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Chinese Government to Use Only Local Software
owlmon writes "CNET Asia is reporting that China has outlawed foreign software in government applications. I expect that software buyers outside of the government will have to follow this lead. It's the same "network effect" that has powered Microsoft's growth for years. When the entire Chinese government is using WPS Office, anyone doing business with the government will feel mighty encouraged to follow suit. Otherwise, how will they exchange documents?"
Don't automatically assume that Chinese gov't will follow the open standards ideology.
Do the folks making WPS Office make available the data needed to make other office suites, like OpenOffice.org and ABIWord, able to read and write in WPS Office's format? Or does WPS use some format already recognized by an alternative office package?
Despite millions of years of evolution, human beings, taken as a group, are still stupid, panicky animals.
The article only briefly mentions it, but the Chinese government is still fully behind Red Flag Linux. It's safe to say that their entire IT infrastructure will soon be based on Free Software. Unfortunately, the article doesn't delve too deeply into the causes, merits, and implications of this decision.
"Maybe we should send the British navy back in to convince them to start buying our goods again."
Ah yes, the "free market" by military cooercion. Works every time. You do understand that this behaviour played a significant role in the success of the rise of communism in China in the first place?
Nevermind the fact that American copyright law does not extend beyond its borders and that the Chinese ( and Icelandics, Hugarians, New Guinians, Bhutanese, etc.) have the right to decide on their own just what constitutes "piracy" of intellectual property and what doesn't. The Chinese are free to take a more Jeffersonian approach to such matters than America is if they wish to. Ironic, isn't it?
Nor are the Chinese alone in such "piracy." Walk up to nearly any street vendor in NYC and you can walk away with bucket loads of pirated and unlicensed merchandise. At one point the Sam Goody Record stores were selling illegal rips as the legitimate article as fast as they could truck them in. Hell, you yourself just might be in possession of "pirated" music or movies obtained through various purely American channels.
Free Tibet. Up with Democracy. Fine. I'm with you.
But Intellectual "Property" isn't natural law. It's a purely human construct of extremely recent vintage and more dubious under the American Constitutional form of government than just about any other.
It's local code. Like how long you get to park at a meter for your quarter.
China isn't in our local jurisdiction.
KFG
Look at the propoganda wording being used!
Chinese government "outlaws" foreign software! Oh those evil bastards!
But when the USA government mandates MS it's not "outlawing foreign software" it's just "helping the economy by buying domestically".
What a crock...
I can't really see how this means better software, or more competition, given that they have just banned foreign software, which includes also much of open source software.
They could just develop some local chinese lousy product. Or alternatively, they could throw in a few highly skilled thousand chinese software developers and develop good products. Either way, it wouldnt be an outcome of free market or competition, and i'd rather not see that product come out of China...
One Microsoft is enough!
China's respect for human rights and their software usage are totally unrelated issues.
It is a good thing they choose other software than Microsoft, for this will create serious competition in a monopolistic market. This will stimulate innovation and will drive prices down in the long run.
The Human Right issue is of course a serious one and should be dicussed at any UN summit over and over again, as should the illegal detention of outlawed warriors on Guantanamo Bay for that matter.
Even if they distribute they are only "obligated" to do what Chinese law obligates them too. Why is this such a difficult concept for some people? Your GPL may well simply have no legal standing in Beijing.
If you think it does than you can hire a Chinese lawyer to make your case in the Chinese courts.
If they distribute in Newark and you feel they are thus obligated under US law all you have to do is legally serve them ( under US law) to appear in Newark.
Then we'll just have to free "Skylorov" all over again.
Remember him? The guy who wrote software in Russia that was legal in Russia and we all got bent out of shape over his being arrested for violating extortionate American Intellectual "Property" laws?
People, for God's sake, try to figure out what your stance on ip is and stick to it. The GPL only exists in the first place because of western copyright law and seeks to subvert it with its own weapons. If such western copyright law does not exist as such the GPL becomes a non issue.
KFG
If it's "complex or critical", you shouldn't be using Word anyway. If it's plain text, use ASCII. If it's formatted, use PDF. By all means, use Word to compose your documents, but it's a terrible exchange or achival format.
Anyway, I've worked in offices for over 10 years. For business purposes, WordStar 4 was fine. It had spellcheck, it had bold. What else do you need in a business document? (I admit, I later upgraded to WordStar 5.)
I also do DTP. For that I extract the text from the Word docs that have unfortunately become ubiquitous before laying them out in a rational way using stylesheets. Then I make PDFs to pass on to the printer.
All this talk about "incompatibility" is basically FUD. If you want compatibiity, use an open standard, not a transient obfuscated undocumented one that has the bonus feature of including viruses.
Trying to encourage the development of technology in your country by limiting access of outside competition has been tried before. In many cases this has given rise to national champions, who are behind the world in the quality of their products and has caused the customers to suffer. For example consumers in India were stuck with outdated mechanical and electorincal products, until the controls were lifted and the market flooded with mostly Chinece produtcs. The consumers benefited and the local manufacturers were shaken badly.
In a similar way the Finnish government was stuck for years with a national government developed word processing program in the 1980's and early 1990's.
So from this point of view the Chinese government might be painting itself into a technology corner, potentially being stuck to an inferior product.
However the Chinese market is so huge that there is room for internal competition. Also software as a product has a tendency towards forming a monopoly, due to the high costs of entering the market and the low costs of replicating the product. So an occasional shaking of the emergent structure might well be justified.
We should also be asking how much the EU bureocracy is paying to Microsoft each year and how much could be saved by moving to Open Office.
It would be interesting to know if the Chinese directive is targeted only to office applications or if it applies to other software also. This could be a boon to the Chinese software industry in terms of ERP software, network managemet, CAD etc.
kiravuo
Hmm let us see:
Japan in July 2003 upped beef tarrifs to 50%
America pushed up Steel tarrifs recently, has massive subsidys for farmers.
Europe well their farm subsidys are ridiculous with some places in Ireland been better off not growing their crops with the subsidys offered.
So yeah obviously bad China, the only country in the world to use tariffs. BAD BAD BAD play fair no tariffs just like all those other countries in the world, oh wait there isnt any!!
As for banning people from certain countries, every country does that it is called a VISA and what happens is you simply do not let people in from the country you do not like.
37 - what does it stand for really...
A new policy by China's governing body will rule that all ministries buy only locally-produced software at the next upgrade cycle.
They haven't banned foreign software per se, rather they have banned buying foreign software. It is an important distinction.
One Microsoft is enough!
That's a ridiculous assertion. The government will be using the Red Flag Linux OS, which is hardly going to create the next Microsoft.