Taiwan to Start National Push For Free Software

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."

Comments

A new definition of "free"

[cascino]

Yes, that's free as in Û"Äèܽ.

Heh...

[ObviousGuy]

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

Re:Heh...

[sffubs]

Except that it is implied by

"Also included are international cooperation on free application software development, with the results freely shared internationally"

which suggests Taiwan is going to continue in the spirit of which 'free software' was intended.

-s

Wrong way to have independence

[phunhippy]

What they should really do to win independence is the following:

Eliminate all free software, Give every citizen pirated copies of Microsoft Windows XP and Office XP plus a plethora of other programs as well.

MS & other big companies freak out over the rampant copyright violations and potential lost revenue and calculate that Taiwan owes them 500 billion dollars or so in license fees!

In light of this CHINA decides it doesn't want that headache of a bill when they re-unify and drops demands for unification of the two countrys(province & country what ever) and now taiwan is free to be their own country(and in trouble with all those licenses they now own)..

Of Course if they proceed to support open source software, china will notice how many good programs and programmers they are turning out and will want to re-unify faster and take the island by force..

See how this can work out only for the worst?

:)

Re:Wrong way to have independence

[mqduck]

I hope I'm not too off-topic by posting this here...

Behind U.S. support for Tibetan feudalists
by Deirdre Griswold

Very few people who seek an audience with the president of the United States get one. Even heads of state have to line up to see George W. Bush, who boasts of his short work day.

Nevertheless, Bush found time May 23 for a meeting and photo opportunity with the 14th Dalai Lama of Tibet.

The Dalai Lama hasn't been in Tibet for over four decades. He left for India in 1959 to become head of a "government in exile" that represented the former Tibetan feudal ruling class.

The White House dismissed the date of the meeting with Bush--May 23, which was being celebrated in China as the 50th anniversary of the day in 1951 when Tibet was declared peacefully liberated from feudalism and imperialist influence--as a mere "coincidence."

Bush's sit-down with the Dalai Lama came just two days after Taiwan's president, Chen Shui-bian, had an unprecedented dinner meeting with about 20 members of the U.S. Congress.

To the Chinese people, these two political acts embracing secessionist elements are further proof that the Bush administration has embarked on a dangerous anti-China strategy with serious military implications.

Covert U.S. strategy vs. official stance

Tibet has been under Chinese jurisdiction since the 13th century. Today it is an autonomous republic within the People's Republic of China.

The U.S. government's official stance, even after the Chinese Communists swept to power in 1949, has always been to recognize both Taiwan and Tibet as part of China.

When Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek was overthrown by the Chinese people and fled the mainland to set up a U.S.-backed dictatorship on the island of Taiwan, Washington continued to recognize his regime as the government of all China, including Tibet. So how could it argue later that Taiwan and Tibet weren't part of China?

Unofficially and secretly, however, Washington has fomented the secession of both Taiwan and Tibet ever since it became obvious that the revolutionary regime in Beijing was here to stay. As long ago as the 1950s, the Central Intelligence Agency began training Tibetan mercenaries at Camp Hale in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado (see Chicago Tribune of Jan. 25, 1997, and Newsweek of Aug. 16, 1999).

According to the famous "Pentagon Papers," the CIA made 700 flights over Tibet in the 1950s. Dropping mercenaries into the frozen vastness of Tibet didn't work, however. So in recent years the anti-China forces here have focused on a "Free Tibet" campaign that has made inroads in the United States with its well-financed and synchronized promotion of the Dalai Lama as a deeply spiritual mystic fighting a soulless bureaucracy that oppresses his people.

This view takes advantage of the fact that most people in this country know nothing about Tibet except that it has pretty mountains. They are easy prey for a slick campaign romanticizing the "spirituality" of feudal times.

The Chinese people, however, have a much more recent memory of what it was like when all-powerful landlords ruled the countryside.

Life for the serfs

Nine out of 10 Tibetans were serfs at the time of the Chinese Revolution. They owned no land and had no personal freedom. Another 5 percent were hereditary household slaves.

Their toil was backbreaking. Education for the common people was unheard of.

