Taiwan to Start National Push For Free Software 299
Andy Tai writes: "Taiwan will start a national plan to jump-start the development and use of Free (libre) Software, according to this report by the Central News Agency, the government news agency of Taiwan, Rep. of China. Due to high Microsoft license fees and also to improve the levels of software technology in Taiwan, this plan includes the creation of a totally Chinese free software environment for Taiwan users, free software application development, and training of 120,000 people for free software skills, as well as efforts at schools to provide diverse information technology environments to ensure the freedom of information. The original article is in Chinese; an English summary appears in this Kuro5hin article."
best part of the article (Score:2, Interesting)
Now *that* is what I like to see! Get the next generation started off right.
Heh... (Score:3, Interesting)
The problem.. (Score:3, Interesting)
Linux, FreeBSD, Others? (Score:1, Interesting)
Why do you think that (it seems) Linux is chosen more often than the other free operating systems? For example, the Germany/IBM/Linux deal, the elementary schools in the Pacific Northwest, etc etc.
Granted, I run *bsd exclusively these days (read: not flamebait/troll/a zealot
I'm the first to admit
--m
Re:The problem.. (Score:2, Interesting)
In Free Software terms, the user base is a more significant factor than economic size. If a country like Taiwan can do this other countries will follow certainly.
Re: Unicode (Score:2, Interesting)
Granted, you could just mount
And after that, we have a whole load of typical unix software AND file formats that handles files suchs as tar to fix to make them Unicode/UTF8 friendly while making sure that they are backwards-compatible.
One minor thing software developers (that's YOU) can do is to make sure that all your new software you create is UTF8 friendly. That way you'd save yourself lots of redesign problems later. It used to be 640Kbytes, then Y2K. It's Unicode now.
Back on topic, don't underestimate the influence of
Re:Taiwan not ready for that yet (Score:3, Interesting)
It takes less programmers than you think to make for growth in the free software community. Here in America I still usually get blank looks when I mention Linux or the GPL. Or data structures for that matter. You'd be surprised at how many "professional" programmers out there wouldn't be able to code a hash table or a linked list.
Free Software and Chinese Mentality explained (Score:2, Interesting)
However, times are changing for China. As this country tries its hardest to enter the WTO, the Chinese government has been cracking down on piracy in government-owned computers and in markets all over the country. (As stated in a CNET article, an anti-piracy official in China was quoted as saying "We arrest the persons involved (in piracy rings) and turn to execute them). Yet the Chinese government, which had been running pirated versions of its software for years until recently, knows they they cannot afford licsensing fees from coporate juggernauts such as Microsoft. Therefore, they pushed for the use of RedFlagLinuix. This situation also applies to the free software movement in Taiwan, which has its roots in centuries old Chinese mentality: give me what I want for the lowest price.
One last note...the Chinese have also considered sofware as an essential component for learining about technology. They do not feel it is a crime to "copy" software such as Windows XP, which is required to run Microsoft Word, a word processing program theyre most familiar with, which is used to type up various documents, especially for education. As one Chinese famous scohlar once said "Stealing a book is elegance".
Re:purchasing power parity (Score:3, Interesting)
Welcome to capitalism.