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Open Source Participation Gains Support In China
eldavojohn writes "ZDNet blogger Fred Muller notes that a Chinese company called Taobao has become one of the first in the country to participate in open source. After years of Chinese companies using Linux, Taobao has announced they are open sourcing TAIR, and they revealed what is believed by Muller to be the first open source repository hosted by a Chinese corporation. Muller tracked down the originator of this information and was also informed that the Linux kernel can expect contributions soon from Taobao. Several people involved with bringing open source to China have expressed concerns over a cultural divide (PDF) in regards to opening your corporation's source code to potential competition. Some people speculated that the culture created by an open source movement was irreversibly foreign to Chinese culture. Taobao is exhibiting cracks in that assumption — exciting times for open source advocates as code contributions to open source become even more multicultural."
I, for one, welcome this news, I've read a lot about Chinese companies using open source software, for example I would love to get my hands on a Debian-running Loongson, but this is the first time I've heard about them giving back to the community.
I wonder if they're hiring native English speakers who can't speak Chinese to help them with community relations? :>
That's a job I'd love to have.
And those of us in Unamerica think it's great news...
how can anyone even begin to think about committing code from a Chinese company into the mainstream linux kernel?
Because it's open and can be read by anyone to make sure nothing sneaky is in there?
-I only code in BASIC.-
The same way they would begin to think about committing code from an American company into the mainstream Linux kernel? The fact that the Chinese government carries out some nefarious business doesn't mean that each and every one of the billion-plus Chinese citizens is out to get us. Besides, it's not like we're just accepting arbitrary binary blobs here: contributions to the kernel are human-readable source code that the tinfoil hat crowd is perfectly welcome to pore over in detail...
Because it's pretty hard to embed lead in code?
While I've seen China do a lot of innovative things, one thing I've learned from Western scientists working in China is that you should Verify first, before trusting.
Remember, the normal response to any question there is "Yes", even when they intend to do absolutely nothing.
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Please, society, produce a Bieber who's famous for something other than being an idiotic teen popstar. If he stays in the limelight, I'm going to have to stop identifying myself in public :(
the Communist ideals of shared ownership and development for the public good that China purports to adhere to
I can't tell if you're being sarcastic or not; there's no such thing in China. There is a wide difference between Marxist communism and Maoist/Stalinist communism. Marx envisioned socialism as an intermediary step on the way to communism (and what you've described) while Mao and Stalin saw socialism as a mechanism for total state control with themselves at the head of state. They use the name communism but only for window dressing. The current economic system in China allows private enterprise but does certainly not work towards shared ownership and the public good in any political sense.
When setting up multi-country dev for open source, consider having people from different countries do review, test and check. In this way the final code is usually very good.
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"Some company called taobao..." Actually, they are not just "some company". They are to China what eBay is to the US and many other countries.
Makes me think.... India has restrictions on Huwei's products. However, how will we tackle the issue of these guys contaminating almost all our devices by infesting Linux? :)