claiming it's theirs? The GPL? Once it's got a major court victory under its belt, maybe. But in order for someone to discover GPL'd code has been used, they'd have to have access to the code, or reverse engineer the program. Both of which would be illegal, and a countersuit would be brought. In today's justice system, most judges would side with the well known copyright laws as opposed to the virtually unknown (outside the community) licensing agreement
As good an idea as Free software is, I really don't think the majority of humankind is ready to adopt it yet. Just a small minority (and yes, it IS a minority) of idealisitic developers.
- In hell, treason is the work of angels.
Oh yeah, IP piracy only happens in countries which label themselves Communist. If they re-labelled themselves as a free market capitalist democracy, it would go away, just like in Russia.
-- Sigs are for losers
No, since the last election, the Republicans have made it a point that we will no longer be the policemen of the world, causing a lot of distress to the countries helping to patrol Kosovo, Bosnia, Korea, and more.
As for people with a record of serious offenses patrolling our streets, as soon as the media gets wind of it, protests are up, the jury box is filled and the guilty are put away. No problem there.
"Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart, he dreams himself your master."
So you consign an entire people to an eternity of crappy existence for them and their posterity for your "honour"? How noble of you. I am beginning to see exactly what your damage is. This was just more of the same "we know what's better for you" jockeying around of peoples that went on in the 19th and early 20th centuries in Africa, the Middle East, the Western US, Australis, and Asia. Didn't the "honourable" British start the first concentration camps in Africa?
As I discussed with someone on a recent trip to India, the world will one day be Indian and Chinese, because they are not afraid to starve a little. We reproduce less, because it is more convenient to have that larger house, the vcrs, satellite dishes, and more cars, and don't have to worry about some of them dying of disease or starvation. Keep in mind that these people are reproducing at a much faster rate than you are, despite their attempts to curb it, so within a few hundred years your decendants will be eating lo mein along with that "honour" after they overrun their borders.
"Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart, he dreams himself your master."
You assume most people are out to take people's works as their own. That reflects on you.
"Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart, he dreams himself your master."
So, is there anything anyone can think of that is worse that the Chinese are not already doing, or have we finally hit the end of the road in human barbarism when speaking of Communist China? Just wondering if there are any surprises left in the future for the news agencies to report or if they will go out of business now that there is nothing shocking left.
"Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart, he dreams himself your master."
Sorry, but ideology that treats people like ants cannot be defended. I'm fairly certain that were you on the receiving end of one of those skinnings, you'd be crying out for some of my ideology.
"Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart, he dreams himself your master."
So our sins excuse the sins of others? I don't think so. That slope is slippery the whole way down to hell.
If I have the ability to point out that someone is doing something wrong, I don't give a damn where I live...I'll freaking point it out because it is damn wrong! I agree with you on a couple of the items you linked to, but like most conspiracy morons you think that every time someone in the goverment breathes, it's because of you. One life is still a precious one life, but somehow I don't think that the things I mentioned are on the same scale as what you've linked to. And wrong is wrong, so while you decry the above things, I can't imagine why you aren't also decrying the things I brought up unless you have a beef with America just because it is America.
"Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart, he dreams himself your master."
No assumption. It was either 1) they explode in pent up anger, or 2) they peacefully ease on into something else, implying there was no anger and things were hunky dory because they patiently saw a future on the horizon that they wanted.
Chinese in droves are moving to Falung Gong because they obviously want something else that their society is not giving them. They are moving on something, but it may not be something that we can identify like "defeating hundreds of tanks" until it comes to pass. Pretty much like everything since the early 1990s now that the CIA has been useless to predict where things were going.
"Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart, he dreams himself your master."
I think our companies are happy exploiting little children to make cheap shoes and whatnot over there.
First quote in article:
"China has a history of being able to take U.S.- or European-developed software or technology products and then try and take control of [them] by wrapping a Chinese applications layer around it and saying it is now their technology," White said (emphasis mine).
That's just a very small portion I presume, since most open source- and/or free software projects involve people from all over the world.
...a fact which for the sake of a quiet life most people tend to ignore ~H2G2
Hey, fuck Iraq too. I'm tired of paying $2 a gallon so some Oil kingpin can have another hooker and a line of coke.
You are right, Afghanistan is completely fucked up too. But that's a religion based thing, right? China for the most part doesn't value human life because they choose not to, not because God tells them not to. In my mind, that's WORSE.
It isn't? Explain.
Can you even read Slashdot from inside China?
How do you define race? common facial features, distinguishing characteristics, common genetic themes (example, sickle cell...). They are not the same.
Surely 'rules' rather than 'spirit'?
--
Hey, bits have rights too y'know :-)
From hell's heart I fstab at /dev/hdc
Speaking entirely hypothetically here (I'm sure this "atrocity" isn't nearly what some here are making it out to be), if the Chinese developers are not releasing their kernel mods, they could indeed be building their own closed source OS with appropriate surveillance and anti-crypto in place. Unlike Windows they have the source to play with.
They could call it 'PRC Linux' and market it as a way to thumb your nose at those capitalist swine, and seal the deal with a cute picture of Tux in a red cape.
From hell's heart I fstab at /dev/hdc
i think they should have to write a formal letter of apology.
The worst is that IT managers could think this article as a proof that GPL is evil :
....
They might basically think : GPL forces you to release the code you're working on. Once it is available to everyone, Chinese/Russian/<Feared country> people could just steal it whithout any drawbacks.
It's sad but this is just adding to MS anti-GPL campaign
Only 26% vote for the presidency, because 50% of registered voters are too fucking lazy to get their asses out of bed and go vote. Every registered voter could go and vote, its just a choice someone makes in their life.
Ok...I can see your point that we don't have a say in how China treats its people (like animals). But every western citizen from CIVILIZED countries has a right to spend their money buying Chinese goods or not. I would love to see a boycott of all chinese goods. I hope Beijing never gets the Olympics, and if they do, I hope all civilized countries boycott, because I don't want to see all of our money going to the chinese government.