Conditions were so backward that the wheel had no function except for saying prayers. Roads didn't exist.

Back in the 1930s the British, who had been trying for years to add Tibet to their empire in India and had actually staged several armed incursions, made a present of an automobile to the Dalai Lama. Since Tibet had no paved roads, the auto had to be dismantled and carried to Lhasa on draft animals.

The nobles, upper-ranking lamas in monasteries and administrative officials, together made up less than 5 percent of the population. Yet they owned all of Tibet's farmland, pastures, forests, mountains and rivers as well as most livestock.

The current Dalai Lama became part of this owning class when at the age of 2 he was taken from his family by the monks to be groomed as a demigod. Before that he was just a toddler named Lhamo Toinzhub.

Serfs were really slaves belonging to landowners. According to a white paper prepared in 1992 by the Information Office of the State Council of the People's Republic of China (available online at chineseculture.about.com): "Sometimes they were traded as payment for debts. According to historical records, in 1943 the aristocrat Chengmoim Norbu Wanggyai sold 100 serfs to a monk official at Garzhol Kamsa, in Zhigoin area, at the cost of 60 liang of Tibetan silver (about four silver dollars) per serf. He also sent 400 serfs to the Gundelin Monastery as mortgage for a debt of 3,000 pin Tibetan silver (about 10,000 silver dollars).

"Serf owners had a firm grip on the birth, death and marriage of serfs. Male and female serfs not belonging to the same owner had to pay 'redemption fees' before they could marry. In some cases, an exchange was made with a man swapped for man and a woman for woman. In other cases, after a couple wedded, the ownership of both husband and wife remained unchanged, but their sons would belong to the husband's owner and their daughters to the wife's owner. Children of serfs were registered the moment they were born, setting their life-long fate as serfs."

Serfdom, whether in Europe during the most backward feudal period or in China more recently, was a ruthless system of exploitation through usury and corvee--unpaid labor that the landlords assessed on the serfs, like taxes.

The Chinese white paper continues: "Incomplete statistics indicate the existence of more than 200 categories of corvee taxes levied by the Gaxag (Tibetan local government). The corvee assigned by Gaxag and manorial lords accounted for over 50 percent of the labor of serf households, and could go as high as 70-80 percent.

"According to a survey conducted before the Democratic Reform, the Darongqang Manor owned by Regent Dagzhag of the 14th Dalai Lama had a total of 1,445 ke [a ke is about one sixth of an acre] of land, and 81 able-bodied and semi-able-bodied serfs. They were assigned a total of 21,260 corvee days for the whole year, the equivalent of an entire year's labor by 67.3 people. In effect, 83 percent of the serfs had to do corvee for one full year.

"The serfs engaged in hard labor year in and year out and yet had no guaranteed food or clothing. Often they had to rely on money borrowed at usury to keep body and soul together."

Class law

Tibetan law divided people into three classes and nine ranks. Inequality was stipulated in the law. The codes said:

"It is forbidden to quarrel with a worthy, sage, noble and descendant of the ruler."

"Persons of the lower rank who attack those of the upper rank, and a junior official who quarrels with a senior official commit a serious crime and so should be detained."

"Anyone who resists a master's control should be arrested."

"A commoner who offends an official should be arrested."

"Anyone who voices grievances at the palace, behaving disgracefully, should be arrested and whipped."

Any socially conscious person in the United States knows that while everyone is supposedly subject to the same law, it is applied differently to rich and poor. But in Tibet the law itself demanded different punishment for the same crime depending on class and rank.

The law concerning the penalty for murder said, "As people are divided into different classes and ranks, the value of a life correspondingly differs." The lives of people of the highest rank of the upper class, such as a prince or leading Living Buddha, were calculated in gold equal to the weight of the dead body. The lives of people of the lowest rank of the lower class, such as women, butchers, hunters and craftsmen, were worth "a straw rope."

Servants who injured their masters would have their hands or feet chopped off; a master who injured a servant was responsible only for the medical treatment of the wound, with no other compensation required.

A saying among serfs was, "All a serf can carry away is his own shadow, and all he can leave behind is his footprints."

