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Linux Business

Linux Continues March On China 436

Posted by timothy from the that-many-elvis-fans-can't-be-wrong dept.
elucidus writes: "A government-sponsored software development group in China unveiled a version of the Linux operating system it has developed that it said will eventually replace Windows and Unix on all of its government PCs and servers. Called Yangfan Linux, which means 'raise the sail' in Chinese, the open source operating system is being pieced together by the Beijing Software Industry Productivity Center, a group established by the government to organize Linux development in China." Update: 08/14 22:34 GMT by T : Note that the story from which this text is drawn originally appeared in InfoWorld; thanks to writer Matt Berger for pointing this out. Read on below for a bit more, and some interesting links.

"The source code for Yangfan was made available last week under the GNU General Public License. The group is now collecting feedback and will continue improving the operating system.

The group has also done significant work localizing the operating system to support Chinese-language characters, which will be contributed back into the Linux community, according to Jon 'Maddog' Hall, director of Linux International.

Yangfan is based on two distributions of the Linux operating system. One is the distribution developed by Chinese Linux vendor Red Flag Software. The second is a version of the operating system called Cosix Linux, developed by China Computer Software Corp."

Reader kchris59 points to these articles at The Screen Savers and at chinadaily.com.cn which provide some more insight on what's going on behind that firewall.
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Linux Continues March On China More

Linux Continues March On China

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  • Is Open Source Communism? Discuss among yourselves. :-)

    • Heh... (Score:3, Interesting)

      by autopr0n ( 534291 )
      Of course, the difference is, digital information can be copied infinitely, while labor can't.

      I wonder, if we had replicator technology today would it create a star-trek style utopia, or would manufacturing companies rush to try to protect their 'intellectual property'?

      Btw, the Chinese government no longer considers itself to be "Communist".
      • No. It would create an energy economy.

      • Re:Heh... (Score:2, Insightful)

        by Corporate Troll ( 537873 )
        if we had replicator technology

        It would surely be banned by companies. Made illegal, you know. The whole economy as we know would collapse. Besides, I don't think humankind would be ready for it, I'm pretty sure everyone would start to replicate Ferrari's, BMW and caviar and Champagne. It would be a neverending decadent party (think "Roman Empire"), not a strict military-like society like Star Trek where knowlegde and research goes above all.

        the Chinese government no longer considers itself to be "Communist".
        Not meant to flame: but how does it consider itself now? Socialist? I don't know... I know that there are more economical liberties in China now, but that doesn't really make it less communist.

        To stay on topic: *if* China pulls this through, it means a whole continent converted to our beloved Penguin. This can have major impact worldwide, because (even if they wished so) China is no island, and bussiness (in the US and Europe) will be confronted with Chinese people using Linux...on the desktop! Word documents? Not anymore for our Chinese friends ;-)

        • the Chinese government no longer considers itself to be "Communist". Not meant to flame: but how does it consider itself now? Socialist? I don't know... I know that there are more economical liberties in China now, but that doesn't really make it less communist.

          Yes, socialist. Some people call it 'facist', but I doubt that. Certanly they wouldn't call themselves facist.

        • Re:Heh... (Score:2, Funny)

          by den_erpel ( 140080 )
          Word documents? Not anymore for our Chinese friends ;-)

          :0 Bf
          * Content-Type: application/msword;
          | formail -b -f -A "$MSHEADER evil-word"

          # reply rule
          -snip-

          :0 H
          * $ ^$MSHEADER
          trash

          (or /dev/null, as you prefer)
      • Of course, the difference is, digital information can be copied infinitely, while labor can't.

        Unless you're China, in which case you just imprison a few more people in a forced labor camp and make them do it.

    • Stupid mods (Score:2, Redundant)

      by oliverthered ( 187439 )
      Why is the parent flamebate?

      Personally I would call opensource, P2P networks &co comunist.

      DMCA and all the RIAA lobying is capatilist.

      If you don't believe me then lookup what the words comunist and capatilist mean and go and read the communist manifesto [marxists.org]

      Moding as flame-bate is the only flame here.
      • DMCA and the RIAA are certainly not capatilist.

        Where in the restrictive rules they want is "Let the market decide." Nowhere the DMCA is a market restriction policy and everything the RIAA wants would limit the market as well. The DMCA and RIAA 's desired rules could basically be described as a twisted type of corporate socialism. Which, unlike true socailism, wanting to try to take care of the needs of the people, is taking care of the needs of the corporation in direct opposition to the needs and desires of the people.
        • DMCA and the RIAA are certainly not capatilist.
          What,
          Please goto www.m-w.com or www.dictionary.com and look up capatilist.

          DMCA and the RIAA are enforcing strict ownership and copyright that is capatilist.

