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Linux Continues March On China
"The source code for Yangfan was made available last week under the GNU General Public License. The group is now collecting feedback and will continue improving the operating system.
The group has also done significant work localizing the operating system to support Chinese-language characters, which will be contributed back into the Linux community, according to Jon 'Maddog' Hall, director of Linux International.
Yangfan is based on two distributions of the Linux operating system. One is the distribution developed by Chinese Linux vendor Red Flag Software. The second is a version of the operating system called Cosix Linux, developed by China Computer Software Corp."
Reader kchris59 points to these articles at The Screen Savers and at chinadaily.com.cn which provide some more insight on what's going on behind that firewall.
Of course, the difference is, digital information can be copied infinitely, while labor can't.
I wonder, if we had replicator technology today would it create a star-trek style utopia, or would manufacturing companies rush to try to protect their 'intellectual property'?
Btw, the Chinese government no longer considers itself to be "Communist".
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
Here: "We are allowed to change our government, why not our software?"
There: "We are allowed to change our software, why not our government?"
-- 'The' Lord and Master Bitman On High, Master Of All
`Fraud! ' came the cry! Microsoft overvalues shares.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
I am not Chinese, but it would seem the answer is fairly obvious. The primary reason that China is looking at Free Software is that Free Software is less expensive than the alternatives. This sort of thing didn't matter before the WTO started pressing China to stamp out software piracy, but it does now.
The second reason that Free Software is advantageous to the Chinese is that it allows them to bootstrap their own software economy instead being second or third class citizens in an American-led software economy. Their are plenty of bright folks in China who can write software. China would much rather put them to work than to pay software developers from overseas to do the work for them. The fact that Chinese developers are far less expensive than American ones doesn't hurt either.
The third reason has to do with Chinese national security. China has no idea what is in most U.S. written commercial software, but they do know that versions of Excell shipped with a flight simulator, and that before it was GPLed Interbase had a backdoor password for years. It's hard enough trusting commercial software on the very best of days, but trusting commercial software written by foreign nationals is a very sticky subject if you happen to be the Chinese government.
One thing is certain, China is not afraid of Microsoft. Microsoft and the BSA might seem scary to companies in the United States, but China is a sovereign nation (and a powerful one at that). If the BSA got too pushy the Chinese government could run their representatives over with tanks and there would be nothing that the BSA could do about it. China is cleaning up its act as regards to software piracy only because the U.S. has threatened to put sanctions on Chinese trade if they didn't. The U.S. market is important to the Chinese, and so they are trying to comply.