Linux Use in China - a View From Beijing
from the direct-from-the-source dept.
Warning from RM: be careful following the links in this story. They all seem valid (tested) but some of them are extremely slow and others are "China only." Netscape in Linux may either crash or hang on many of them.
Linux in China
-by Xiong Jiang
I just read the GraphOn press release on yahoo and found out it is still a very early step into China market. The "initial use of GraphOn Bridges is expected to begin in November 1999 at the Beijing Concord College of Sino-Canada, a 1500-student Beijing-based private school serving grades 10 through college". And "if successful, Chinese private enterprise and government sectors may be expected to follow..." So, it is obviously a PR from GraphOn, instead of a substantial explanation of fact. Not to mention that the China cooperators with GraphOn mentioned in the PR are even unheard to me. Maybe their English names are too different from their Chinese names ? :) OK, I just read the web of Sundiro, maybe it is a great start-up, but I really didn't hear any former success business case, and the counter on its web is 4690 this moment.
Leaving further investigation of this event to other more professional guys (I have some friends more deeply engaged in China IT industry but I am not), I would share my Linux experience as a Chinese graduate students with you, and hope you could have a better vision of Linux in China, and China itself. :)
My first touch of Linux dates back to April, 1996, when I was a graduate student in the EE department at University of Science and Technology of China (USTC), one of the top five universities in China. At that time, our campus network has just been built up, and the campus network center was helping every department set up Linux email servers. I had an account on our department email server, so, I began to use it. :) Soon, there was a campus BBS. From BBS, I got to know there was already Linux on our campus network, downloaded by our network center staff through the new-born CERnet (China Education and Research network) from the Internet. Just as most of you in the beginning era of the Internet, I am very curious about Linux, and Internet, and even email. I had never heard it before. We only had Windows, 3.1 mostly, and a few very old VAX, Sun3, and Sun4, in a lab not always open to all.
So I began to look at it. From BBS, I got to know the ftp site on campus where I can get it. We have 100M FDDI campus backbone and 10M LAN for each department, so I easily download the necessary files: INSTALLATION documents and image files. After sitting in front of a 486 66 (16M RAM) for nearly a half day diving into the document, I installed my first Linux system with slackware, kernel 1.2.13.
The learning process was very pleasant. I found out that I can almost find anything I want to know about Linux, from README, man pages, and BBS. As most of the programmers of you, "Undocumented DOS Interrupts" and "Undocumented Windows" had been my top-secret reference books in DOS/Windows era. But on Linux, everything is open. Terrific! I've got to use it. :)
Few months later, I set up a Linux masquerading gateway on a 486 100 (32M RAM) for our lab colleagues, so we only need one IP to connect the lab LAN to the campus network. We have tens of PCs but my advisor didn't have so much money for so many IPs, though it was very cheap, maybe $20 per year for each IP. Linux desktop was quite ugly at that time, no KDE or GNOME still, but we saw its power ! Many campus email servers are set up with Linux on PC. In our network center, even Sun Sparc is running Linux.
I should talk about more country-wide Linux activities instead of my own experiense. Addition to our USTC BBS, we have several other hot Linux BBS or forums. The most prestigious are freesoft newsgroup (if you can't access it, here is the mirror on linux.net.cn, the SMTH BBS (domestic access only) at Tsinghua University (top 1 in China), and ihep BBS, where the main developers of TurboLinux (China) took off.
There are several GNU software archive: freesoft, wormwang's new silk road, and Tucows Linuxberg mirror at Quanzhou, Fujian Province.
There are three main Chinese Linux distributions now: TurboLinux, XteamLinux (with win98-alike GUI installation), and BluePoint Linux (with console Chinese support employing framebuffer in kernel). They are all real free software programmers that respect GPL. They are making more and more efforts to merge their work into global Linux developemnt.
There are several individual projects that cooperate tightly with the global developers, such as KDE i18n by Lark Wang, Linux Virtual Server project by Wensong Zhang(English page). There are also some GNU/Linux related web forum, such as China Linux Forum, China DigiTribe, and our LinuxNet Forum. We have a fascinating report on Richard Stallman's recent visit to China (English page) with photos taken by myself. You may have read it on LinuxToday.