I don't have any problem with the chinese people, I only have a problem with the government, and with people who think the government is right and just.
I think Gentus found out that by not releasing modifications, you shoot yourself in the foot: maintenance will be much harder, as the upstream will never incorporate - or even consider - your changes. A new upstream version now means work, instead of relief.
my other sig is a 500 page novel
Also They didn't even tell us what coders, what software, and what license were involved, so Red Hats press release lacks total credibility.
Its pure china-bashing.
Just what I would expect from the company that released a RedHat 7.0 with a non-compatable gcc.
I find it hard to stomach the idea that we (/.) would even entertain the notion of using the (all too powerful) might of US copyright law to force other programmers to make free beer.
"You know, the golf course is the only place he isn't handicapped."
I spent a year in Iraq looking for WMD and all I found was this lousy sig.
Isolationist, yes. Ignorant, no. (Well... except for certain communist-controlled areas of California and the Peoples Republic of Massachusetts.)
Americans ARE deeply isolationist... the way you can be only if you live in a country as large as the US. The attitude of the average American is: "The entire nation of [insert name of shit-hole third-world country here] and everyone and everything in it isn't worth the life of a single American soldier." George Washington's warning against "entangling foreign alliances" is as loud today as it was over 200 years ago. We forgot this warning briefly in the middle of the last century, and paid for it dearly in SE Asia and other places. We're not likely to forget again.
Face it, Americans ARE in charge. For better or worse. We've been in charge for the last 60 years or so, and we'll continue to be for the foreseeable future. Get over it. Frankly, we'd prefer not to be burdened with the job, but since it's ours we do the best we can. It means having to listen to whining Euroweenies and Greens dressed like forest elves complaining about how awful we are for
But, because we're Americans, we DO listen to them, instead of just bitch-slapping them and getting on with the job. We're not always right, but when we're wrong it's most often because we tend to err on the side of caution. In the end, we ususally end up doing whatever we want because we can, and there's nobody else big enough to tell us "No". It's one of the perks that comes with the job. If you don't like it, build a better military-industrial complex for yourself and the job is yours! Until then, shut up and be thankful the Russians or the Chinese aren't in charge.~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
"Three generations of imbeciles are enough." -Oliver Wendell Holmes
true, but australia has a very stable economy, unlike the U.S.
P2P Anonymous Distributed Web Search: http://www.yacy.net/
$30k USD/year is very good money for programmers in China
It's sad to say but in Australia that is pretty good also...
The real reason that RedHat is complaining about Linux developers in China is that they can't penetrate that market. One of the most important considerations here is ethnic/cultural background. Even though RH is well respected in the US and Europe, in Asia they're too late to become the top Linux distro in Asia. So, that is hard to swollow. Turbolinx, on the other hand, is much more accepted in Asia markets because they had their focus and ethinic backgroud in Asia to begin with. Naturally, companies such as IBM or Dell recognized it already and use Turbolinux as their main Linux installation option in China, Japan and S. Korea. So, I guess, my point is that unlike M$ world domination Linux world domination can't be accomplished by one distro.only.
IP was invented for the sake of lawsuits.
How can this be? This goes against the spirit of free speech.I thought Totalitarian China fully supported open source and the open expression of ideas. ::rolling eyes::
--Joey
will they be GPL'ing that Orion-thing they had for a while? :-)
karma capped
What? The capitalist Redhat can't penetrate the Chinese market effectively so now they're resorting to mis-LEADING accusations and FUD? I read the whole article and saw ZERO evidence of wrong doings. All I read was name-calling and finger pointing.
Next they're gonna be calling Chinese Linux "viral" and "cancerous". Tzzzzzzzzzzz...
---------
Did you just fart? Or do you always smell like that?
eTrade SUCKS
Think about it, if you were China, the sworn enemy of the U.S.A., would you trust closed-source software from the U.S.(windowz)? How easy it'd be for the CIA to embed SubSeven (or the likes) into it and spy on China...
So thus it's no wonder China is so forwardly using Linux and other Open Source software.
Thus it shouldn't be a big surprise that M$'s biggest enemy now is not Linux, but China.
---------
Did you just fart? Or do you always smell like that?
eTrade SUCKS
I feel I must point this out.
The original piece was irresponsible and so is the slashdot coverage.
Is every Chinese software company holding back changes made to GPL software? Are we just going to lump all "Chinese developers" as ignoring the GPL? Read the article and notice how the antagonist is always just "the Chinese developers".
I really dislike stories were the writers don't have the decency to research and give specific issues, name specific groups, ie. But go on and make *VERY* large and biased GENERALIZATIONS.
I'm not Chinese but I feel for the Chinese developers and hackers out there which this in no doubt offends.
Based on upvotes, Ageism is the only "-ism" Slashdotters care about and think isn't SJW
Rolling This Fattie, Laughing?
pr0n - keeping monitor glass spotless since 1981.
That we have a more highly evolved sense of sarcasm?
pr0n - keeping monitor glass spotless since 1981.
so you have the right to define "Human rights" for every human in the universe. Now would this right infringe China's (or any other person's) right to define what "Human rights" are???
You should *not* BASH on a country which is in the stage of developing human rights. Instead, if you are so interested in the country's human rights, why not help them directly?? (and just in case you think china is not trying to improve human rights, ask yourself : why on earth would china want so much flames? why on earth would they NOT want to improve?? why on earth would they want another reason for USA to bash them out?)
IMO, what china needs before human rights is education. Would YOU want an iliterrate to vote for the president? Not that i'm saying China is full of uneducated people, but overall the people in USA are relatively more educated and have more experience with these "rights" and so they are more ready to use these "rights" without causing problems. The last thing we want is a social disorder caused by these "rights", just because people are not ready to receive them yet.
There are still remote areas in China where people are struggling to earn just enough to live. What would they choose, the right to live, or the right to choose the president??
Look what happened to other countries when your definition of "human rights" invaded them : social disorder, political wars, riots. Just because they have the "right" to do so. People go maniac just because the guy they supported didn't get elected for president.