          Your thinking about free market which differet from capatilist. Read wealth of the nations be Adam Smith .
    • China is only communist by name. Their economy is, in fact, a mix between communism and capitalism. There are lots of capitalist companies in China. When you walk over the street, you'll be flooded with ads.

      Actually, the US' economy is also a mix between capitalism and socialism, no matter how much people deny it. Think Social Security and that kind of things.
  • The group has also done significant work localizing the operating system to support Chinese-language characters, which will be contributed back into the Linux community
    Uhm, why does Linux need to be localized to support Chinese characters? Doesn't the thing use Unicode?

    • Re:Supporting Chinese characters (Score:5, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 14, 2002 @03:15AM (#4068392)
      It's a lot more complicated than that.

      Unicode is a step in the right direction, but there are still different ways of encapsulating Unicode.

      I mean, transferring an 'A', (ASCII code 65), in unicode is generally NOT done like this:

      0 0 0 0 65

      that's wasteful.

      There are encodings that 'escape' from a one or two byte encoding in to the higher-order ones. You really need to read the full spec to understand it properly.

      Also, a lot of people don't really properly understand the way Eastern languages such as Chinese work. For example, some of the same *characters* might be used in Chinese and Japanese, but if you write Chinese in a Japanese *font*, it will look very unusual to a Chinese national. Compare it to writing English using Greek characters, and you will get some idea of what I mean. To foreign students of Eastern languages, the differences might look very minimal, but these are all important issues.

      Also, I am not sure about Chinese, but in Japanese, you certainly need to include ruby text, (small characters alongside or underneath the main writing, usually to indicate pronunciation - you will have seen it on the lyrics to Anime theme music).

      Yet another thing, you have to address vertical/horizontal writing.

      Input methods, as well, there are so many ways to input Eastern languages. What about if somebody needs to mix in Korean in the same document, for example. Very, very, complicated issues.

      Incidently, for anybody wanting to do all this - the latest version of EMACS is about the best thing to use, in my opinion, with LEIM installed - you can mix scripts, and use sensible input methods, it's great. Not ideal for word processing, but it gets the job done.

      Any other questions about Eastern word processing, just ask.
      • I don't think anyone uses UTF32, in UTF16 it would just be 0 then 65.

        Anyway, while it might be wasteful, I think the world would be a better place for programmers if everyone stuck with UTF16 rather then other crazy encodings.

        Compression can take care of the rest, besides how much of the large, space-taking-up information is plain text anyway?

        What about if somebody needs to mix in Korean in the same document, for example. Very, very, complicated issues.

        How so? It dosn't seem like it would be complicated to me.
        • That's UCS16... UTF is an encoding, UCS is a character set.

          Sensible setups use UFT8, which can encode up to UCS32 - good enough for any languages we're likely to use in the near future (assuming we don't meet aliens with billions of characters in their language).

          The advantage of UTF8 is ease of transition - you can still use strcmp, normal "" strings, etc. (compare to the hoops that Win32 has to go through to do UTF16... I tried to convert a program once, and gave up after a month banging my head against a brick wall).

          The disadvantage is that it's biased towards western character sets - once you get into things like chinese it takes something like 6 bytes to describe a 4 byte character (btw. 2 byte characters are not enough for chinese. Presumable 'doze uses UTF16 to get around this limitation).

      • UTF-8 is somewhat ascii compatible, and an efficient coding for mostly ascii data. Looks like the unix world, ietf protocols etc. are moving in this direction. For more info check out
        UTF-8 and Unicode FAQ for Unix/Linux [cam.ac.uk].

    • Re:Supporting Chinese characters (Score:5, Informative)

      by Yokaze ( 70883 ) on Wednesday August 14, 2002 @03:23AM (#4068422)
      First, when speaking of Linux, one usually speaks of a whole bunch of software and not all software might support unicode.

      Second, Unicode is just an encoding (or a set of encodings).

      All the messages have to be translated, the applications have to be checked whether the display is correct or not.
      The layout may be incorrect. Not to mention that the application might rely on some assumptions, which are correct for latin1, but not for other character-sets.

      Not to mention that several applications aren't prepared to be localised.
      • Heh, I remember at school when we got our first Windows 3 machines, some guy was certain you could translate to greek by typing in English then setting the 'Symbol' font.

        Laurence Brice, are you still out there. heh.
      • the applications have to be checked whether the display is correct or not.

        Ah. A Windows programmer. (-:

        Use something like Tk or Qt (yes, you can use both of those on Windows and Macintosh as well as Linux/UNIX/*BSD) and the dialogs etc pretty much sort themselves out. That doesn't mean that all of your problems are solved in one go, but it does mean that such issues crop up only around 5% as often.

