Chinese Government to Use Only Local Software 534
owlmon writes "CNET Asia is reporting that China has outlawed foreign software in government applications. I expect that software buyers outside of the government will have to follow this lead. It's the same "network effect" that has powered Microsoft's growth for years. When the entire Chinese government is using WPS Office, anyone doing business with the government will feel mighty encouraged to follow suit. Otherwise, how will they exchange documents?"
Double-edged sword (Score:5, Insightful)
World standards (Score:2, Insightful)
Yes, but how will they exchange documents with the rest of the world that's using the de facto standard, MS Office?
Sounds like a pretty stupid plan to me:
1) Homegrown software
2) Force it on everybody
3) ???
4) Profit!
Inter-suite data exchange? (Score:5, Insightful)
That's local *commercial* software... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Conversion Filter? (Score:3, Insightful)
Fine if you write a few letters or track your spending with a small spreadsheet.
However, anything complex and critical (like the stuff you send to your client or they send to you) must convert with 100% accuracy. This is why Koffice or OpenOffice will not do well in a business environment.
Re:Conversion Filter? (Score:3, Insightful)
Besides, last time I checked OOo didn't support WPS Office formats. Does China have local competition in the word processing market? Is there a Chinese Free Software movement? If not, why is anyone going to write a conversion filter for these formats?
Shucking standards.. (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:GPL (Score:2, Insightful)
They dont have to, who cares? (Score:2, Insightful)
Even if they dont, we will still get better software. Windows will have competition, Microsoft Word, and all the American software companies will now have competitors in China, this is great.
Sure not all the companies will be open source, but even if they are closed source you'll still be able to buy or download Chinese software which may be x100 better than the American software we have currently.
Re: That's local *commercial* software... (Score:5, Insightful)
> Unfortunately, the article doesn't delve too deeply into the causes, merits, and implications of this decision.
No, but it does make passing mention of a couple of things, which were pretty much predictable anyway:
a) Stem hemorrhaging of cash from China to Redmond, Wash.
b) Stem hemorrhaging of information via spyware.
I've been predicting for several years that (b) alone will eventually cause most governments to convert to open source (or home-made) software. The risks of not doing so are simply too great, and in fact I'm surprised that there hasn't been a mass exodus already.
Re:GPL (Score:3, Insightful)
GPL'd code is usually hard to steal, since anyone who has it is allowed to make copies and distribute them.
But that's not what you mean. You mean they will use a GPL'd program, change it, and block it from being exported. Nothing will stop them (except ethics maybe, but I don't get the feeling world leaders have much of that). And it's not even illegal (according to international law, or even US copyright law (which is void in China btw)).
The people distributing the source allow redistribution, just as the GPL says they must. Exporting laws are generally not considered a limitation to the person you distribute the program to, but rather a limitation which is just part of the world. If the chinese would have a problem with it, then so does the US government for their anti-encryption-export laws.
The only license violation that might happen (IMO) is that they modify a program, then they do redistribute it, but refuse to distribute the source (of their modifications, or of the whole program) as well. As long as they keep it inside China, they'll probably get away with it. However, I don't think they want to keep their code secret. They probably will want to train IT professionals, and then having lots of source code availabe certainly helps.
Re:Who cares? They cant afford our software (Score:3, Insightful)
Extremely good point and well made. Sure piracy is wrong and under current laws illegal. It is really hard to care when the alleged "victims" are multi-billion dollar corps who seem intent on stamping out real music in favour of plastic manufactured nonsense and who are unwilling to actually pay the artists who make the music anyway.
I for one am glad China are making this move - even if they throw up their own Microsoft its more competition and that can only be a good thing
Re:They won't buy our software... (Score:5, Insightful)
Ah yes, the "free market" by military cooercion. Works every time. You do understand that this behaviour played a significant role in the success of the rise of communism in China in the first place?
Nevermind the fact that American copyright law does not extend beyond its borders and that the Chinese ( and Icelandics, Hugarians, New Guinians, Bhutanese, etc.) have the right to decide on their own just what constitutes "piracy" of intellectual property and what doesn't. The Chinese are free to take a more Jeffersonian approach to such matters than America is if they wish to. Ironic, isn't it?
Nor are the Chinese alone in such "piracy." Walk up to nearly any street vendor in NYC and you can walk away with bucket loads of pirated and unlicensed merchandise. At one point the Sam Goody Record stores were selling illegal rips as the legitimate article as fast as they could truck them in. Hell, you yourself just might be in possession of "pirated" music or movies obtained through various purely American channels.
Free Tibet. Up with Democracy. Fine. I'm with you.
But Intellectual "Property" isn't natural law. It's a purely human construct of extremely recent vintage and more dubious under the American Constitutional form of government than just about any other.
