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Report Says China Will Demand Source Code
An anonymous reader alerts us to a two-week-old story that hasn't gotten much traction in the press to date. A Japanese newspaper and the AP report that China plans to demand source code from hardware manufacturers, and ban the sale of products from companies that don't comply. China is calling this an "obligatory accreditation system for IT security products." The plan is to go into effect next May, according to sources. "Products expected to be subject to the system are those equipped with secret coding, such as [a] contactless smart card system developed by Sony Corp., digital copiers, and computer servers. The Chinese government said it needs the source code to prevent computer viruses taking advantage of software vulnerabilities and to shut out hackers. However, this explanation is unlikely to satisfy concerns that disclosed information might be handed from the Chinese government to Chinese companies. There also are fears that Chinese intelligence services could exploit such confidential information by making it easier to break codes used in... digital devices."
It's the Prisoner's Dilemma. Unless you want to make it illegal to give source code to the Chinese, there will be some companies who will comply because it is better for their bottom line to do so.
They are doing by legal fiat what the open source community has failed to do through voluntary cooperation, namely, boycotting products that don't provide their source code. Ironically, this autocratic move could be a boon to open source.
The Chinese government is well within it's rights to make decisions regarding what goes on within it's borders. Infact, the whole purpose of a government is to put the interest of it's own country first above the interest of any foreign power.
In this case, seeing the source code of electronic devices being sold in China is very much in their interest, why should the chinese government trust foreign corporations to supply black box equipment when they have no idea how it works? There are many people who boycott products, at least in certain areas, where they don't have source code... I wouldn't run an internet facing server on anything for which i didn't have the source for many reasons.
If you don't like it, noone is forcing you to sell or manufacture your products in china. If you don't like their rules, go somewhere else... If you want to take advantage of the large customer base in china, as well as the cheap labour costs then you have to play by chinese rules.
Ofcourse, this policy is also beneficial for those companies who already release their source code, since they're already compliant.
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So, you want to take advantage of cheap chinese labour, but don't want to pay the "hidden costs" of using chinese labour?
If you don't like it, manufacture your goods somewhere else.
If you try and change the way the chinese do things, then the costs will be dragged up too and chinese manufacturing will end up costing the same as any other country. Leave china to those who are willing to play by it's rules and accept the costs.
You have to decide wether the cost of corruption and copying of designs etc is outweighed by the lower manufacturing costs or not.
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It just doesn't work like this because those "western devices" are probably already made in Asia.
I was visiting a Chinese factory that made widgets, and member of staff showed me a widget branded by a "famous western company" to impress upon me that the widgets made in their factory were of a high standard. "Here's a sample to take home, but don't tell anyone *wink* *wink*".
Their agreement may not exclude selling the widget in part, or in whole on the domestic market, so the brands are in fact a complete myth. Those fake Sony goods that have been re-badged as a Chinese brand could be close to functionally identical, albeit with a much lower price tag.
Another experience I had, was with a certain widget that had interchangeable parts. The product as a whole would be sold on the domestic market with Chinese branded parts, or swapped out for a brand that would know for export.
It's all bullshit but very interesting to observe, and as an audience you are really overestimating the Chinese government's intervention which is close to none. This is just companies chasing profits with as much regard for ethics as our own companies.
They might manufacture the physical widget there but they didn't program the driver or firmware - it came on a master rom or was bundled in a cd already compiled.
Hell... *I* have access to the source code for Windows. Anyone can have access to some, see their shared source licensing program. There are a number of legal ways to get access to the code for those who are interested.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
China is the world's largest importer of raw materials, and the world's largest exporter of finished goods. As they nation (and economy) grows, China needs to ensure that it has good access to those finished goods that it cannot make in-house. I suspect, by May of next year (when the "source code" thing is supposed to be implemented), China will have secured trade agreements with Japan, the US, S. Korea, and everybody else it cares about, guaranteeing a certain level of fancy high-end electronics with a low tariff.
China's not stupid. With a growing market of 1.3B people, it can threaten to do something insane, and other countries have no choice but to offer great deals to pacify the Chinese Tiger.
"Diplomacy is something you do until you find a rock." --Richard Pound
It's been no secret to me. However a simple Google search would have helped you.
While the practice seems in decline now that China continues its march toward ascension to the World Trade Organization, recent years have seen Chinese patrol boats foray deep into international waters in search of "customers." When a suitable vessel is located, it is ordered to heave to and follow the patrol boat back into Chinese territorial waters. Once inside a local Chinese port, the vessel would be impounded for "suspicion of smuggling," with both cargo & crew held for ransom.
http://www.cargolaw.com/presentations_pirates.html
The Petro Ranger, valued at $16 million, was restored to Alan Chan's Petro Ships in Singapore, but the company lost cargo worth $2.3 million to the pirates and the Chinese authorities. Alan Chan blames the Chinese for abetting the piracy.
- http://www.lrb.co.uk/v25/n24/glas01_.html
etc and so on...
Seriously - legislating that all commercial software must be open source makes a lot of sense from a free market point of view. (It improves transparency, prevents vendor lock-in, etc.) Using copyright law to implement open-sourcing has always struck me as an ugly little hack, that just happens to be the only practical way to do it in the current western political climate.
...to finally get much hardware to work with Linux.
I'm sure you know how much gray channels have their source in China. The Russians provide the cracks and the Chinese supply the world with cracked versions, or so I'm told.
So if someone in China leaks all that source... an you can be assured that it will leak... then we can finally understand the interfaces and implement the drivers.
My hope is, that nVidia, AMD/ATi and intel will decide to still sell to that market and give them the source. Then when they notice the leakage, it's already too late, and 1. we have enough information to implement fast graphics card drivers and 2. china will develop knock-offs for their own market, which then strangely find themselves for a fraction of the price, in your local computer store.
Oh, and hopefully, nobody tries to go to war over it, or we might be fscked. But hey. at least we all finally got our 8x dual-chip-card Crossfire setups at home.. in our bunker basements. :D
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
Well, this is just a more overt instance of such corporate espionage. The Chinese have been VERY active over the past decades in spying, both corporate and military. They are very prolific at espionage, and this is just a new slant on their programs...now that we have given them so much of the hardware knowledge over the years by moving manufacturing over there. This is just a logical next step.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
Now just how stupid is that? If you can get the Windows source code, the "security through obscurity" position is blown out of the water. And you still don't get the benefit of community patches and such.
We should all forget the USA as the unfair capitalist system. China is the most savage capitalists of all.
Whoa! Hold your horses. What you're describing is not capitalism, it's corporatism. In a pure capitalist society, the government is supposed to make sure everyone plays fair. In a corporatist society, the government doesn't give a shit about fair play as long as they get a big pay check.
>>Their agreement may not exclude selling the widget in part, or in whole on the domestic market, so the brands are in fact a complete myth.
It also assumes they hold up their end of an agreement, which is laughable. After Qualcomm got a bunch of Chinese factories up and running with their Q-phone, China Telecom started selling their C-phone, which was an exact duplicate of the Q-phone, made by the same people that Qualcomm had trained in making their phones. They're so dishonest, it's fucking scary that so much of our technical manufacturing is being done over there - we're paying for their postgraduate education, and giving them free blueprints to rip us off with.