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Taiwan to Start National Push For Free Software

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the makes-good-sense dept.

Andy Tai writes: "Taiwan will start a national plan to jump-start the development and use of Free (libre) Software, according to this report by the Central News Agency, the government news agency of Taiwan, Rep. of China. Due to high Microsoft license fees and also to improve the levels of software technology in Taiwan, this plan includes the creation of a totally Chinese free software environment for Taiwan users, free software application development, and training of 120,000 people for free software skills, as well as efforts at schools to provide diverse information technology environments to ensure the freedom of information. The original article is in Chinese; an English summary appears in this Kuro5hin article."

4 of 298 comments (clear)

  1. Heh... by ObviousGuy · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Nary a mention of the GPL in the entire article text.

    --
    I have been pwned because my /. password was too easy to guess.
  2. The problem.. by neksys · · Score: 3, Interesting

    The problem is that Taiwan is a relatively poor country in comparison to the Western powers. A large-scale shift to open-source, free software will do little in terms of affecting Microsoft's sales. What I'd like to see is a country like Canada take a real stand, and make an effort to use open source software in schools and such. I can guarantee that Microsoft has a significant enough investment in it's northern neighbor that such an act would certainly cause it to at least take a closer look at its business practices.

  3. Re:Taiwan not ready for that yet by Greyfox · · Score: 3, Interesting
    That's pretty much any college anywhere. My experience is that 90-95% of CS majors are only getting into the industry for the money. Most of them don't really care about or have any particular aptitude for computers in general or programming in particular.

    It takes less programmers than you think to make for growth in the free software community. Here in America I still usually get blank looks when I mention Linux or the GPL. Or data structures for that matter. You'd be surprised at how many "professional" programmers out there wouldn't be able to code a hash table or a linked list.

    --

    I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?

  4. Re:purchasing power parity by BigBir3d · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Do you know what foreigners (specifically chinese and taiwanese) think of Americans? They have no interest in giving us money. And you forget, if you are the standard, such as Microsoft is, you can charge whatever you want, and the people have to pay, otherwise they can't use your product. This is true for an OS, as well as proprietary file formats, such .doc or .xls or whatever else. Own the file format, and usually the customer has to own the program to use the format. No different than a car or anything else. Toyota owns the car, if you buy it (rent, lease or buy), then you can use it.

    Welcome to capitalism.