It's local code. Like how long you get to park at a meter for your quarter.
China isn't in our local jurisdiction.
KFG
Chewbaccian Dialectic Applied to Literary Critique (Score:1, Insightful)
The Chewbaccian Dialectic is a powerful theoretical approach and when applied to literary critique it really shines!
Well done sir!
propoganda wording!! (Score:5, Insightful)
Chinese government "outlaws" foreign software! Oh those evil bastards!
But when the USA government mandates MS it's not "outlawing foreign software" it's just "helping the economy by buying domestically".
What a crock...
Force investment in China (Score:3, Insightful)
This is nothing new. In the middle-east most countries require foreign companies to partner with a local company that holds the controlling stake. So for example, IBM operates as GBM (Gulf Business Machines) in the middle-east.
So, the Chinese government won't buy software from M$(US) but from M$(China) after M$ sets up a development facility in China. This will also force MNCs to divert investments from other competing economies like India, Indonesia, Philipines etc.
On the other hand, desktops and servers could run Linux and other open source software customised for Chinese, networking equipment would be sourced from Hua-Wei, chips are already manufactured in China. What else's remaining??
Re:They dont have to, who cares? (Score:5, Insightful)
They could just develop some local chinese lousy product. Or alternatively, they could throw in a few highly skilled thousand chinese software developers and develop good products. Either way, it wouldnt be an outcome of free market or competition, and i'd rather not see that product come out of China...
One Microsoft is enough!
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:They won't buy our software... (Score:2, Insightful)
As for human rights issues - I wonder how they would compare if one actually made an honest analysis? China still does have some serious issues I'm sure, but as far as I can see, they are actually working on improving things. On the other hand, here in the West things have gone the other way recently, not least in USA; if this continues much longer, we will be less fortunate than the Chinese and the Tibetans.
hold your nuclear horses, cowboy (Score:3, Insightful)
Why do you think that your american model of what is IP is correct, when the rest the world is worng? Just b/c you have more power? Not any more.
First, You don't talk about Afganistan, you talk about a country that has a nuclear weapon. China has enough nuclear weapons to make any your military attack obsolete. You may destroy more their cities and kill more their children. But after the nuclear winter will begin, the US goverment will have more serious issues to solve rather than "IP infriging" in China. If there will be any US goverment after that :)
Second, last time I've chekced in Walmart and other US supermarkets: almost everything was made in China. Burn Chinese economy down and start to think where you will buy next time all your clothes, electronics and everything else. The trueth is that US consumer becomes a slave of the China economy. If China goverment will stop all export to US that will crash US economy better than all previous dot-bombs, enrons, 9/11 and 8/14 altogether.
No, think again and come back here to fix your wrong comment.
Funny how China is blacklisting everything (Score:2, Insightful)
Now, this is not the same kind of commodity (obviously) but it's the same kind of attitude. I wonder what's the next step for them. Maybe forbidding people from certain countries to come to mainland China ? It might be for the best of their country, but they certainly do not know how to impose such rules with diplomacy... my 2 cents worth...
staggeringly naive (Score:2, Insightful)
This is all about the ageing despots who run China trying to keep political and economic control over technological changes. Instead of restricting access to dangerous material at the server/network end (http://yro.slashdot.org/yro/02/09/02/0246224.sht
is it really "ours" ? (Score:1, Insightful)
Grab a Microsoft Xbox DVD remote, for example. It's not made in USA.
Re:Conversion Filter? (Score:3, Insightful)
I have to use MS Word on XP at work now and think it is rubbish. I take work home and find OO much better. I have all the TT fonts loaded and tend to stick with them.
Re:GPL (Score:5, Insightful)
If you think it does than you can hire a Chinese lawyer to make your case in the Chinese courts.
If they distribute in Newark and you feel they are thus obligated under US law all you have to do is legally serve them ( under US law) to appear in Newark.
Then we'll just have to free "Skylorov" all over again.
Remember him? The guy who wrote software in Russia that was legal in Russia and we all got bent out of shape over his being arrested for violating extortionate American Intellectual "Property" laws?
People, for God's sake, try to figure out what your stance on ip is and stick to it. The GPL only exists in the first place because of western copyright law and seeks to subvert it with its own weapons. If such western copyright law does not exist as such the GPL becomes a non issue.
KFG
Re:They won't buy our software... (Score:4, Insightful)
And yeah, why not send in the troops when economic interests are threatened. Like invading Iraq for example (and no, they didn't find those weapons of mass destruction, or any proof of a connection to al Quaeda, all they found out was that all official reasons for starting that war were bogus and that Bush and Blair even knew they were bogus).