People may have misconceptions about China. But hey, perhaps i do too.
For disrespecting the GPL, well, we've yet to see more details. Perhaps it was a few individuals, in which case i think this is not be only china's problem. I bet this has happend in other places too. Or perhaps it's the whole lot of people, i'd really want to know what they would gain by doing that. I'm sure they could never produce software better than the open source community. Perhaps they just didn't understand. Stubborn idiots.
Don't quote me on this.
Yes, I was around last time it was mentioned.. and the time before that.. and the time before that.. :)
:p
I guess I'm not as good at trolling as those people though
Not Meta-modding due to apathy.
* Supersonic aircraft - stole documents from foreign governments to complete
* Manhattan project - used breakthrough technologies from foreign laboratories to complete
* Space projects - Used stolen V2 rockets destined to other allied countries after world war two, as well as a truck-full of Nazi scientists.
The US is not that great a country. Last time I checked, the US has a spiralling national debt, some sort of trained chimp as a president, a terribly fascist foreign policy, a large but poorly trained military... the list goes on.
The reason you don't hear everyone else saying their country is number one is everyone else has realised that means nothing. Everyone else has grown up. Can't you?
I wouldn't fret about it - it happens every day of the week.
800lb gorilla? More like the 3 year old child having a tantrum every 5 minutes, wanting an ice lolly or a cookie. The rest of the world has got used to your 'I want it now' attitude. Hopefully, the US will calm down a bit. Until it does, it's straight to bed, with no dinner.
'Honour the GPL or we'll... we'll... shit.'
- Westerners
Nice racism, by the way. You realise what postings like that makes the rest of the world think of you and your country?
First of all, there has never been a country that is truly communist, the way Karl described it, including China. Even if some people behind communist revolution do have good intentions, power is addictive and people in power in communist countries do whatever is necessary to keep this power and defend their own interests at others' expense. This is totally against a true communist spirit.
Secondly, just because a few Chinese companies are making closed source software using open source code, doesn't mean all Chinese companies are bad. This kind of stuff happens everywhere, just remember that company that used Virtual Dub code in their product a few weeks ago. I wouldn't be surprised if more big companies stole GPL code but never got caught.
To conclude, of course it's an outrage that people steal code made from open source projects but that's not a reason to put all Chinese companies in the same basket nor to link communism with this kind of theft.
There are 2 kinds of people in this world: Those who write in decimal and those who don't
Sound interesting. I also installed RedFlag. I don't have good impression on the product except the background. The source is available, but I don't think the whole product is really a solid product as a desktop OS, unless you have to use Chinese like I do. The packages are very old, and a lot of software are not included. I thought about to improve it myself, but the GUI stuff is not really my strong point, I work on driver level, people really don't care it's in Chinese or English. After reading all these emails, I feel these are not fair to Chinese Linux developers and users, even some honest Linux companies. These splits the Linux community, just what like US government does in politics. Linux community should fight against this for the unification of the community.
When you can only get someone's source and build scripts in a 650MB CD image, it seems to me they're not paying attention.
Of course, i could get the iso, then unbundle it and distribute it myself.
Reboot macht Frei.
I have little trouble believing that a country that runs its students down with tanks skins convicts alive.
Reboot macht Frei.
China is more a Maoist country which isn't any better...
Steve Ballmer calls us communists.
Now there's eveidently an argument against
. Communist China throw us out the Communist League!
Some local dists are a litle more "Russian-aware" but last I heard, the tendancy is to go for Mandrake and then download extra software, i.e. fonts and so on from the net. The software seems to be open-licensed.
Funny you should mention this. There seems to be a serious lack of regard for licenses and international law in general in a lot of countries. In fact, one can say, few countries care. Arabization efforts for the Unix environment have been very slow and rather unsuccessful. Some of them provide certain solutions, but insist on selling it to you, and not allowing you to modify and redistribute their code, whether commercially or not. Generally, it is a result of not having a serious programming community and therefor not understanding the importance of software. I wouldn't worry too much, these things are changing. It takes a little longer in some places, but change is surely coming.
Since the license says that you can charge "charge no more than your cost of physically performing source distribution", if the license said what you say, it could in theory result in the author getting 50,000 orders for the sum of CD + postage.
Executing people for committing terrible crimes is the only way of making sure they will never do it again.
BTW. People in US support death penalty so it is the law.
End of story.
...and you can't blame meteors for everything.
I think Stallman is a lunatic and 20 years from now nobody will even remember his name..
But , according to him GPL is a temporary measure introduced because of existence of copyright laws.
Since China does not obey by our copyright laws there is no need for GPL and , frankly China sounds like a dreamland for FSF folks.
...and you can't blame meteors for everything.
How fucking smart -> a drone in Seatle.
You have a concept of human nature and that is why you go ahead and assume that "drones" in Seatle do it only for the money.
You are pathetic.
...and you can't blame meteors for everything.
Hell yeah. ...
Do you feel so morally superior to go and make these people change their ways?
You, who lives in society that considers killing unborn (and sometimes born) children an essential right
...and you can't blame meteors for everything.
How is that racist you stupid prick ?
You don't even realize but with every comment like that you are cheapening meaning of term "racist".
Next time there will be danger of true racism people will dismiss it simply because of idiots like you.
...and you can't blame meteors for everything.
you do know that the people of HK were pretty much happy to return to china don't you? the feeling among the hongies was that it was time to reunite
Folks, hate to burst your bubble and thwart the various racist and otherwise improper statements here, but this happens all the time, here in the US of A and everywhere else for that matter. It is human nature to take the easy route (use someone else's work) and most commercial vendors don't want to admit it and subject their code to GPL (or whatever). I don't agree with it, don't condone it, and will stop it when I can, but trust me the Chinese are far from the only violators of the sacred sacraments of the GPL.
