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Beijing Snubs Microsoft For Municipal PCs' Software
jsse points to this Gartner article which says "that on 28 December 2001, the Beijing municipal government selected among seven vendors to provide operating system (OS), office automation (OA) and antivirus software for government PCs. Beijing selected six bidders, including Red Flag, but rejected the seventh bidder, Microsoft -- the only one that was not selected. Gartner listed several reasons why Microsoft lost the bid, but missed out the famous rumor that Microsoft has built a bad relationship with China since the first Chinese Windows 95, which was written by Taiwan programmers, contains Easter eggs carrying anti-communist messages."
I aplaud the Chinesse on this. They told a corporation that was bad mouthing them to go fly a kite. The whole reason that China is known as a haven of piracy is work done by Microsoft and it's goons at the BSA. The fact that China had some piracy, mainly due to the fact that it could not legally import much of the software, was touted several years ago as a reason that they should not be allowed into the world market. The company leading this charge? Microsoft.
Microsoft figured they would leverage their way in by calling them pirates and then simply saying you can become legal by pay as a large license fee for all of the stuff you are using. The Chinesse understood what this was. Microsoft wanted a bribe to allow China into the world markets. China told them to go f**k themselves, and rightly so.
Hopefully this will make Microsoft look twice now at how their fanning the flames of piracy histeria hurts them more than it helps them. Missing out on a multi-billion dollar market tends to do that to a company.
Papa Legba come and open the gate
"How will reducing software licensing costs transform china in 30 years, when its been an agrarian society for thousands, and poverty stricken for a couple hundred, at least ?"
Many countries have been agrarian societies. But some countries in the last 100 years transformed themselves. For example France is one of the few countries in the world that is 100% self sufficient in terms of feedding itself. But throughout that time France organized and modernized itself. Hence they have more money and a better standard of living.
But the catch in the loop is that to take advantage of automation you need a specific sum of money. And you cannot become modern without the automation. Hence by lowering the cost to entry a society can transform itself.
Way back when with a 100 USD you actually used to get quite a bit of software.
"You can't make a race horse of a pig"
"No," said Samuel, "but you can make very fast pig"
Sorry to disappoint you, but Bush and Cheney are know to have ties to many, if not all, of the major oil companies in the US. I'm not even going to touch on the subject of stock ownership.
So is this about a legitimate choice in operating software, or is it about nepotism?
I think, before we look to any altruistic reasoning on the part of Beijing on choosing "Linux" over "Microsoft" we need to look closer to home ... to their homes.