China Mobile Joins the Linux Foundation 56
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."
Doesn't open source kind of clash... (Score:5, Insightful)
With the Chinese government's view of technology?
Re:In before (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Watch out!! (Score:1, Insightful)
*waits for someone else to spot the joke*
we did we did (Score:3, Insightful)
Actually You Didn't Beat Me, the Submitter (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Watch out!! (Score:3, Insightful)
Much better to grow and be part of any phone system than have to request outside help on your own phone network.
If the gov is part of the formation of any new phone system, the phone system is part of the gov.
A NSA Room 641A in your pocket. No need for sloppy push upgrades or requests outside the country. No Costas Tsalikidis, Adamo Bove style telco software needed. Linux shaped in the state image will give peace of mind to a generation of political leaders. With Linux on your phone, the state can find you before you stand in front of a column of Type 59 tanks.
Re:The word is spreading. (Score:3, Insightful)
However, it would be hard to implement customer lock-in with Linux since the software is all open source and the file formats for data are all open source. Any attempt to lock-in customers would be futile since they can just take their data and their software and go to another vendor.