Inevitably, most of the above mentioned web pages are in Chinese. As more and more Chinese now can read English on web, either via some dictionary tools or they could speak English themselves, I hope in the coming 21th century, more and more Chinese web can be read by English-speaking people, via some dictionary tools (for example, KingSoft PowerWord) or not. :)
And thanks Robin "roblimo" Miller for give me this chance of writing on Slashdot. Though he told me to write on SOFTWARE, but not politics, I still want to point out only one thing: as American people don't necessarily think in the same way with their governments, Chinese people also enjoy this freedom. Please update your vision of China from the horrible "10 Red Years", on which we have also introspected with great regret and overcome it more open-minded since the reformation brought by Mr. Xiaoping Deng. (I speak for myself, not the government, though you may feel there is some similarity. :)
Finally (Score:4)
not that the guys on top have done anything wrong, quite the contrary
But the recent story that mentioned China and Linux brought a swarm of very negative anti-chinese comments. Get a clue people. Westerners (particularly us United Statesens) could learn a lot from the rest of the world. Get over the whole Communist / Government / Propoganda thing and learn about the people!!!
Sheesh.
I am disgusted sometimes by what I read on
okay. nuff ranting.
And the United States doesn't? (Score:4)
It's fine to be concerned about China and their admittedly bad record on the matter, but please don't act like the U.S. is some sort of shining example.
Now, I believe the man was talking about Linux use in his country. Do you have anything constructive to add to the conversation with regards to that?
- A.P.
--
"One World, one Web, one Program" - Microsoft promotional ad
The Internationalization of Linux (Score:5)
However, I still wonder if there will be a time when Linux development will be so decentralized that consensus on a development language could become difficult to achieve.
No, not C, C++, Java, Basic, Etc. I mean English.
After all, while English is rather standard as a second language throughout most of the world(for better or worse--damn picky language!), and the kernel is *now* written in the language(variable names, comments, keywords, etc.), the high density of immense programming talent in countries such as India and China that do not primarily speak English could create an altogether new kind of code fork.
Is code obfuscated if it's rewritten in an unfamiliar, maybe even two-byte language?
What if I so obfuscate some GPL code? Do I have the legal obligation to release a non-obfuscated(read: translated) version?
I actually honestly doubt anything onerous would come between the Tower of Babel.h and the GPL. But I could see some confusion sooner or later--I've gone through more than my fair share of code written in french, and it ain't too fun
Other stuff:
Only Stallman Could Go To China. (After ESR's well-intentioned but rather brutal slapdown of China's ethical policies, one actually has to pause and notice the irony--RMS The Diplomat, ESR the Firebrand?!)
as American people don't necessarily think in the same way with their governments, Chinese people also enjoy this freedom. Please update your vision of China from the horrible "10 Red Years", on which we have also introspected with great regret and overcome it more open-minded since the reformation brought by Mr. Xiaoping Deng.
An interesting way to look at things. However, Americans are pretty used to hearing stories about people getting jailed for being in the kind of small, powerless political parties that Americans have a long history of mocking without mercy for being ineffectual and unprofessional.
The thought of people going to jail we prefer to laugh at is rather alien to Americans
Of course, your point is extremely well taken--You Are Not Your Government. It's stupid thinking like that which gets civilians killed in wars for no other reason but that they obviously support The Enemy. (Then again, it's relatively easy for citizens to unify under their government in times like, say, when an embassy or a federal building gets bombed.)
Keep us posted--political issues aside, I'm extremely interested in those small, university level projects to add genuinely new and cool stuff to Linux.
Thanks for the update!
Yours Truly,
Dan Kaminsky
DoxPara Research
http://www.doxpara.com
Let he who is without guilt cast the first stone (Score:4)
Reform? (Score:3)
Americans' views of China are heavily influenced by the Tiananmen Square massacre, and I just can't see how someone who murders, and then vilifies political protesters was a very reform-minded individual.
The Linux and Open Source People (Score:3)
Now, us Americans generally think of China as a more closed country, whether this is true or not. Us Americans are also known to make comments without being very informed beforehand! But it is not only the 'traditionally' closed countries that would benefit from being a little more open; all of them would. Do you think America would up and give away military secrets for the good of the world or open development? I don't think so. And I'm also not saying we should right now.
What I'm getting at is the slow change in the world that will be brought about by all this wonderful technology. Corporations have seen the potential for this (and seen it as a threat to the corporate way of life), and have already moved to squish it quickly, with little success. Ditto with the government, although we have to be a little more concerned there with an entity that can make laws. It seems that this technology has the potential to forge change towards an open world, and it seems to be in many ways unstoppable.
I love hearing from people in other countries that have taken on a love for all this technology, and that are in their own small way a part of changing the world! With enough effort aroun the globe, some good shit is gonna happen!
--forgive me if this sounds weird in any way; i wrote it as i just woke up and my brain is still booting... =)
Re:The Internationalization of Linux (Score:3)
English is one of 2 national languages in India. There are about 32 "official Indian languages," spoken in the various states and regions of India. This makes it necessary for professionals in India to communicate and practice their professions in English. Otherwise they could not avoid the problems of communicating across linguistic regions. Also, using English connects Indian professionals to the world community in a way that Hindi (India's other national language) would not. That is why Indian medical journals are all written in English.
