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Behind the upsurge in Chinese open source communities
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CommentsZhou Qun, the general manager of TurboLinux, says there are two reasons why TurboLinux set up Whitefin: lack of open source talent has been hindering the company's development, so they hope to find more talent from within the community; and they also hope to promote the company's desktop system through Whitefin.
Part of the momentum behind this change comes from the Chinese government, which now regards open source communities as a key to its software industry and will put more resources toward them in its eleventh Five-Year-Plan period (2006-2010). "As a banner of China's Linux industry, Red Flag no doubt has more responsibilities to advocate the government's new tactic. It is vital to a government-supported company to take a good position in China," says a Chinese Linux expert who wished to remain anonymous. These new company-supported open source communities are lucky. They get support from companies, while the companies themselves get support from the government.
The communities supported directly by the government are fortunate as well. For example, the Leadership of Open Source University Promotion Alliance (LUPA), which is supported by China's Zhejiang province government, got a "promotional fund" of $1.25 million when it was established. More than 30% of the money comes from the government, and the majority of the rest is from government-supported companies.
By contrast, some volunteer-based open source communities are in trouble. Communities such as LinuxSir, ChinaJavaWorld, JavaUnion, and Huihoo are active but have no government backing, so programmers devoted to the open source ideal are their backbone.
That backbone, though, is fragile. Many Chinese programmers believe in hard work and making money, and they have no devotion to open source. Many programmers work more than 50 or 60 hours a week for their companies, making it impossible to do things for the open source community. "In China, the pressure of survival allows only a few programmers to have the will, time, and possibility to devote to open source development," says Yang Wei, an expert from the Chinese government's software department. As a result, there may be only a few "backbones" within a community, and if they get too busy or have money troubles, their community may disappear.
These "backbones" don't seem to worry too much about the difficulties they face, though. "I think these new communities with government backing are OK. I would go there if necessary. After all, they have more money and strength to give us a better environment to push the open source industry," says Chen Jiong, a Chinese programmer and regular visitor to LinuxSir.
But Chen also thinks that the new open source communities will be unable to make the industry better in the short term. "After all, the bottleneck of China's open source industry is the lack of devoted talent. Communities can't give birth to many new programmers in one night. It's a long-term project."
Zhang, another regular visitor to LinuxSir, said that the new open source communities may also have a negative impact on the industry. "Too many new communities may break up the cooperative relationship between the scarce Chinese open source programmers, so I think the cooperation between community and community is very important, at least at present."
Chen Nan Yang is a Chinese freelance journalist and former IT director in the Chinese government.
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I'm a bit surprised major non-US organisations, whether government or private, don't push open source and home grown OS software a lot more.
Given the
history of <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECHELON" title="wikipedia.org">Echelon</a wikipedia.org> and current terrorism/communism hysteria they'd be foolish to assume that the US isn't already
spying for the US' commercial and government advantage. Cryptography is no help when the US has the software keys to your computer.
e.g. The US CIA could put a keyboard sniffer on any network connected PC in China with a regular M$ update that reports back on subsequent updates. The CIA could use a secret government order to force M$ to do this and keep quiet even if M$ didn't want to. The risk/reward for the US on this is huge, particularly if they're careful to make it look like a virus so they've got plausible deniability.
Other contries should be bending over backwards to get off the M$ treadmill of software taxes but the threat of espianage is pretty low on the list of reasons. Besides, when has M$ ever listened to the Government they employ?
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Out of 250 postings, say I receive only 5 replies (a very low example). So then I made $5.00 with my name at #6 on the letter. Now, each of the 5 persons who just sent me $1.00 make the MINIMUM 250 postings, each with my name at #5 and only 5 persons respond to each of the original 5, that is another $25.00 for me, now those 25 each make 250 MINIMUM posts with my name at #4 and only 5 replies each, I will bring in an additional $125! Now, those 125 persons turn around and post the MINIMUM 250 with my name at #3 and only receive 5 replies each, I will make an additional $626! OK, now here is the fun part, each of those 625 persons post a MINIMUM 250 letters with my name at #2 and they each only receive 5 replies, that just made me $3,1250!!!
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