The only athletic sport I ever mastered was backgammon - Douglas William Jerrold
...can it be done anyway? I remember reading somewhere that the GPL was unenforcable in certain provisions, namely that that required all source to be opened if even the slightest bit of GPL code was used. I could of course be totally wrong - at any rate, I'd appreciate some links on the subject if anyone has some. Thanks
http://www.themeparks.ie
And the problem with Western society is your deference to "great" men (K. Popper) Your hero worshipping is bunk. Yes, chinese disguise ideas as their own but westerners do so also. And there's definitely no significant difference there. To be honest with you, I could care less about "intellectual property" -- I am chinese. The idea of IP is to subjugate people into idolatry. Please spare me. IP should be like tipping your cap to someone. But that is all. (re: Mickey mouse crap,... 90 years licence to sell you little stuffed animals, i mean come on!!) And remember, in some parts of china, chinese people lived without locks on their homes. The idea that property needs to be hoarded is a western trait.
Proponents of free software compare proprietary software to communism. Likewise, proponents of proprietary software liken free software to communism.
:)
Now we finally know which behavior is more in line with communism, seeing actual communists engaging in it.
Only the stupid and the woefully uninformed could possibly argue that the Communist Party does not serve the people - especially when 63 million of those people are members!
Assumming that there are as many as 63 million members of the party, that number constitute only 5.25 percent of the Chinese population. That's an elite.
Political participation in the US, while quite low, is probably quite a bit higher than 5.25 percent.
If the Chinese government wanted to promote Linux as an economical alternative to Windows, they picked the wrong operating system. A closed source OS might have allowed surveilance and protected against improper use of cryptography. Free software allows individuals to discover such additions and remove them.
There are so many companies right now who pay lip service to the free software movement but hew strictly to the wording of the GPL, bending it wherever possible, that I was beginning to worry that everyone was missing the point.
When you can only get someone's source and build scripts in a 650MB CD image, it seems to me they're not paying attention.
A country which doesn't respect intellectual property laws is found not respecting the GPL.
Really?
Wow, and not too long ago people were all applauding China's adoption of Linux. Didn't realize that it was solely because they could get something for nothing without being accused of piracy?
I highly doubt that the additions are "backdoors" put in by the government. O/S allows you to look at the code and see what's inside. Why the hell would the Chinese add shit only to have their people get the "virgin" copy?
I believe that they should merge their code base w/the rest of the world, but if they really want to do it. Fine. They are ignoring the vasy majority of the rest of the world and continuing to use their outdated and unacceptable government structure, why should they keep up w/anything else?
Quite humorous given that the GPL philosophy epitomizes communism (pure communism rather than some of the distorted types that have occurred on this planet. It is always interesting seeing GPL advocates frothing at the mouth when they see the term communism associated with the GPL when that is exactly the sort of ideology that it promotes, and Mr. Stallman is a modern-day Marx-wannabe). So here apparently you have the people who supposedly live under the ideology ignoring it when it serves their purpose. How surprizing.
It bothers me that this bashing of the Chinese gov't, which does many bad things, starts turning into a subtle form of racism, as this badness is associated with anything and anyone Chinese. "The Chinese gov't sucks! Embargo them!" Do you think that's the best thing for the Chinese people?
Because of our hatred of Saddam Hussein, we embargoed Iraq, and the Iraq civillians are the ones who really suffer.. Who are we really protecting and punishing here?
Fact is, there are tons of proxy servers that Chinese people use to get around the firewalls. Ordinary people in China are working hard to find practical solutions to the problems there, while we Americans just use the whole country as a punching bag.
You want to see human rights violations? Look at Afghanistan, where Ph.D.-wielding women have been reduced to prostitution because they're not allowed to work, where men aren't allowed to treat female patients, but where women aren't allowed to be doctors... Look at any number of African countries where genocide is still rampant (and often fundamentally caused by imperialism).
Yeah, China has problems, but this scape-goating and hate-mongerinig is so McCarthy-esque it's scary.
China never was Communist. It's always been an almost monarchial dictatorship acting under the guise of Communism. Hell, the economy there these days is pretty much completely capitalist. And I doubt the developers they're talking about here are acting under specific directions of the government. "You must flaunt the capitalist pig licenses or else!" And if violating the GPL is high on your list of objectionable activities by the Chinese gov't, you obviously don't know much Chinese history. I stopped trying to understand humans after learning about the Cultural Revolution, the Greal Leap Forward, Mao's bloodthirsty lunacy in almost all respects, witnessing the Tiananmen Square Massacre first-hand, etc etc.
They only need to release the code to people they distribute to, and then only if customer ask for the sourcecode. They don't have to make the source publically available. They don't have to roll the mods back to the original kernel.
So, what exactly is the problem?
Je ne parle pas francais.
Right you are. Also, in Afghanistan, they realize that executing women who are suspected of being unfaithful is the only way to keep them from doing it again. People in Afghanistan support the death penalty so it is the law. End of story.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
But I'm sure we'll see more of this in the future.
/.?
More condemning articles with little evidence pointing fingers and posted to
--
--
"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
I have the feeling that this claim may not be fair to Chinese developers (Note: I'm a Chinese)
It would be better to find out the developers who violate the licenses. If you got modified version of software from Chinese developers, ask them to provide you the source if they haven't done so. Now, if they refuse, that's a real violation. Before someone have done that, the claim is not justified at all. I really want to see a case like that, and someone bring it to the court in Hongkong/China/Taiwan/etc.. and test the GPL over that side.
I also question why the Slashdot comment doesn't mention about the practice of RedFlat, that source is coming with the binaries. What a balanced comment!
A sig is redundant.
Picking my words here carefully to avoid the wrath of Godwin ;-)
Late '30s Germany had a system called 'Blockwardens'. Essentially, they littered the area with party supporters who were under instruction (and paid) to mention pretty much everything that people were saying and doing to area handlers. Stub your toe and cry out in anguish against the government and you would be reported if they heard.
They were totally anonymous.
Net result, you had no way of knowing where or when you could say something possibly irritating to the government - anyone could be the blockwarden and so could get you in to trouble. About as close to a thought police as you can get.