    • One *big* problem that I've found trying to use Linux with Chinese is in inputting chinese characters. There is software available (e.g. 'xcin'), but it's not anywhere near as easy to use and smooth as in Windows.

      This is a difficult problem to solve - there are a large number of different methods to input Chinese which all have to be supported. Then this input method has to be easy to use across all potential applications (i.e. if you change from your Abiword window to a shell to an emacs window you still want to be able to use the same input method).

      It's still at the 'doable-but-painful' stage in Linux (heh! What's new there?), but something as fundamental as entering text needs to be really simple for Linux to be useable natively in Chinese.

      At the moment Windows beats Linux hands-down on this front ... so any progress in this area is very welcome.


    • This is the question I always want to ask :

      How to use Chinese characters on Linux system ?

      On Windoze, there are several ways to achieve the goal. But on Linux, so far, it's kind of hard to do so.

      So, anyone out there who know the answer ?

      Please share !

      • KDE3 has greatly improved international support - all the Unicode/il8n stuff support is built in.
        This means that at the GUI level it's just(!) a question of all the apps supporting and translating this - take a look at this table [kde.org] for information on the translation status for (Traditional) Chinese.

        If you've got a full (with international support/fonts) installation of KDE you should be able to try it out fairly easily - just change the language via the GUI configuration tool.

  • Open Source? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by global_diffusion ( 540737 ) on Wednesday August 14, 2002 @03:09AM (#4068375) Homepage
    Given China's reputation for being "closed source" with information, I would expect them to be a bit shady with the source for programs. Does anybody know how the aforementioned 'red flag' and 'cosix' distrobutions have been about releasing code? Are they active contributors or have they just been taking?

    • Re:Open Source? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Ami Ganguli ( 921 ) on Wednesday August 14, 2002 @03:33AM (#4068448) Homepage

      There's no conceivable benefit to them hiding the source. It's highly unlikely that 'if' statements and 'while's conceal any sort of subversive political message.

      There's no relationship between censoring news and supressing source code.

      • You are too naive! (Score:2, Funny)

        by hrm ( 26016 )
        There's no conceivable benefit to them hiding the source. It's highly unlikely that 'if' statements and 'while's conceal any sort of subversive political message.

        I dunno, suppose the installer asks you to select an installation mode, with the following options
        ( ) I would like the default programs that the party has wisely selected for me
        ( ) I would like to elect my own programs
        Wouldn't you wanna know if there wasn't some networking with party HQ involved in the corresponding if statements?

    • Of course they have to release the source code. It's written in the GPL! If they don't do that then they are violating the law.

    • Re:Open Source? (Score:5, Informative)

      by AtomicBomb ( 173897 ) on Wednesday August 14, 2002 @05:11AM (#4068702) Homepage
      These are the links for downloading the 'red flag' or 'cosix' modified source code:
      http://www.redflag-linux.com/xiazai/yingyon g.php?d own_type=20
      ftp://linux.cosix.com.cn/pub/cosixlin ux/3.0/src/

      I have tried to download a few packages, all seem to be working.
    • This is a very interesting subject. While I don't think censorship is the problem here, but wrather the key issue is the lack of copyright law enforcement. Oddly, I think there's an alliance here between the open source community and the IP community. China has routinely ignored foriegn IP rights. Do we really think that the Chineese government will feel compelled to release their GPL modifications?

      Of course not. In China, GPL is free as in shutup-and-do-what-we-say.

  • Time for new linux slogan (Score:5, Funny)

    by af_robot ( 553885 ) on Wednesday August 14, 2002 @03:15AM (#4068393)
    Choise Linux - a billion Chinese can't be wrong

  • This is great for China (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Zemran ( 3101 ) on Wednesday August 14, 2002 @03:15AM (#4068394) Homepage Journal
    I really do think this is great for China BUT I cannot see this effecting me. I do not think I am going to rush out and get a copy to play with... I think any tools etc. that they develop will be specific to thier needs and unlikely to be of use to me. Good luck to them and I wish them well.
    • Imagine tens of millions of kids growing up learning Linux rather then windows (I'm not going to pretend like a large percentages of Chinese schools are going to have computers. check out the film not one less)

      it'll mean a lot more software and stuff for Linux. Eventually.
    • Most of the world's computer hardware is made by Taiwanese companies with factories in mainland China.....who do you think writes the drivers???

      If Linux becomes big in China and Taiwan, hardware support is no longer going to be a problem.

      By the way, the oldest and best Chinese Linux distro is Linpus from Taiwan:

      http://www.linpus.com.tw/main.htm
      • The Taiwanese still use Traditional Chinese characters, while the mainland uses Simplified ones. A mainlander might have trouble using a Taiwanese distro and vise versa.

        Ironically, computer technology has completely negated the need for simplified characters
        • It is a little bit more complicated than that.

