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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."
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...