I honestly don't know anything substantial about Chinese politics or society - but, with this sort of system, you can shut off dissent very effectively. If you can't discuss you can't organise. If you can't organise then how can you get any movement of opposition going? The net might be able to help a little (still very vulnerable, though) but how many Chinese have unfiltered net access?
Greg
(Inside a nuclear plant)
Aaaarrrggh! Run! The canary has mutated!
"Patriots" are always free to do that sort of thing - this, though, made sure they had someone getting regular updates from particular people. Memory says they were paid but I'm not 100% certain.
In case anyone wants to do any research, they were known as 'Blockleiters' in German.
Greg
(Inside a nuclear plant)
Aaaarrrggh! Run! The canary has mutated!
What makes you think the powers-that-be in Red China would let their people have access to unadulterated Linux? You're forgetting that they control the horizontal and the vertical...nothing gets past their "Great Firewall" that Mao wouldn't approve. The few people who get to travel outside the country might be able to snag a regular Linux distro in their travels, but the only people who would have that opportunity would be those who have already proven themselves loyal to the current regime.
20 January 2017: the End of an Error.
Actually, it is of great priority. Quite frankly the US needs China, and China needs the US (Ditto for all other nations in the world, see "For Whom The Bell Tolls". We all need each other).
However, the majority of US citizens feel that there are certian basic human rights that ought to be met by everyone. We generally won't mess with another country, but we can force them to make certian decisions due to the fact that they need our business to thrive economically. It would be the same as other nations refusing to trade with us (or limiting, or tariffing, etc) because we don't have vey strict emissions standards, or because we have nuclear arms, etc.
I'm proud of the USA, and am glad to be here. Sure, there are things I disagree with that the nation does both externally and internally, but that's the price I pay for choosing to live in a semi-democracy (republic or 50 states, which are also ruled as republics. We could go to a democracy if we wanted, now that the needed speed and bandwidth of communications are in place, but that would also entail a lessening of our anonymity and privacy).
At any rate, don't think of us as bullying you. Think of it as you scratch our back, we'll scratch yours, and don't touch the other nations that have treaties with us.
IANAPSM (I am not a political science major)
-Adam
Prepare to don flame suit
Donning flame suit...3...2...1...
Flame suit engaged and operational.
This sig 80% recycled bits, 20% post user.
I personally see the culture gap between the mainland chinese mindset than the american mindset. Many among the americans actually don't view financial gain as their number one priority in life, however, in the mainland, where generations have suffered far far below the "american" poverty level for decades, or even centries. Making money now become the primary factor in gaining respect or "face" in the increasingly materialistic nation.
Hong Kong, on the other hand, has always been the most materialistic of the three, until recent years where China seems to be surpassing them in terms of finacial dense populations. Money has always been important, and it is needed to follow what is "in" in the popular culture, where Linux and being an "IT" person is so hip. Although there are still many linux using geeks here (like HKLUG, cuhk linux geeks! We put Fast CangJie chinese input method v6 in Linux!!!) the population as a whole follows the latest buzz and fad.
Taiwan has always been a major world player in computer, especially in the hardware side (hey, who do you think wrote all those optimized windows drivers that are closed source?
I think that even if chinese developers violate these licenses, there is really nothing the west can do. But I just like to point out that not all developers are doing this, and the open source movement in the east is getting stronger, with more people learning to code and learning about open source. Only time will tell us.
I really don't care what the actual ratio is, but I have seen first-hand pallets full of fake product ready to be distributed to various "expos" where unbundled wares and other stuff is laundered like regular semi-used product.
I've always figured that "shelfware" balances "fakeware." By "shelfware", I count all the unused copies of Microsoft products that were preinstalled but then deleted, or bought for an employee as a package but never actually used, for example.
I imagine the fakeware and the casual copying mostly just balance out this picture, but I don't have numbers to back this up.
[
If the BSA figures of "1 in 3" pirated applications being used today are anywhere near correct, do you think it's because corporations can't afford software?
No, it's because they figure that nobody will catch them ignoring the licensing issues.
China is only one of the large producers of fake Microsoft products. Fake Adobe and Autodesk and Macromedia products, as well, but fakes of these are a little harder to spot.
As a producer of any fake products, like Rolexes and Gucci items, they do it because there's a market for it.
But Open Source is free-as-in-beer, so why would they circumvent the licenses? The thicker the cultural apathy, the more prevalent it will be. They don't care about Western license law, they just grab what they can use, and use it. There are plenty of people in the USA and Britain and Canada and Australia who don't care about Western license law, so people in Eastern and Middle-Eastern and Latin-American and African countries are going to care even less.
Capitalism and Opportunism are often confused, so anywhere that capitalism is sprouting... opportunism thrives.
[
I don't see how either human rights or software license abuse can be of any priority of yours if you don't live in China.
To paraphrase: "I don't care about anything that's not in my country". You must be american, right?
Opus: the Swiss army knife of audio codec
So, if polls of people in various European countries in 1940 had consistently shown that people were in favour of persecuting Jews, would that have made concentration camps ok?
That these guys are acting like a bunch of fucking communists!
I'd go easy on the assumptions there... I've seen no evidence whatsoever that the average Chinese citizen is a lit firecracker. Are you sure you're not basing that on a Western-centric view which says "they must be pissed off because I'd be pissed off if I had to live like that"? Different cultures, different values. If the vast majority of the Chinese populace were truly upset about the way things are going, they'd have done somtehing that couldn't be stopped by a few hundred tanks by now.
--Fesh
--Fesh
Kill -9 'em all, let root@localhost sort 'em out.
The level of security needed to positively insure that a convict can never get the chance to repeat the crime they were convicted of (and in the cases of people like Ted Bundy or John Wayne Gacy, their behavior pretty much indicated that they'd do it again if given the chance) would be considered cruel and unusual punishment. That's right, there's no such thing as an escape-proof cell, and the security that would be necessary for even a paltry attempt at desiging one would amount to cruel and unusual treatment of the convict. So by this logic, execution is the only humane (to the convict) way to keep such offenders from hurting others again. Compare that to the treatment of the one guy in Alcatraz who was locked in solitary confinement in total darkness for so long that he had memorized every world series game play by play in a failed attempt to keep his sanity.