The Chinese Revolution eventually ended serfdom in Tibet. Those among the former rulers who resisted democratic change were then embraced by the CIA--which according to the Chicago Tribune article gave a special retainer to the Dalai Lama of $180,000 a year during the 1960s to keep a government in exile in Nepal.

Today's budget for this high-powered anti-China campaign has not yet been revealed.

Dispute with Microsoft

[Overcoat]

Taiwan has been recently involved in some legal hassles with Microsoft over licensing fees and excessive price increases. I wonder if this plan is a genuine effort to use free software just a bluff to put a scare into Microsoft?

Re:Dispute with Microsoft

[T-Ranger]

There is a reason why there is a distinction beteween "theft" and "theft of service". Because there is a distinction.

In your example, this person did not steal $1,691.00 from microsoft. It is the theft of a potential sale. Not everyone who runs pirated software would purchase it if they could not get it otherwise.

Clearly since these 20 people are using pirated software they are unwilling to spend the money on XP. Why do you think that everyone that uses software is willing to spend money on it?

Stealing a snickers bar is infinitly different. Effen had to purchase supplies to make the bar, and then distribute it. There is a very large incremental cost in producing a tangable item such as a choclate bar. In your example, someone is buring 20 copies of XP. There was zero incremental cost to Microsoft in that operation.

The problem..

[neksys]

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.

Re:The problem..

[ObviousGuy]

Taiwan's economy is half the size of Canada's. It is by no means small.

Canada
GDP: purchasing power parity - $774.7 billion (2000 est.)
GDP - real growth rate: 4.3% (2000 est.)
GDP - per capita: purchasing power parity - $24,800 (2000 est.)

Taiwan
GDP: purchasing power parity - $386 billion (2000 est.)
GDP - real growth rate: 6.3% (2000 est.)
GDP - per capita: purchasing power parity - $17,400 (2000 est.)

Taiwan, opensource, and intellectual property

[poopie]

I believe this is a good thing and will have positive impact for all of Asia.

Taiwan has a lot of computer-savvy people, and one of the things that is holding back opensource and linux in Asia are the less-than seamless integration of CJK/Unicode character display, input methods, and font rendering for Unix/Linux when compared with Windows.

I know all about the efforts underway to systematically resolve those issues (and wish them well), but you still need to be a UNIX guru and in some cases a programmer, if you want to get a Linux system set up that can support all of the popular asian language input methods and have them be consistent across all apps in all environments.

One thing micros~1 has done exceptionally well is operating system internationalization and providing a common consistent method for display, and changing of IMEs.

If Taiwan can contribute efforts to making linux more multibyte-friendly, it makes linux more accessible and practical to the fastest growing segment of computer users in the world -- who likely can run any software they want for only the cost of a CD from the local software street vendor.

When people who can pirate all the software they want actually *CHOOSE* to run linux, that will be a major turning point for opensource.

I remember the old joke: "you can only sell one copy of any software in Asia" - Imagine if the creative talents of all those crackers/hackers/pirates were focused on creating free software...

Re:Taiwan is NOT a country

[Derleth]

Taiwan is as much a country as Kuwait is (Remember when Iraq called Kuwait the 17th Province? Same deal.). China simply refuses to acknowledge it, and is threatening to conquer the independent nation of Taiwan by force. Hmmm... if they really owned Taiwan, why would they have to invade it just to assert authority over it?

Taiwan has its own government, military, and seperate ties to the US (seperate from China, that is). In fact, the US has pledged to defend Taiwan if the gangsters of Beijing ever stage an invasion. So Taiwan is recognized by the USA and most of the rest of the civilized world.

What the CIA says about Taiwan. - We recognize Taiwan. Taiwan recognizes us.

BBC Article of interest - We sell weapons to Taiwan, much to China's consternation. Beijing does not dictate Taiwan's foreign policy any more than the UK dictates America's foreign policy.

In short, you are full of shit. So is Beijing, for that matter. Taiwan is, and of rights ought to be, a free and independent nation.

Taiwan not ready for that yet

[randy_ch]

I am a college student in Taiwan, and what I can only say is people in Taiwan are not ready for the adoption of free software. It still has a long way to go.