          Taiwan = Traditional
          China = Simplified
          Hong Kong = Traditional
          Singapore = Both ( But most kids learn Smiplified )
          Overseas Chinese = Traditional

          Traditional encoding uses Big5, but simplified uses HZ and GB2312.

          http://www.artsiv.net
    • Much of the work to localise to Chinese (e.g. broadening UNICODE support) will benefit other localisation efforts. This in turn could mean broader adoption of Linux, since language is a big barrier to adoption - one that MS recognizes.
  • They make rather interesting products and concepts Redflag Linux [redflag-linux.com], including this Internet ready Microwave Oven [redflag-linux.com] design concept. Thanks for posting this article Timothy, these companies seem like worth following!
    • I'll second that.... I was expecting some dumb american version that plays mp3s and dances or something stupid, but it seems as if their "smart" appliances will actually have legitimate uses and seem quite innovative. I just wonder how long a) it will take for these to seep into US/European markets or b) US/European manufacturers and engineers to get the same mindset for useful devices. ....... I'm counting on the former =P

      -kwishot

  • Oh darn (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Datasage ( 214357 )
    ... Thats one billion windows licences microsoft wont sell... i wonder if the calculate that as a loss?

  • Is there any chinese slashdotters? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by t0qer ( 230538 ) on Wednesday August 14, 2002 @03:26AM (#4068432) Homepage Journal
    That could provide a cultural insight as to why china would be so open to open source?

    As an american slashdotter, i'd like to point out why the US doesn't more readily adopt linux.

    1. Microsoft lobbyist
    2. Microsoft license sweeps
    3. Microsoft Strongarm tactics
    4. [insert your own M$ reason]

    Technically from what I know of Bill Gates (throwing a fit at ppl pirating his altair basic) and what I know of chinese copyright laws (nearly non-existant) I guess the only conclusion is it's quality that is winning out in china.

    I have heard about the open markets in china where you can purchase bootlegs of any software for near the cost of the CD. If the choice is between M$ at .5 dollars and Linux at .5 dollars linux wins.

    Sorry, I was just kinda scrapin for some insightfullness there.
    • You miss the only important reason:

      Microsoft tax.

      Microsoft is a fuckin huge company,and they pay a lot of tax (although not enough i'm sure), and all their employees can go out and buy stuff, and pay tax on that.

      • Re:Is there any chinese slashdotters? (Score:4, Informative)

        by mirko ( 198274 ) on Wednesday August 14, 2002 @04:01AM (#4068532) Journal
        A lot of tax ?
        Read this [prospect.org] :
        "Microsoft enjoyed more than $12 billion in total tax breaks over the past five years. Microsoft, in fact, actually paid no tax at all in 1999, despite $12.3 billion in reported U.S. profits. Microsoft's tax rate for the past two years was only 1.8 percent on $21.9 billion in pre-tax U.S. profits."

        Never underestimate GwB's close friends.

        • And that's not all... (Score:3, Interesting)

          by leonbrooks ( 8043 )
          `Fraud! [usagold.com] ' came the cry! Microsoft overvalues shares.
        • Why don't they pay any tax? I don't know the full reasons obviously, but I bet part of it is the INSANE amount of money MS and Bill Gates give to charities, foundations, schools, etc.

          People talk all the time about how greedy and all Gates is, but they don't realize he gives away more money in a day then most people will make in a lifetime. My school for instance has gotten somewhere around 40 million dollars from Gates in the past couple years--one of my computer science professors joked that "with the amount of money microsoft gave us for this room [a special MS room in comp sci building" we could have plated it in gold and had money to spare." -- they didn't plate it in gold but they bought the biggest widescreen flatpanel computer monitor I've ever seen.
    • As an american slashdotter, i'd like to point out why the US doesn't more readily adopt linux. 2. Microsoft license sweeps

      Strange, I thought (and all computer magazines agreed) that license sweeps push people towards Linux. Just thing about it: if MS rise price or more strictly enforces licenses, people have to pay more. So they look for alternatives. So they switch to Linux. A lot of articles at /. blamed MS for license sweeps.

      Am I wrong?

      Oh, no, forget about this. As a good slashdotter you learned that you can simultaneously blame Microsoft for doing and not doing the same things.


    • > That could provide a cultural insight as to why china would be so open to open source?

      IANAChinese, but I would guess that the less cozy a country's relationship with the USA, the quicker that country will adopt OSS and/or non-Made-in-the-USA software, for a variety of reasons.

      • as a symbol of cultural independence from American hegemony
      • (for communist countries) as an explicit rejection of US IT companies as symbols of capitalism
      • for reasons of national security
      Regarding that last one, I don't know whether there's any spyware in Windows or not, but I do know that spyware happens, and if I ran a country I don't think I'd rely on any concept of basic human honesty to assure me that MS & the US government weren't in cahoots, systematically shipping software to spy on my country.