However, I think that the standard used today for applying the death penalty is pretty warped. It amounts to petty retribution, not any sort of regard for the possibility of rehabilitation. I think most death sentences are handed down purely on the basis of emotion, not on any sort of scientific evaluation of any future threat that an individual poses.
--Fesh
--Fesh
Kill -9 'em all, let root@localhost sort 'em out.
Truly spoken like someone who has never been "out in the sticks" of China. Most rural Chinese don't much bother themselves about politics. Beijing is, literally, half a continent a way, and what happens there is largely irrelevant in their daily lives. And Lenin would never have been pleased with what passes for communism in China.
Well, in fact, while China is currently ruled by something calling itself a "communist party", the style of governance bears far more similarity to socialism than anything Marx or Lenin ever envisaged.
Therefore, Hong Kong, a city of China, is also a communists city. Hong Kong ... runs on capitalism.
Are we talking about communism as political system or communism as economic system? Being capitalist doesn't necessarily mean you're not communist.
For what's worth: neither does the US of A. Executing people, even retarted, is against Human Rights. What china does is wrong, but the US of A shouldn't be shouting that hard towards china, but look in the mirror first.
--
Never underestimate the relief of true separation of Religion and State.
Incidentally, "There is no body of Federal common law separate and distinct from the common law existing in the several states", as Justice Brewer famously quoth in State of Kansas v. State of Colorado, 1907. Brandeis, in Erie R.R. Co. v. Tompkins, 1938, stated that "There is no federal general common law". Taking these together, the astute reader will deduce that there is Federal common law in the United States, just not much. Never trust a lawyer, after all. :-)
Federal courts, though, really aren't supposed to expand upon the common law of the states, and should only fabricate laws "to protect uniquely federal interests" in the event that statutory or state common law does not apply.
Mostly, anyway.
If you're interested, start with a Google search on the Erie Doctrine. If you're really interested, read The Common Law, by Oliver Wendell Holmes.
"The best we can hope for concerning the people at large is that they be properly armed." - Alexander Hamilton
Now, I'm all for protecting the fine reputation of the Chinese and lampooning dullards and bigots, but before another do-gooder makes a comment chastizing the original poster for saying the Chinese have no manners, please read the post again!
The 'they' with no manners is not the Chinese, it's the "Westerners who claim to be working in [everyone's] best interests".
geez.
You think everyone makes their mods public?
No.
Who's going to do anything about it? Nobody.
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
Executing people, even retarted, is against Human Rights.
Oh, barf me. By whose definition is it against human rights? Polls of people in various countries, particularly European countries, consistently show that people are in favor of capital punishment.
--
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
oh please, it's the same in Russia as it is in China
russia....democracy......hahaha.....you're funny, you know that?
No I didn't. Somebody once told me I was ironic, but I didn't know what it meant.
-- Sigs are for losers
This is the sort of thing that getting into the WTO will change. The Chinese will bind themselves into the world economy and begin to rely more on the freedom of trade. Should they violate other countries' rules, they merely challenge it, boycott their products, and strangle their economy until they finally revolt.
Communist China's undoing will be economic, just like the Soviet Union's. The question is, will it be with a whimper as they continue to slide up towards capitalism (!= democracy) or will it explode as a bloody revolt when The People's pent up anger is released? The great Russian transition into capitalism is far from over and could still exploded into a scene with Putin's head on a stick and a dictatorship of a few years before settling into something stable (reference South America). The Chinese transition may be something different altogether.
"Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart, he dreams himself your master."
We've had reports of fur coats made out of dogs in China, inmate organ harvesting, the peaceful Falung Gong being arrested in droves, students in China being slaughtered, American planes being knocked out of the sky over international airspace, and now skin harvesting of prison inmates. If the atrocities that nation is so far responsible for doing to its own citizens haven't made us shift production of Barbie dolls and Nikes to some other less cheaper part of the world by now, we Americans are a lot more cold blooded worshippers of money than we believe. How many of us Americans would be willing to give up all our little comfortable gadgets or even risk semiconductor prodcution on the island of Taiwan for a statistic as large as 1 billion unfortunate people.
Our European allies such as France cannot even stomach the sight of starving out Saddam Hussein or Fidel Castro before they give up without a gunshot, so what would happen when you multiply that by 100 to get rid of the Chinese Communists? Maybe that was Milosovich's problem...he hadn't negotiated a contract with Kenner or Keds for guaranteed cheap labor!
"Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart, he dreams himself your master."
[sarcasm] Yeah we all know how NONE of the Chinese have any manners. I mean, they're only more respectful of the elderly than us in the west [/sarcasm]
I kind of admire China on this one. It's a big, powerful, Asian country that does things its own way, and this just infuriates the West to no end. You can make your little laws and jump up and down as much as you want but at the end of the day, we're gonna do what we want. And you know what? Whether their actions are utlimately right or wrong, at the end of the day, the West always capitulates, always loses face. Why? Because we're greedy bastards who don't want to lose access to their billion customers.
Please don't interpret this comment as condoning the actions of the Chinese government against its own dissidents and the peoples of other countries, its selling of arms to 'rogue' states, etc. That's not my intent. I simply wish to point out that China does not let the West bully it; if anything, it bullies the West. None of the other Asian countries can make the same claim. (Note: I'm of Indian descent.)
Yeah, I agree! Yay for China standing up for itself.
Retard, did you read the second paragraph of my post? It included this caveat:
Please don't interpret this comment as condoning the actions of the Chinese government against its own dissidents and the peoples of other countries, its selling of arms to 'rogue' states, etc. That's not my intent.
I complimented them for showing some balls against Western dictates; I didn't condone their human rights violations.
