Slashdot Mirror
China Mobile Joins the Linux Foundation
eldavojohn writes "As a gold member, China Mobile has joined The Linux Foundation putting it next to AMD, Google, HP and Cisco in the roster of the foundation's gold members. This marks the very first time a Chinese enterprise has joined The Linux Foundation. Earlier this year, we saw the first Chinese company openly participate in open source and now China Mobile, ranked 77th in the world by Fortune with over half a billion customers, has joined the foundation that fosters the growth of Linux."
China Mobile probably just joined so they could get access to the Linux source repositories and steal the code.
This space for rent. All reasonable inquiries will be entertained at proprietors discretion.
Only the Platinum members are allowed to bug the kernal. I think that Gold members just get a discount.
Entomologically speaking, the spider is not a bug, it's a feature.
With the Chinese government's view of technology?
I hope Americans see this as a bad thing and that it will sting them to be more competitive.
The Wise adapts himself to the world. The Fool adapts the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the Fool.
but we have either posted or dont have mod points handy
Read radical news here
In before Americans spinning this as somehow a bad thing, bla bla communism, bla bla Obama health plan.
I'm the submitter. I'm American. The submission wasn't edited at all and I don't think I put a negative spin on it.
I even omitted some things like China Mobile being a state-controlled and state-owned company. But you can find that int he linked Wikipedia article. The company has been terrible with it's move to 3G. And, as a telecommunications company with 570 million customers, it's probably done a lot of harm as well as a lot of good. The most xenophobic statement you'll get from me is that it's a Chinese company so there's probably a lot of corruption at all levels. And that's not to say that there isn't corruption in the lobbyists of the American equivalent but I'm guessing the customers have even less rights when it comes to dealing with a state-controlled massive corporation.
So there's that but, you know, regardless of whether or not they're a member of the Linux Foundation, that's going to persist. If the Linux Foundation refused their entry (and, come on, Google and HP are in there so ethics like privacy aren't huge concern) I doubt China Mobile would break down and clean up just so they could get in. But now that they're in, maybe they can offer better service to customers? They're definitely paying dues to the Linux Foundation so unless you see that as 'blood money' it's a really good thing. It's good for us, it's good for the Linux community, it's good for people who want cheaper mobile phones and it's good for the people of China.
Getting the evilest of the evil to use Linux is a net positive for everyone involved. The only people who lose are the companies that make money off of everyone by selling a cash cow operating system like Windows hammered down into some sort of Frankenstein mobile operating system.
bla bla communism
Ha. I wish. If China were truly Communist without social classes, the bulk of the people would be treated a whole lot better and the system would either collapse or work properly for the first time Communism has been put into practice. Instead you've got some sort of hybrid closer to socialism than the United States is that keeps itself working by slowly implementing more and more capitalism. I still can't understand how people can call China "Communist" when the income, living conditions and rights of a rice farmer in BFE greater China is not even comparable to a banker in downtown Beijing.
I think this is just another sign that the year of Linux on the desktop is a dead dream but the year of Linux in the server farm and the year of Linux on the mobile device are already here.
My work here is dung.
of rinux on the destah
The Chinese really enjoy the freedom of Open Source, the opportunity and innovation it brings.
Freedom is the new Totalitarian ideal.
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
I don't care who joins the Linux foundation and who doesn't, as long as more corporations are supported OSS in some way. The Windows monopoly needs to end, even if Google develops a Linux based distro and starts selling it for money (Though I don't wish for this to happen)
All the excuses of hardware-compatibility and user-friendliness has been long gone. For example in my very own experience where I had to run a PCMCIA card via a PCI-PCMCIA adapter on my desktop, it took me 3 days to find a solution in Windows, while both the adapter and PCMCIA card worked out of the box on Ubuntu without any further settings.
Just like all other technology ventures that have gone to China, the chinese are just going to infringe on the innovation from the western world's Linux technology and copy it without payi- oh I see what you did there.
I don't understand your remark, nor the mod.
It's hard for US mobile phone providers to compete with the lines of China Mobile and China Unicom (the #2 in China, afaik there are only two, thanks to state regulations). China Mobile has over half a billion subscribers - that's more than the entire US population. China has the advantage in numbers.
With platinum friends like Oracle on the linux foundation who needs enemies.
Yes, my formulation was silly.
I just hoped that people who say "This comes from evil communist China! It must be stopped !" would just work at making "great freedom-loving America" better.
But yeah, silly reaction to a silly comment. Sorry about that.
The Wise adapts himself to the world. The Fool adapts the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the Fool.
but athe Chinese-controlled entity (read: all of them) submits code to the kernel, it better be not just put under a microscope, but sent through a freaking MRI. Trust but verify? No; just verify three or four times.
I know that most of my comments here do not get any traction. That is why I have not posted here in so long. I know that for this comment I might be modded as a troll or something like that. But I have been thinking for some time about liberated software in closed communist like countries for some time. I think it was N. Korea doing their own GNU+Linux that got me thinking more about the fact that for as much as we GNU geeks like to talk about Libre and the power of free speech given by FREEsoftware, I do not see very much of it coming to fruition. I do not see where liberated code has translated into free speech or what I see as more important in freedom of religion. The cross pollination of ideas provided by FLOSS is supposed to end up in liberation of minds. Yet all is see is the closed countries doing what they want with what they want and if the community did want to sue them which it does not, it does not have the money like Microsoft to do it anyway. Why would they be in violation? Simple non-compliance of the GPL v2 and v3 the most common license type used.
Those that do not know, pay for it.