China doesn't have the history of English colonialism that India does, but English is the language of technology and it is the language that connects China to the world. China also has many regional languages. If anything, proficiency in English will increase in China, as it is everywhere else.
So there is little reason to think that Chinese and Indian coders will fork the code into local languages, since those languages isolate people from the other people that they need to be able to communicate with, like other programmers. The only solution is to use a regional language to talk with friends or family, and use English for the professions and technology.
Aside from these language issues, China and India have economic issues that make free software *much* more attractive for financial reasons than it is in the affluent west. As much as you might hate Microsoft, you probably don't suffer financially from the few hundred dollars a year it takes to stay current with MS products. In India and China it is a very different story -- one hundred dollars is a lot of money for an average citizen. Also, the cost of labor in these countries is much lower relative to the cost of technology (hardware and software) than it is in the west. This also supports the proliferation of open source software, because the software is free and you pay for service, which is less expensive due to low labor costs.
All in all, few people in the OS community appreciate the impact that OS software can have in these two countries. China is the most populous country in the world (1.25 billion), and India is number two (1.0 billion). As open source software explodes in these countries, the installed base of Linux will become huge. These countries have a lot of poverty, but are far more technologically sophisticated than you might expect. The average young people in these countries are reasonably well educated and hungry for technology.
So regardless of how much market share Microsoft can maintain in the US, Linux could easily dominate the market in India and China within five years. The open software genie is out of the bottle in every country, and it might behave differently in some countries than it does in the US. Do not underestimate the resentment that many people in developing counties feel towards the Microsoft Expensive-Western-Technology-Empire. It reminds them of colonialism. They are very proud of their countries and they want industrial and technological autonomy. OS software gives them that possibility.
For information on Linux in India, a good place to start is Linux-India.org [linux-india.org].
Re:Oh hogwash (Score:3)
The question is, did you meet them by going there, or by them moving to where you are?
The point is, when you talk to people who have chosen to leave a place, you will find a high proportion who did not like where they were living. The rest most likely like where they moved to better (or had better opportunities at least). That's why they moved!
Re:Computer languages not based on English... (Score:3)
But that's not the problem. Computers are procedural devices. Or rather, computers based on current CPU design are procedural. The processor executes one instruction, and then the next, and then the next. There are certain operations that this model requires: loops, branches, etc. Whether you call them "while", "for", "djnz", or something else, you still have the same basic concept. Even SMP and Massively Parallel systems are procedural - they just do more than one thing at once.
This is not an English thing. Changing the names of the commands won't change the way we write programs.
If you want to play around with a truly different programming paradigm, try neural networks.
And another note: I've worked with non-English speaking programmers. They tend to misspell variable names, but do it consistently!
Engineers & public figures (Score:3)
But note: Engineers who try to apply engineering concepts to public life/human nature can be mistaken. And engineers aren't as politically involved as, say, writers, in general. There are exceptions, especially in OS/FS, but changes in engineering practices don't always affect politics.
There are exceptions, of course. The Progressives at the (last) turn of the century were Taylorists, believing in "scientific management" by professionals; note the "city manager" position, previously nonexistent. But overall, only really big movements in science/engineering have affected public life -- and that's IN THE US.
From what I know of China, economic freedom increases as political freedom stays low. But hey. Tiananmen students faxed out their protests. Xiang here can write us sorta freely. There's no way for the Chinese gov't to suppress EVERYTHING on the net....unless those top-notch Chinese coders help them...hmmmm...
Which means it IS important to get some alternative modes of thinking into their realms of possibility. GPL respect in "Red China"? I'm all for it.
Re:China doesn't have the worst track record (Score:4)
Or did you think that all Multinationals are American?
If you start digging into international affairs and all the "America-bashing" that goes on at that level, you'll find three things. (1) Most people criticize the United States for things that are also being done to a greater extent by multinationals owned and operated out of other countries. (I'll note that US law is more strict on the behavior of multinationals operating out of the US than other countries are.) (2) People do this because they are either ignorant of things like the fact that the Royal Dutch Shell Company is called that because it's Dutch, not because of some anacronistic Madison Avenue type deciding that the name was cool. (3) People tend to target the United States because as we have the largest economy in the world, we're more likely to simply step in and write a large check. (The amount of money the US gives out in foreign aid grants is larger tha many countries's total GNP.)
Best to dig into the propaganda and find out what's really going on, rather than speak out of ignorance and contribute to the problem.