Re:staggeringly naive (Score:3, Insightful)
Beyond that, I think you're being a little too cynical. It's perfectly natural for a country not to want to depend on another (potentially hostile) nation for important elements of it's infrastructure. Moreover after seeing Microsoft tried and convicted of anti-trust violations and get off pretty much scott free, I'd be really worried about becoming dependent on their software.
Market = Leverage (Score:2, Insightful)
China is a huge market and controling entry to that market gives them leverage. So they use that leverage to their advantage. Why not? I think that's better than the american way: "export" (via WTO etc.) their laws (especially IP-laws) to other countries to make them play by a set of rules that puts them at a disadvantage.
Trade implications (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Nice to see ! (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Conversion Filter? (Score:5, Insightful)
If it's "complex or critical", you shouldn't be using Word anyway. If it's plain text, use ASCII. If it's formatted, use PDF. By all means, use Word to compose your documents, but it's a terrible exchange or achival format.
Anyway, I've worked in offices for over 10 years. For business purposes, WordStar 4 was fine. It had spellcheck, it had bold. What else do you need in a business document? (I admit, I later upgraded to WordStar 5.)
I also do DTP. For that I extract the text from the Word docs that have unfortunately become ubiquitous before laying them out in a rational way using stylesheets. Then I make PDFs to pass on to the printer.
All this talk about "incompatibility" is basically FUD. If you want compatibiity, use an open standard, not a transient obfuscated undocumented one that has the bonus feature of including viruses.
Security (Score:2, Insightful)
Microsoft is a US based company. Why would China want to use a US firms software for all of its government business? That is ludicrous. What would happen if the US government used Chinese software?
Why should the Chinese government trust that Microsoft won't be secretly subpeonaed by US secret courts to open up backdoors to let the CIA in? I wouldn't trust them to not do that.
If the US government buys Chinese software and uses it in government then, maybe you guys have a case against China for not using US osftware.
How much US military hardware is not American? How much of it is Chinese?
Protectionism is a dangerous toy (Score:5, Insightful)
In a similar way the Finnish government was stuck for years with a national government developed word processing program in the 1980's and early 1990's.
So from this point of view the Chinese government might be painting itself into a technology corner, potentially being stuck to an inferior product.
However the Chinese market is so huge that there is room for internal competition. Also software as a product has a tendency towards forming a monopoly, due to the high costs of entering the market and the low costs of replicating the product. So an occasional shaking of the emergent structure might well be justified.
We should also be asking how much the EU bureocracy is paying to Microsoft each year and how much could be saved by moving to Open Office.
It would be interesting to know if the Chinese directive is targeted only to office applications or if it applies to other software also. This could be a boon to the Chinese software industry in terms of ERP software, network managemet, CAD etc.
kiravuo
Re:Funny how China is blacklisting everything (Score:5, Insightful)
Japan in July 2003 upped beef tarrifs to 50%
America pushed up Steel tarrifs recently, has massive subsidys for farmers.
Europe well their farm subsidys are ridiculous with some places in Ireland been better off not growing their crops with the subsidys offered.
So yeah obviously bad China, the only country in the world to use tariffs. BAD BAD BAD play fair no tariffs just like all those other countries in the world, oh wait there isnt any!!
As for banning people from certain countries, every country does that it is called a VISA and what happens is you simply do not let people in from the country you do not like.
Re:This is a very good thing (Score:4, Insightful)
While there is Red Flag Linux, I wonder whether we have any reason to believe that the government of China will not act in the interests of proprietary software producers just as much as do the governments of Western nations.
In the case of Red Flag Linux, it may simply be that it is deemed acceptable because there does not exist any satisfactory proprietary and locally produced operating system.
Whereas with an office suite and the audio/video protocol where there are existing local proprietary solutions, the government seems more than willing to favor these existing proprietary solutions over existing open source solutions, and also over developing new open source solutions which would compete with these existing proprietary solutions.
I'm not quite ready to praise the government of China over this move.
Re:Conversion Filter? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:While you despise the communist government, (Score:1, Insightful)
Go try that outside of the local chinese federal police office and see what type of treatment you get.
Re:Trade implications (Score:3, Insightful)
They're already in. And this is a ruling on what government ministries can use, which is easily cast as national security, which is excempt from WTO rules. Could China complain that they can't tender for software for the Pentagon? Anyway, the US pisses on the WTO whenever it feels like it. The 3rd world is full of poverty-stricken farmers who can't sell their crops in competition with subsidised American farmers, which certainly goes againt the spirit, and probably the letter, of the WTO.
Re:Funny how China is blacklisting everything (Score:2, Insightful)
Doesn't the united states do this already, if not an outright ban on entering then they make it very difficult for certain nationalities to enter teh US?,
in fact doesnt it do all the things that the "red peril" is instigating now?.. favour domestic industry over foreign etc...