      Heck, if I were a petty dictator I would probably try using spyware on my neighbors.

    • 1. Microsoft lobbyist
      2. Microsoft license sweeps
      3. Microsoft Strongarm tactics
      4. [insert your own M$ reason]

      Idiot. The US doesn't more readily adopt Linux because Joe User and his Grandma don't want to mess around with recompiling their kernels and editing text based configuration files and bitching to hardware manufacturers about device drivers in order to write letters, play games and email pictures of their kids and puppies to each other. If Microsoft didn't exist, Linux would still be confined to the tech community, and Apple (or Commodore or Acorn or whoever) would dominate the consumer and desktop space.

      Face it, for 99% of computer users, Linux simply isn't suitable, at least not at the moment.
      • The US doesn't more readily adopt Linux because Joe User and his Grandma don't want to mess around with recompiling their kernels and editing text based configuration files and bitching to hardware manufacturers about device drivers in order to write letters, play games and email pictures of their kids and puppies to each other.

        Which rock have you been hiding under for the last decade?

        Very few people, even technicians, ever have to do anything like that today, let alone all of it.

        As an aside: 99% of Windows users would refuse to try installing their OS. A GUI doesn't magic complexity and problems away, it just makes them prettier. A modern Linux install is actually simpler, faster and easier than a Windows install. Even RedHat, hardly the holder of a reputation for pushing the envelope, is easier to install than W2k, even though the W2k tested was a set of manufacturer's recovery CDs!

        My wife (SWMBO) uses Mandrake Linux 8.2, Kmail, Konqueror (or Mozilla for sites that break Konq), OpenOffice.org, The Gimp, XMMS and about twoscore of the games. She fears the toaster, that's how technical she is (not so her sister, who flipped the PSU switch on the back of her own computer from 220 to 110 and blew it up).

        Last week, I shut down SWMBO's machine for the first time in about 8 months to add some new hardware to it. She came home as it was booting and asked me what the startup screen is (text in a fancy framebuffer border with a progress bar) because she'd never seen it before, never knew textmode or the boot screen existed, never rebooted her machine. She doesn't know that it has a kernel, or that it has a USB webcam that I use as a kiddie monitor, or that her printer talks to it through USB; and your reward for asking her how the dual-scroll-wheel AOpen optical mouse connects (PS/2, in fact) would be a blank and concerned look. No worries.

        Are we there yet?


        • All well and good, but as you point out, she has you to look after the system for her. Now imagine she was on her own (perish the thought).

          I'm a smart guy, I know Unix, I've been developing on it for years, but until recently I always ran windows at home. So the other week I pop SuSE on a new box I just built. So yeah, it works, and it's pretty neat. But I'd take w2k over KDE in the interface stakes any day. And yes, you still have to fiddle with countless config files to make it do anything interesting. I'm leaving SuSE on that box, it does the job I want it to do well. But there's no way I'd recommend linux (well not SuSE anyway) to anyone who isn't of a technical background.

    • I am, for one. (Re: Are there any Chinese slash..) (Score:5, Informative)

      by DigitalHammer ( 581235 ) on Wednesday August 14, 2002 @05:49AM (#4068791) Journal
      Is there any Chinese Slashdotters...that can provide a cultural insight as to why china would be so open to open source?

      First of all I would like to state that I am of pure Chinese descent.

      To answer your question, I believe there are 3 factors that make China very open to open source: Confucianism, the WTO, and Microsoft licensing.

      The centuries-old mentality of being extremly frugal with one's money or possesions. Though this idea is ancient, the Communist government began to encourage the use of this virtue in times of famine and hardship. This article from Time Magazine titled "Overeating Dying in China" further explains:

      "In the early 1980s when some nouveau rich squandered their money on restaurants delicacies and government officials took advantage of their jobs to attend luxurious feasts, a distorted concept was built up in most Chinese's minds: the wealthier one is, the more fatty foods are on your dinning table.

      The grumbles about upstarts' arrogance and the government officials' corruption turned into general disapproval. People began to look favorably at the ancient Chinese maxim which praises abstinence in consumption....Considering the 30 million destitute Chinese struggling in remote mountainous areas and those laid-off work who are living a hard life, traditional virtues like fighting one's way up and building the country through hardship and thrift are still highly encouraged by the Chinese government.       "

      This "frugal ideal", reinvigorated in the minds of mainland Chinese, compounded with ancient Confucian values of filial piety encourage the development and acceptance of open source software over propeitery ones in China. The bit about filial piety applies to the corporate environment of Chinese businesses. Filial piety in Chinese families enforce the younger family members' respect of older ones. This encourages the younger members' to set priorities that value the importance of the older family member (typically the father, mother, and grandparents). Chinese children, raised under this mentality, carry these priorities over to their workplace where they place their upmost importance upon the boss and senior officials (formerly occupied by older family members).