Ask yourself, had oil not been found in Nigeria, do you think the Nigerian Dictatorships that have repressed its people would have never formed, or would have turned power over to a Democracy? Absolutely not. Further, before criticising the Dutch for their "evil company" (oh, excuse me, that should be "American," as we are the root of all evil in the world today), note that multinationals are generally operated locally by local citizens--in fact, most multinationals simply act as holding companies for companies incorporated in the nation where they do business. So when the Nigerian dictator put to death a half-dozen folks for criticizing Shell, was it an American who was responsible for ordering their deaths? No; it was a Nigerian. That is, it was Nigerians killing Nigerians over money. The fact that the money came from a Dutch company doesn't make it the fault of the Americans. (Oh, excuse me, Dutch--but it can't be the Dutch because it's the Americans who are evil; the Dutch only make good chocolate and dance around in funny wooden shoes. Oh, hey; it's all confusing--let's just pretend Shell is an American company. No, wait--let's blaim Cheveron! That's a good answer: we'll blaim Cheveron even though Ken Saro-wiwa was criticizing Shell; Ken Saro-wiwa must have made a typo and must have really been criticizing Cheveron, not Shell, as Cheveron is American and Shell is Dutch. That's it!)
Does it bother you how stupid all of this "Evil American multinational corporations" bullshit is?
What's the point? I'm evil, because I'm a native american--no, wait, I'm one of the "repressed people" so I mustn't be evil--in fact, why I'm not out on the front lines picketing Cheveron because some activists were put to death for the actions of Shell in Nigeria is beyond me.
I'm confused. Am I a good guy or a bad guy? And am I supposed to be friendly to Dutch people, or should I be throwing my Dutch chocolate out the window in protest? And should I be...
Ah, the hell with it. I'm going to read some cartoons at http://www.userfriendly.org instead.
Unicode Linux? (Score:3)
There is talk about different distributions being customized for different languages - rather, I for one would love to work on a distribution that supports all languages simultaneously, perhaps it should have all the resources stored in unicode. As it stands, I cannot at present even find a single free unicode font that implements most of the major character sets of the world.
Would such a "Unicode Linux" distribution be technically possible now? Would it have too heavy of a footprint to be of any use? Is there an IME and text editor out there that could support this properly?
BTW: I listen to CRI and RTI almost every night, and Zhongwen is the next language on my list to learn, so I'm a bit biased.
I wanna be an American. (Score:3)
The thing I do not understand is this:
Where do the agressive people get the right to slag him for living in China. Do these people know anything about China other than what propagana has been spoon-fed to them? Somehow I doubt it.
Since I moved to NY from Moncton, NB, Canada, I have seen this kind of ignorance and fear from many of the people I have met. I see it in many things that are done in this country. I thought this was supposed to be the 'home of the brave', I guess I was wrong. As opposed to sticking their necks out and learning something, many people would rather sit cowering in fear and point their fingers, jeering "Red Commie Bastard". Wow, that's brave.
The people talking about all of the bad things China has done in human rights. Do they know? Were they there? I doubt it. Here's the reason for my doubt:
Most of the people I have met here think Canada is a small insignificant country north of them somewhere. It has 2 or 3 major cities: Toronto, Montreal and some of them have heard of Vancouver.(note: there are professional BIG LEAGUE sports teams in these cities and they are therefore televised a lot.) I have had people from this country ask me if I see the sun in the winter! I explain to them that I lived just north-east of Maine and they still think that there's NO SUN for the winter months there. Yet there is in Maine. I guess the sun stops at the american border just like rational thought and good government.
Unbelievable.
If these people are so un-informed about a country that borders them to the north... How could they have _ANY_ grasp of what occurs in China?
They know what they have been told by the media for the most part. Not much more.
From my studies in school I found China to be a 'mysterious' country filled with some beautiful art, music and an interesting history. It's probably over-crowded and I am sure there is a lot of poverty. But I don't hate them for it. They have a completely different set of beliefs than I and their system of government is so vastly different from mine that I cannot fathom how it would operate. So what? I _REFUSE_ to subscribe to the propaganda jammed down my throat about 'commies' and 'reds' from american television throughout the late 70's and 80's. I really don't think anyone who lives in a country who's leader is a manipulative 'playboy' has any right to go on about matters of good government. I will not hate these people until I know them myself and find reasons of my own. I don't believe that communism is any worse than 'American capitalism'.
Some people don't have the presence of mind to believe there's more than one way to live.
I hate to generalize and I hate stereotypes. These are just the things I have seen.
Many thanks to Slashdot for trying to bring stories like these to view. It's an excellen idea hosted by some very fine and humourous folks
Onward and forward with the free software movement! I hope it opens more eyes and gives me more opportunities to see and learn about my foreign planet-mates
It truly is an interesting time to be alive isn't it?
- Chris