By the way, I followed your interesting link. Pretty appalling stuff. Once again, NOT TO CONDONE CHINA'S ACTIONS, but did you notice that all of the skinning was of executed prisoners -- i.e., corpses -- for transplant to burn victims except for one (admittedly gruesome) case where the executed prisoner had not finished dying?
Paid-software pirating I can understand. It may be expensive, and not that good. But free-software pirating is horrible!
There are bunches of people working for free, trying to make a better world for everybody. And then a small group of SOB ignores this whole wonderful thing!
Why don't they abandon comunist right now? Aren't they the so called best society? Aren't comunism and socialism made to bring rights equality to all? Why are they acting like this?
GPL do not want to make money, as said Stallmann, enough just for living, and living cheap. And now, a small group from a comunist country violates GPL? I'm stopping trying to understand humans.
I know we don't know yet what license is being violated. I used GPL just as the most representing license.
-=-=-=-=
I know life isn't fair, but why can't it ever be un-fair in MY favor!?
It's like 10,000 spoons when all you need is a knife.
[+1 for inciting irony flame war]
Not Meta-modding due to apathy.
They probally will release it in peices and leave it to the world to reassmble it. Look at what they did with that spy plane.
Mr.White didn't give any evidence. From my expeience, that allegation is completely groundless. For example, the dominant Linux distribution in China RedFlag-Linux (http://www.redflag-linux.com) is open to everyone. You can download the binary cd and source cd for free. If you think that any applications that run on Linux should be open source, you are completely wrong. GPL only applies to GPLed code, not the code that is owned by companies. I worked for two companies in US, I ported proprietary applications and drivers to Linux. None of them are open source. If Mr.White thinks that the respectable Chinese Linux developers(just like the Linux developer in US or Europe) violates GPL, he should be prepared to give evidence before opening his mouth. Unless he can give an evidence, I have to say this is just groundless allegation.
It is an typical FUD, RedHat want enter China market,
./xc/extras/X-TrueType/GBK
And the first thing they need to do is attack China
Linux Company as possible as they can.
Anyway, China Linux Company doesn't have an good record
on GPL. But Chinese Developer obey the GPL rules!
The next is the Chinese Developer's GPL work list:
Please see http://www.lids.org , http://www.linux.virtualserver.org
they are all leaded by Chinese developer, And you can have an look at glibc/QT/gtk/XFree86, Some Chinese
developer leave their name there:
glibc:glibc/iconvdata/gb18030.c
QT:qt/src/tools/qgbkcodec.h
src/tools/qgbkcodec.cpp
XFree86 4.10:
We are newbie in linux world, But our chinese developer
are eager to work under the GPL like all respected hacker have done.
Please do not mix devloper with the evil commercial company!
Erm, aren't the GPL etc. governed by US law? And since when did China subscribe to that?
It just goes to show that anything other than PUBLIC DOMAIN is not truly free information. And, more importantly, anything other than Public Domain is unenforcable in an international environment such as the Internet.
The GPL isn't worth the paper it's written on. It presumes a whole heap of US-centric crap which is unenforable outside all but a handful of countries.
That something as US-centric as the GPL could be written by those who style themselves as "pioneers" of the Internet is very telling. They're not pioneers of anything, they're just Uncle Sam apologists trying to enforce the same old Uncle Sam rules in a world that doesn't give a toss about the US.
--
Andrew Oakley - www.aoakley.com
However, you should probably read it in view of section 3c, which says if distributing a binary, you can
Now, it all hangs on how you define "any third party". Given the presence of 3 c), I would assume that it would include any subsequent recipients of the binary, but I'm not convinced it extends to "anybody who wants it".
Go you big red fire engine!
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
They then went to Hong Kong and polled Hong Kong citizens, asking them which they'd prefer. Over 60% said Chinese rule.
Moral: Don't assume you know what the people of a place want if you're not from there.
The GPL is a grant of license with respect to copyright law. Many countries have copyright laws under which the GPL probably makes some sense (signatories to the Berne Convention, for example), so the expectation is that the GPL will be enforceable there.
Lots of people here have been saying that the GPL is meaningless in China. China wasn't a signatory to the Berne Convention, and didn't have much in the way of copyright. That is, until recently.
When China wanted to join the World Trade Organisation, it was forced to sign TRIPs. TRIPs (trade related aspecs of intellecutal property) is a little document designed for Pfizier, Monsanto, IBM, Sony et. al., which enforces 20 year patents, life of the author + 50 year copyrights, restrictions on "compulsory licensing", and DMCA-style anti-circumvention device prohibitions. In perhaps the most spectacular coup for corporatations over the public interest (ever), it was tacked onto the GATT in 1994. In effect, any country which does not believe that their interests are served by such extreme IP monopolies, suffers massive trade sanctions through WTO exclusion (see Braithwaite and Drahos, Global Business Regulation, chapter 7, for more details).
China, like everyone else, has buckled to this pressure, and is going to want to create the impression that it's trying to follow TRIPs. If someone could actually identify a prima facie deliberate GPL violation in China, they might have some chance of a successful prosecution.
Fixing copyright
There are indeed a few smaller distro makers that are not releasing source to kernel mods, but this is by no means all of them. China is a big place, try not to paint them all with the same brush.
The GPL probably makes some assumptions that are more true under US and European law than elsewhere, but it is, fundamentally, a contract. The Code of Hammurabi (1792 BCE) contains enough of the fundamentals of contract law that a time traveler could probably defend the GPL with little else. Of course, there are some assumptions in the GPL that might be a little tough to exlpain in aincent Babylon, but the terms of the GPL are clear enough that you could identify a flagrant violation in almost any legal enviornment.
Yes, China is a communist country. But, communist or not, it does have a working system of contract law. Keep in mind that China has a large, complex and vibrant economy. They make everything from locomotives to DRAMs. Without contract law, none of this would be possible.
