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."

Comments

China's Source Code

[Archangel Michael]

I wonder if any American company will get to see any of China's source code.

Re:China's Source Code

[Archangel Michael]

Oh wait, that is Racist of me.

We can't do that because it might offend China.

Re:China's Source Code

[Tsolias]

If there is a rule that a chinese company has to have its code reviewed by the U.S. Ministry of Something and that company wants to enter the market of the U.S. (not America, America is a continent) then that chinese company will have to obey the rules.
That's what IBM is doing, they are entering a new sandbox, with different laws and different corruption that the U.S..

Bottom line is, noone forces IBM to comply with chinese laws and enter that market and vice versa. They are willing to do it.

Re:China's Source Code

[Archangel Michael]

China isn't monolithic as the west assumes. There are racist Chinese who are racist against ethnic minority Chinese. In the same way that Italians aren't the same as Irish or German.

A new startup

[Anonymous Coward]

Strangely enough, shortly after the IBM code was reviewed, a new startup in China called "RYE-BM" plans to hire 1000 new employees.

Re:A new startup

[Tsolias]

...and shortly after the new RYE-BM startup is created, 1000 more U.S. outsourced their activities to that company.
Damn those Chinese.

IBM already has China's Source Code

[tomhath]

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.

Re:In other news...

[Tsolias]

They don't even care about IBM.
They could've bought IBM in one night.
Foxconn alone is 3 times the IBM in simple numbers and makes everything.
Huawei another company that makes the rest of what Foxconn does not make.
IBM is already sold many parts to the chinese, Lenovo being one of them, and the rest are sold here and there.
It's just the rule. They are so important, as a market, that they can even make IBM to obey every rule they want.

Compiled?

[mhocker]

How do they prove that this source code is actually what was compiled?

New reality of global business

[ErichTheRed]

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.

Re:New reality of global business

[SvnLyrBrto]

> IBM isn't stupid, but they probably are greedy, and
> didn't want to lose access to the Chinese market.

IBM is actually being pretty stupid here. It's just that everyone else is being stupid in a similar manner. Handing your source code, or any other designs or technology, over to the Chinese government* is, as you say, the same as handing it over to their domestic businesses... your competitors, current and future.

* (Arguably to ANY government, but especially China's.)

But it's a combination of short-term greed, plus a "prisoners' dilemma" situation. If *everyone* were to stand together, refuse to hand over their technology, and tell China to knock off the corruption and IP theft or get stuffed; then *everyone* would be much better off in the long run. But there's a great deal of short-term profit to be made if you let China push you around. And once one company takes their thirty pieces of silver, it's hard for everyone else not to go along too.

The problem is that hardly anyone looks at what will happen past the next quarter anymore. And the few who do plan to use their golden parachutes and be long gone from the company before the loss of all of their IP comes back to bite it in the ass in the long term.