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

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?

:)

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?

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...

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.