      In most, if not all jobs in China involving internal technology, the IT manager must find software that will create a stable infrastructure while saving as much money as possible. This is where the "frugal mentality" and the rigid set of priorities converge to brighten the appeal of open source software. Because China is attempting to gain full membership within the WTO, which requires its adherance to strict IP rules, the country began an enormous crackdown on the "pirated" software industry. Using pirated (MS) software no longer was an option, as it used to be 10 years ago. Another path would be to purchase MS software licenses. However, the thought of accepting the dinosauric financial demands of Microsoft licensing contracts clashed with the frugal mentality prolific with Chinese tech companies, and the set of priorities spawned by Confucian filial piety led them to consider the amount of funds that could be saved and allocated for other departments by not buying licenses. In turn, Chinese techs were left with another option: Open source software, more specifically Linuix. The legal and cost-free nature of the penguin OS became an appealing option to the Chinese techs, and in turn took the opportunity to develop and integrate it in to their corporate infrastructure.

      Chinese cultural traditions of filial piety and frugality are further explained in this excerpt of the site "Paul Herbig's Working Papers":

      Chinese Network

      The Chinese commonwealth is a group of small Chinese companies from all over the world affiliated with each other, protecting and taking care of each others businesses. They are also referred to as 'Greater China', or the 'Chinese Network'.

      The survival mentality and the Confucian tradition of patriarchal authority, form the values of a typical Chinese entrepreneur - one who seeks to control his own small dynasty. These so call life raft values are:

      l.Thrift ensures survival.
      2.A high, even irrational, level of savings is desirable, regardless of immediate needs.
      3.Hard work to the point of exhaustion is necessary to ward off the many hazards present in an unpredictable world.
      4.The only people you can trust are family-- and a business enterprise is created as a familial life raft.
      5.The judgment of an incompetent relative in the family business is more reliable than that of a competent stranger.
      6.Obedience to patriarchal authority is essential to maintaining coherence and direction for the enterprise;
      7.Investment must be based on kinship or clan affiliations ,not abstract principles.
      8.Tangible goods, like real estate ,natural resources, and gold bars are preferable to intangibles like illiquid securities or intellectuals properties.
      9.Keep your bags packed at all times,day or night (Kao,p.25).
      Unlike the Japanese Keiretsu, the Chinese network is an open system for all Chinese entrepreneurs all over the world. They watch for each others businesses and help those who are in need. These Chinese entrepreneurs have a give - and - take relationship. The network is usually formed by joint ventures, weddings, political opportunities and common cultures. Ownership of the company are usually passed to relatives, regardless of their educational background or competency (the classic example is An Wang's passing of his company, Wang Computers, to his mediocre son instead of professional managers--which ended in failure). Generation after generation, no matter in what culture they were brought up, every Chinese seeks control and security of their businesses.
      The first Chinese generation has a survival and Confucius mentality. Every business decision is made for the future of the family. Unlike the old generation, the younger generation are born in other countries outside of mainland China. They do not only carry the Chinese culture, but the one they were born in as well. This generation, especially if born in a western country, has a sense of individualism. Companies like Winbond,a high-tech company in Taiwan, which considers themselves to be a Chinese company , believes that you should respect your family and love ones but you have to set your mind on what is right for the company. D.Y. Yang,owner of Winbond, says, "A Chinese company depends less on data and more on intuition,feelings,and people." But on the other hand, he also mentions, "Of course you have to respect the family business structure, but since this is a high tech company,individual contributions are important (Kao,p31)."
      ---snip

      I have heard about the open markets in china where you can purchase bootlegs of any software for near the cost of the CD. If the choice is between M$ at .5 dollars and Linux at .5 dollars linux wins.

      On a side note, frugality, combined with Communist ideals and Confucian values led to the explosive growth of the pirated software and media industry in China, as this essay written by Rutgers Univesity student Sheng Ding explains:

      "Confucius's concept of the transmission of culture and Marx's views on the social nature of language and invention arose from very different ideological foundations. Nonetheless, because each school of thought in its own way saw intellectual creation as fundamentally a product of the larger society from which it emerged, neither elaborated a strong rationale for treating it as establishing private ownership interests.[15] Deeply influenced by these two ideologies, China falls behind all developed countries and many developing countries in the field of intellectual property protection. It is also not difficult to understand why most of Chinese did not know what were IPRs in 1980s."

