Slashdot Mirror
Can China Pull An India?
ricst writes: "The New York Times has a story about how China is trying to leap ahead of India as the world's second-largest producer of software. Apparently the Chinese are trying to learn everything they can from the Indian software developers. It's not clear that if China becomes a strong competitor to India that 'jobs will be lost or simply not created' in the U.S. My guess is that the most creative software opportunities will remain in the US for some time, and the more routine development efforts will continue to be transfered overseas."
I have no problem with China, India, or any other nation for that matter, taking part in the global economy (i.e. I'm not isolationalist), and if they produce great software then that's superb. Having said that I _DO_ have a problem with nations that steal jobs away from other countries without providing them: i.e. If Chinese only buy products from China, and they counterfeit all the software from the US, then I have a massive problem with that. Personally, given the counterfeiting nature of IP in China there is absolutely no way at this juncture that I would trust it as a nation to contract software development out to.
Oh yes, routine development such as most of KDE, the invention of the Linux kernel and so on was done outside the US. Just routine stuff, not really creative, right ?
-- Don Inodoro
Idiot, that's not what he said. You took something he typed, and twisted it into an extreme statement.
Lemme guess, you also like to associate yourself with a political party, and you watch ABC for "news."
... or anything else good for that matter. Communism does not support productivity or creativity. So they can try all they want, but only capitalist governments can support and promote innovation.
[FromTheMorning]
You guys are seriously overthinking this, and you're way too easy on China on this site. When did China stop being the evil, ruthless country that they are? How many tiannamen square massacres and Falun Gong witchhunts (where the chinese government hired people to hack American servers that contained Falun Gong information!do you guys need before you start taking a critical stance against China's government?
The reason that China cares about software development is probably because they're trying to stop getting their web pages hacked by human rights advocates.
They're "going to some other country to learn about programming"? Do you see people from other countries going around the world looking for the "secrets of the programmers"? It's probably just some communist "waste of time" project. And you know what they're probably going to do with it? Program some firewalls and a Falun Gong website exploit or something.
God I'm sick of china. Did you know that they took some Linux distribution code, hacked it up a little bit and called it "Red Flag Linux"? Can you beleive that? That's a spit in the face of everything that Linux represents, being a freedom operating system in all it's possible descriptions. China's probably using it for a Falun Gong firewall or something. Pathetic.
What an awful, unfounded, racist statement. You ought to be ashamed. The US is not the be-all and end-all of software development. Nor is it the center of the universe. I personally use many creative pieces of software that are produced overseas.
In fact, much of the great free software we all use has non-US origins. Sylpheed, KDE, Linux, and large portions of Gnome have started oversees and continue to be large, international efforts with significant non-US contributions. Many well respected and innovative Linux distributions such as SuSE and Mandrake are of non-US origins, and the newcomer ELX, from India, already offers more working code than the vaporous "Lindows." What an ignorant statement.