Re:Double-edged sword (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:staggeringly naive (Score:3, Insightful)
I doubt that the current Chinese government is the best possible for China, and they are certainly far from a democracy yet, but anybody claiming to know that they know better how to run China is either an idiot or an ideolog. It took Europeans hundreds of years and many bloody wars to become modern democracies. Americans had to commit genocide and institute centuries of slavery before finally waking up to ideas of human rights and equality. Give the Chinese a break--they aren't doing all that badly in comparison, they are just a little late.
Oh, and as for Microsoft, the Chinese are just watching out for their economic interests: nurturing domestic high-tech expertise is a good thing for them, and replacing Microsoft software with domestically developed software just makes sense.
Compatibility (Score:3, Insightful)
This really depends on how open the file formats are. Back when Microsoft was fighting for the Office market, I started using Word because the import/export filters were so good that I could use Word as a translator between the several word processors that everyone was dealing with. It wasn't until they owned the market that they started being incompatible with everyone, including earlier versions of their own software.
I see nothing but good coming from this. With one of the world's largest countries using something else, Microsoft will be facing a lot of market pressure to make their file formats regular and available for conversion to other formats and clean up thir act on being able to import from other formats.
Re:not so Hmm... (Score:4, Insightful)
It's not always that simple when dealing with the Microsooft monopoly. Several years ago everyone in our office was running Word 95 and whatever the version of Excel was that came in the same Office package. Bill wanted more money and so came out with the next release of Office. I could see that no one in the office except my senior programmer and myself even understood that other 99% you mention (we had actually done some slick things with it). We determined there was no feature in the "upgrade" that would be of any use at all. I was able to avoid upgrading for quite a while, simply because there was absolutely no need for it. But it turned out there were idiots at the company headquarters who had upgraded (with no good reason) and were too damn stupid to save their documents in a format that our office could read. I wanted to fight it, but the order came from senior management (who didn't even use computers) that we had to upgrade all of our systems so we could exchange files with the HQ systems.
Do you start to understand how pervasive the MS monopoly and their closed file formats are?
More competition? Better software? hahaha (Score:1, Insightful)
I do think that this, if extends its negative influence to the whole chinese software industry (dunno how much government software have impact on the whole industry), will only aggravate the chinese situation, and let them be more closed, more isolated, actually more dead.
Good Idea - We should do this too (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:They dont have to, who cares? (Score:4, Insightful)
A new policy by China's governing body will rule that all ministries buy only locally-produced software at the next upgrade cycle.
They haven't banned foreign software per se, rather they have banned buying foreign software. It is an important distinction.
One Microsoft is enough!
That's a ridiculous assertion. The government will be using the Red Flag Linux OS, which is hardly going to create the next Microsoft.
We shall see (Score:3, Insightful)
Look at all the software packages that might be used in the Chinese government created by companies all over the world. Now these companies are being told "Nope, you can't sell here anymore." That's a great deal of the world's producers being effectively shut out based on nationality. This is not a win for Free Software, this is a win for protectionism disguised (apparently very well) as advocacy for Free Software. This is no different then farm subsidies in Europe, and U.S. protection of the steel industry. (I have problems with both by the way).
One final thought, the last country in the world I would expose my source to is the Chinese government. The Chinese have not been known to be respecters of intellectual property. How fast do you think it would take for source of your application you developed to be handed over to a competing Chinese company. A month tops I believe.
As for you apologist who believe it necessary to protect new industries in developing countries, I have a rebuttal when it comes to software. The reason to protect industries like this would be because they have high barriers-to-entry and large capital costs. For instance, the building of farm equipment is one I would support because it is both resource intensive and long lead times to development and production. Software on the other hand is just the opposite. I can seat down someone in Russia, India, China, Egypt, Costa Rica, or the US give them a text editor and a compiler and they can become a software company. The resources and talent to build software can be found anywhere in the world as long as you got a computer and an internet connection to download the software. Therefore protecting local software companies, especially as an inflow of jobs comes from other parts of the world at the same time, is protectionism at its worst.
Re:Double-edged sword (Score:3, Insightful)
BTW US policies in regards agriculture arn't that different. Fact is without the subsidies 'n tarifs, America's chemical & hormone feedlot beef wouldn't be supermarket price viable (cows can't normally live knee high in shit unless pumped full of a million chemicals) & Americans would be eating nice healthy free-range local, Oz & Latin American beef instead.
Re:Protectionism is a dangerous toy (Score:2, Insightful)
http://www.guardian.co.uk/globalisation/story/0
Re:World standards (Score:2, Insightful)