      Well, I am confident that this reply answers your question. More information about Chinese philosophies and other ideals that are involved in China's flourishing open source movement can be found below:

      Paul Herbig's Working Papers [google.com]

      A Paper on IP Rights in China, by Sheng Ding [rutgers.edu]

      The Chinese Way with Money, an article from the Shanghai Star [chinadaily.com.cn]
      • I believe many of the traits (maybe not all) you are depicting are not specific to the Chinese society, but are rather those of traditional societies. Many African and Islamic societies function the same way. I am from Morocco (An Islamic, African, Arabic and Berber country, yes all that in the same time :) ) and this is the way many moroccans do business too.

    • Re:Is there any chinese slashdotters? (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Jason Earl ( 1894 ) on Wednesday August 14, 2002 @09:44AM (#4070012) Homepage Journal

      I am not Chinese, but it would seem the answer is fairly obvious. The primary reason that China is looking at Free Software is that Free Software is less expensive than the alternatives. This sort of thing didn't matter before the WTO started pressing China to stamp out software piracy, but it does now.

      The second reason that Free Software is advantageous to the Chinese is that it allows them to bootstrap their own software economy instead being second or third class citizens in an American-led software economy. Their are plenty of bright folks in China who can write software. China would much rather put them to work than to pay software developers from overseas to do the work for them. The fact that Chinese developers are far less expensive than American ones doesn't hurt either.

      The third reason has to do with Chinese national security. China has no idea what is in most U.S. written commercial software, but they do know that versions of Excell shipped with a flight simulator, and that before it was GPLed Interbase had a backdoor password for years. It's hard enough trusting commercial software on the very best of days, but trusting commercial software written by foreign nationals is a very sticky subject if you happen to be the Chinese government.

      One thing is certain, China is not afraid of Microsoft. Microsoft and the BSA might seem scary to companies in the United States, but China is a sovereign nation (and a powerful one at that). If the BSA got too pushy the Chinese government could run their representatives over with tanks and there would be nothing that the BSA could do about it. China is cleaning up its act as regards to software piracy only because the U.S. has threatened to put sanctions on Chinese trade if they didn't. The U.S. market is important to the Chinese, and so they are trying to comply.

  • linux, communism, humor (Score:5, Funny)

    by bani ( 467531 ) on Wednesday August 14, 2002 @03:26AM (#4068433)
    Whenever I hear "linux" and "chinese" in the same sentence, I always get this image of Microsoft waging a 1950s-mccarthy propaganda war:

    "When you use Linux,
    you're using COMMUNISM"

    I guess I've been tainted by http://www.modernhumorist.com/mh/0004/propaganda/m p3.jpg
    • The funny thing is, what you are saying is compleatly true!

      GPL is all but comunist, because it removes ownership from a single person.

      ELUA's are super capatilist (more like corporate state capatilist) because the enforce the ownership with the software producer.
      • GPL is all but comunist, because it removes ownership from a single person.

        Not necessarily. GPL depends on copyright to enforce the wishes of the author -- that's why use by those others than the author is 'licensed'. The author also has the freedom to re-license the code, or derivatives, under a different license if she so chooses.

        Maybe we need a Socialist Public License, for people to release things like DeCSS under -- "Don't blame me, it's the fault of the populace at large!" :)

      • Not really. You retain all rights as a copyright holder. What you really are doing is allowing people to use your property in any way they please, as long as they "pay" by extending the same courtecy in turn.

        It does _not_ in any way remove ownership. Given that you have not accepted patches from anyone else, nothing prevents you from releasing another version under any license you want. Of course, you can not 'ungrant' a license (like GPL) from a version already released. What you are thinking of is perhaps the sometimes practice of granting FSF the copyright - in that case you do lose ownership, but it is a separate action that has nothing to do with GPL (and that most people would not want to do).

        /Janne

      • because it removes ownership from a single person.
        True. It's owned by each person who has the program. Not shared ownership, but each person fully owns it and can do anything they like with it (except depriving other owners of their rights). This increases, guess what? CAPITAL!
    • Heard from ENRON just before they collapsed.

      "When I said burn all the books I meant , 'put them on the fire', not 'copy them onto CD'"
  • That China, a country with draconian human-rights laws has open, flourishing Linux use and development? It doesn't quite seem to work so well (at least on a government and regular user level) in the west.
    • It dosn't really seem that ironic to me. What does computer use have to do with political freedom?

      While many people in the west consider Free Software a bit 'subversive' and politicized, they are right in line with the communist rhetoric that the nation was founded on.

  • Premtive Joke suppression. Plz no "Rinux" jokes. (Score:3, Informative)

    by autopr0n ( 534291 ) on Wednesday August 14, 2002 @03:44AM (#4068478) Homepage Journal
    The Chinese people have no problem pronouncing "L"s, it's the Japanese who make that mistake.

    Thanks in advance.

