Slashdot Mirror
IBM Permits China To Review Source Code (wsj.com)
An anonymous reader writes: IBM has permitted the Chinese Ministry of Industry and Information Technology to review its proprietary source code in a 'controlled' environment, said IBM Senior Vice President Steve Mills yesterday. The company didn't make clear which of its products would be available for review. According to a (paywalled) WSJ report: "IBM has been willing to strike closer partnerships with China’s government than many of its fellow U.S. tech companies, people familiar with the company’s strategy said. Still, it isn’t clear to what extent IBM’s move might be a symbolic gesture. The people briefed on the practice said Chinese officials can look at the code only during visits and can’t remove it for a thorough review. In a short amount of time, it would be extremely difficult to comb through all the code for a product for potential “backdoors” that would allow spying on users."
I wonder if any American company will get to see any of China's source code.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
round-eye.
Strangely enough, shortly after the IBM code was reviewed, a new startup in China called "RYE-BM" plans to hire 1000 new employees.
>> Chinese officials can look at the code only during visits and can’t remove it for a thorough review...it would be extremely difficult to comb through all the code for a product for potential “backdoors” that would allow spying on users.
Then why would the Chinese find value in these reviews? (Unless they really are spiriting code out - love those Google Glasses, Xi - or are being allowed to bring their own code analysis tools in.)
And why isn't anyone raising "ITAR" here? I know I've bumped into that objection when working with people outside the US on far less-critical, less-popular tech.
The source code of Lotus Notes should be a good read
Chinese ministry of computing announces the formation of Chinese Business Machine incorporated...
How much of IBM's code development has already been outsourced to China? I don't think they employ very many programmers in the US anymore.
I would have flagged the submission "notthebest", but I can't comb /. 24/7.
WSJ and the NYT makes it hard to see full stories and should be banned.
Also, we should see more from sites like the Guardian and the Atlantic, the latter of which still has Vannevar Bush's "As We May Think" available.
It appears that most all of the articles about this is linking to the WSJ article, but at least they are not the WSJ site. Here's a Reuters post.
me steal source code when you're a dope
How do they prove that this source code is actually what was compiled?
From a business perspective, this sounds like China wants some assurance that IBM's mainframe software, DB2 and other stuff doesn't have any detectable backdoor code in it. The same thing happened with Microsoft a while back, and other governments including ours audit source code for the same reason.
I think the difference between the US and China in this case is how closely Chinese companies are tied to the government. I doubt there's too much in the way of trade-secret code that a foreign government couldn't reverse engineer given enough time and resources. But, it's much more likely that any information gained will make its way back to state-funded/supported companies in the Chinese environment. IBM isn't stupid, but they probably are greedy, and didn't want to lose access to the Chinese market.
My opinion is that China seems to have the right ingredients in place to be the dominant global player in this century. They have a mix of authoritarian control and an insane focus on economic growth, and are willing to do whatever it takes, popular or not, to achieve their goals. Look at their massive infrastructure build-out during the financial crisis, or their direct intervention in the stock market to fix volatility. We (the US and Europe) aren't there yet, but we'll have to get there at some point.
I imagine the source code is written in children's breakfast cereal Alpha-Bits.
Nah, they've already got Microsoft Office.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
china has copyrights most think they do not. you register them with the government and if anyone was to clone it they would get into deep shit. what happens is most company's don't bother to register with the china government and you get clones.
...STUPID!
Operating systems? DB2? Compilers? Other applications?
The source code for proprietary operating systems isn't much good without the hardware it's designed to run on, unless some clever programmers can port the functionality to other hardware.
They sentenced me to twenty years of boredom
....just that...CPI, PM, SOM, WPS... give me that !!! :)