And I've heard enough about the Chinese government refusing to obey intelectual property standards. This simply isn't the case. While they might make noises and gestures as if they were still communist, the reality is very different. They are signatories of most or all of the international conventions on patents, copyrights and trademarks. It is true that there are plenty of honest-to-goodness software pirates (I hate the using term "pirate") in China, but this is more of an enforcement problem than a legal problem. The government simply doesn't have the resources to investigate and prosecute IP violations the way the US does. That's just a fact of life when your country's per capita purchasing parity is only $3,800.
Before you go posting about countries you've never visteded and/or know little about, you should do a little homework. I use the CIA factbook. Here's the entry for China.
--
In spite of the suggestions and all the tests that I have made, I have not cavato a spider from the hole.
I demand a million helicopters and a DOLLAR!
Just an observation... the article doesn't say outright that developers in China are violating the GPL.
The strongest language comes from Mark White as "in a sense [this is] going against the ideals and benefits of what made Linux useful to them in the first place."
I get the feeling that there is no actual violation taking place, just a disregard for the spirit of the GPL, in which case the only course of action is moral suasion (which is exactly what this article is doing).
--
Accountability on the heads of the powerful.
Accountability on the heads of the powerful.
Power in the hands of the accountable.
You shouldn't make sweeping generalisations about people from another country. Thats what they do in Russia.
Nothing much happens in China without the consent of our despicable, foul government that has kept the Chinese enslaved for over fifty years now (not that they were free before, but that's a separate issue.)
The behavior described in this article dovetails perfectly with our shameful history of dictatorship of the communist party in our country, and their avowed intention to obliterate the free world by any and all means at their disposal.
If this allegation is true, they are hurting themselves
more than they are helping. They would have to keep their private forked code separate, and constantly modify and merge with the evolving open code base. In the long run, they would lose the open code base advantages because they would not be able to merge their own forked code.
Furthermore, if there are secret things being put in, I would imagine it would be backdoors to allow the government the control it seems to need. These "enhancements" are not needed by the community anyway.
The Chinese can decide that the GPL means nothing in which case the author can sue Chinese companies in jurisdictions where it is respected. If those companies do this in China however I think they will eventually become very weak Linux related companies due to the hostility they are sure to draw.
Also, keep in mind that these claims are being made by one competitor against another. I'm not saying they aren't true, but the problems are likely being exaggerated to make them sound bigger than they are. For example, no specific case of GPL violating was quoted, just general accusations and assumptions. We need more proof before we should feel outraged.
People in US and the west have experienced monopolies in IT for last 30 years, such as IBM and Microsoft, and realize that opensource is good. People here have not yet suffered enough because of those monopolies, and we still look at IBM and Microsoft as an example for our own software industry. Let's face it, all the opensource companies are burning their VC money ( or other financial resources), trying to find a good opensource business model, what can you expect from those Chinese opensource companies who don't have nearly as much money to burn? If Red Hat is really interested to open Chinese market, it should put money where its mouth is, and hire some Chinese programmers to work on open-source projects ( btw, $30k USD/year is very good money for programmers in China).
As a matter of fact, I really like to see that happen. I tried redflag, and the truth is you can not install it if you are not fluent in English, and understand all those OS jargons in English. Linux probably has the best internationalization support, including Chinese thanks to all those programmers in Taiwan and mainland China, but still there are many many programs that are in western(Latin systems) languages only, such as evolution and gedit( menu bar is Chinese, but the content canvas can not display Chinese). I wish I have time to fix all those, which is not that difficult at all. But I graduated from college a while ago, and it is hard to get away from wife and kids nowadays.
Anyway, I agree that Chinese programmers should contribute more, but keep expectations low, for now, please.
P2P Anonymous Distributed Web Search: http://www.yacy.net/
They can disrespect human rights human rights if they like, but not respecting the GPL is too much. We must fight to protect software freedom in China and save the GPL!
Seriously, as far as I'm concerned, software license abuse in China is not the top priority...
Opus: the Swiss army knife of audio codec
Read the friggin' license, folks.
The GPL does not require that code be given back to the origional developers. It requires that it be given to the people to whom you distribute the software.
Basically, they've forked the projects. Big deal.
Get over it. It's time to move on.
I have discovered a truly marvelous sig, unfortunately the sig limit is too small to contain i
IMHO there is little to be concerned about in practice, all the offenders are doing is making life difficult for themselves.
As each new 'legit' release is made, the piractes will have to retro-fit their own custom changes again, and again and again...
This will leave those that break the licence terms increasingly behind those that play by the rules of the game.
So far I found two misconceptions here:
China is being ruled by communism. Therefore, Hong Kong, a city of China, is also a communists city. Hong Kong is a Special Administrative Region of China. It has an international financial market and runs on capitalism.
China and Hong Kong do not respect IP and Copyright. China's law can bypass any license agreement. Pirate copying of copyright software is illegal in China and Hong Kong. Especially in Hong Kong, its legal system is based on common law, same legal system in British and US.
Furthermore, effective on 1/4/2001, companies and individuals possessing pirated software will be subjected to max. fine of HK$50,000 per copy and jail. Police, with court's warrant, can enter(bash) any place to confiscate computer equipment containing pirated software without piror notice.
A poor 14-year old boy was just caught for hosting MP3 sites. He was at home while police bashing his door.
It's true that you can find illegal-copied software everywhere. In Hong Kong police can jail you immediate if you are being caught carrying them. Try showing your collection of pirated software at China's custom, but bear in mind the max. penality for smuggling in China is not just jailing.
(in an unrelated story, while companies were busy looking for enough legal licenses before new law enforced, Microsoft had raised the price of all Windows/Office software. Those suckers.)
So, if you planned to come here for cheap pirated software, think about it.
wow, the GPL is being violated in China.. perhaps these are some bigger issues from China:
Outlaw group is mass killed
tibet situation, caused by China
see what a Chinese 'criminal' has done to deserve jail
Chinese government illegally harvests organs
obviously a lot of problems exist in China, anyone interested should visit human rights in china
(The original punched-parchment scrolls of Linux were illicitly smuggled out of China by spice traders, and centuries later ended up in the archives of an obscure Finnish museum. It's not clear what happened after that.)