  • There aren't a billion people there... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by RedBear ( 207369 ) <redbear&redbearnet,com> on Wednesday August 14, 2002 @03:46AM (#4068483) Homepage
    but they are also doing this in the Philippines. The Advanced Science and Technology Institute [dost.gov.ph] has put together a somewhat simplified single-cd distro on which they've included such things as OpenOffice. They've been showing it off to the public and getting great response to it. It seems to be targetted toward home users and educational environments. According to the FAQ [dost.gov.ph] it's based on Red Hat 7.2. Anyone interested in trying it out can download an ISO here [dost.gov.ph]. A snippet from the website (the distro is named Bayanihan Linux):
    BAYANIHAN is a Filipino tradition where people in a community help their neighbor in physically moving their house to a different place.

    BAYANIHAN embodies the spirit of the Open Source movement. BAYANIHAN connotes people joining in and helping those in need. It also implies a movement from one place to a hopefully better place.

    LINUX was added to the final name since the software's basic framework is LINUX. It was built on top of a Red Hat Linux operating system.
    • BAYANIHAN is a Filipino tradition where people in a community help their neighbor in physically moving their house to a different place.

      What a bizarre tradition! I mean I realize there are times when it might be convenient to move a house, but still. Such a strange idea.

  • Open Source vs Revolution (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Lord Bitman ( 95493 ) on Wednesday August 14, 2002 @04:36AM (#4068620)
    Here: "We are allowed to change our government, why not our software?"
    There: "We are allowed to change our software, why not our government?"

  • Steganography (Score:4, Funny)

    by tlambert ( 566799 ) on Wednesday August 14, 2002 @04:51AM (#4068653)
    So how long before there are stegonographic comments in Linux source coming out of China to get around the gvernment censorship of the media, but not of source code?

    "Take the first letter of each fortune in the fortune file, and then..."

    -- Terry
    • What message are they going to send that we are not already aware of? // Help! Help! Were being repressed! // Seriously, if you get this message // there are about a billion of us // trapped in this asian country // and we would really like to be // free. MUST TYPE QUEITLY, SECRET // POLICE MONITOR MY CODE!!!

  • free==future. (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    My company is beginning the switch to linux terminal servers for the 90% of the machines at our work. The decision is soly based on that they do not want to pay $500,000 to microsoft so workers can browse the web and write memos. And we are really just a fairly small company - i cannot imagine what a large company or government must pay. Most amusing the top managers really have no idea what linux is, they just refer to them as the penguin machines.

    Linux is devleoped in a way that requires no profit margin, unlike microsoft. so unless microsoft finds a killer app it seems that companies,governments and any other organization that acts in their own self-interest will naturally swtich to the 'ultimate undercut' : linux.

  • Some incorrect assumptions (Score:3, Informative)

    by IamTheRealMike ( 537420 ) on Wednesday August 14, 2002 @05:23AM (#4068729)
    I've seen quite a lot of people here saying things like "Wow, China is adopting Linux". No - the Chinese government has said it might adopt Linux for its computers.

    Bear in mind Windows has a strong selling point in the Chinese market: excellent input methods for Chinese. When it comes down to the ordinary people deciding, it'll be "what can I use easily" - not what does the government use.

  • I find it intriguing that the developing countries are some of the world's largest users of the Linux system. Africa and China are now almost exclusively using Linux and/or unlicensed Microsoft systems, a fact which Bill Gates would no doubt like to set right. But aren't they right?

    Why pay for buggy pieces of crap when you can get a decent operating system for free? Not to say Linux is the be all and end all but as operating systems go it is more robust.

    I think countries like China who will now be developing more and more applications for Linux could finally get the proverbial show on the road and give companies a very useable option to forking out truck loads of money for Microsoft licences.

    One of the major fallbacks of Linux is the lack of applications especially those for development. The day there is an equivalent to Visual Studio in Linux is the day that companies will realistically think more about changing to Linux.

    That's my opinion anyway.
  • This is a really good thing for Linux. When governments use a piece of software the companies that want to deal with that government have a strong incentive to also use the same software because of the convenience factor. On the down side, a huge installed base increases the probability that more people will try to propagate a virus for those machines. It would be far too tempting to try to debilitate a whole government.

    There will be a threshhold at which the number of linux boxes will make for a target rich environment for virus writers. This is something that should be anticipated and dealt with now before it becomes an embarrassment. Let's learn from others mistakes!

  • Old /. news - Not Again (Score:3, Funny)

    by jsse ( 254124 ) on Wednesday August 14, 2002 @11:43AM (#4070816) Homepage Journal
    After 302 posts, no one caught this guy repeating old /. story [slashdot.org].

    I think he's just testing /. editors' ability to recognize old news. I think he got the answer. :)

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