For example, most of my classmates have no ideas of what free software is, even my major is computer science. That is because we have been used to the software from Microsoft for a very long time, and the teaching of using those software is part of our eduction. I am sure that most people can not succeed in the process of transferring from Microsoft to free software. It still needs a lot of effects before we can finally achieve it.

However, I am still glad to see the government has such a farsighted plan that not only will save much money for our people, but also can bring about the rising of the develope of software industry. Although it will not come true in the near furture, I appreciate how perspective our government becomes! In fact, I am surprised. I think it is a blessing for we people in Taiwan. Thank god we are going toward the right direction.

Re:Taiwan not ready for that yet

[Greyfox]

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.

Changing the world

[enigma48]

Originally I was going to comment on how different the priorities are between the western (US/Can) and eastern (China/Taiwan) worlds are. Assuming the translator did their job correctly and introduced a minimum of bias, a few phrases caught my eye: "benefits the government NT$ 2 billion and the society NT$10 billion", the statement about international cooperation on free application software development and coordination of training centres, "...and ensure the people's rights to...".

From a Canadian standpoint, it sounded like people being put first. WAY first. Not about dropping Microsoft - just the fact that people tend to be put that far first.

Sitting back a second, I remembered the just-passed anniversary of Tiananmen square. So much for the "ideal" ways of the east.

But it got me thinking. Imagining what would happen if other governments adopted this plan of using and developing free software to meet the needs of the government. While the private sector has little incentive to release any work they did while paying for the employee to do it, the public sector has almost no incentive NOT to.

Imagining a little further, a few other governments pick up the idea - at least small groups anyway - because the work of Taiwan (and maybe Germany) provided a very necessary tool that was only available via closed-source software. Simplifying and standardizing international charsets alone would be a godsend.

Now, other countries make the switch to a partially open system and add their piece of the pie.

Suddenly, governments everywhere are noticing the next-to-nil cost of switching some or all of their systems to an open-source based solution. Training was needed anyway and other governments won't mind giving some limited support for the first bit. Service companies step in later for more robust support seeing some money in the picture.

I like the idea of open-source. I don't preach the benefits of open source nearly as much as I preach the benefits of solution X over solution Y where *applicable* (eg: Linux over Windows, Apache over IIS).

I like the idea of governments co-operating, improving the picture for everyone. Even if it saved them nothing over the current system.

I like the way the world looks for my future children right now.

Jeff

Re:Interesting Point...

[s390]

Should people start lobbying the states/federal government to impose another penalty on M$: a boycott of Microsoft products?

Well, one wouldn't use the term "boycott" as it's rather loaded with left-wing connotations. But some professional IT managers in government agencies at all levels (Federal, State, and Local) are way ahead of you. Many of them are ticked-off at Microsoft's heavy-handed "marketing tactics" (i.e., character assassination and thinly veiled extortion) and the high costs of Microsoft's new annual software rental licensing and forced upgrades, and they are looking at alternatives, including especially Open Source.

Government MIS managers are a fairly buttoned-down bunch (they're civil service staff, after all), but if you listen to a convention of them talking about the escalating hassles and expenses of Microsoft software, you'll hear four common complaints: (1) security and stability problems, missing/late/buggy patches, and high maintenance labor costs, (2) arrogant sales reps going "over their heads" and denigrating their management judgement to their bosses at the first sign of hesitation about signing up for annual software rental licenses, (3) threats to force costly and disruptive software license audits if they don't toe the line, and (4) the high costs of Microsoft software licensing and support expenses. Many IT managers in government either can't afford to pay for annual software "upgrades" they don't really need or resent Microsoft's strong-arm approach, or both, and are looking for ways to reduce or even totally eliminate their dependance on Microsoft software. Lots of them are looking at Open Source for a way out.

So yes, lobbying government politicians to open up software procurement to competition, use public taxpayers' money to acquire Open Source software that is freely available and open for inspection, eliminate the software monoculture that enables security vulnerabilities and pandemic infections, discourage sole-source and no-bid software contracts, and reduce public software costs... might be very helpful to public IT management. Polite letters to legislators, board members, and the heads of agencies can help.

Re:purchasing power parity

[BigBir3d]

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.