Like the Soviets and the B-29 Bomber (Score 1)

This reminds me of the way the Soviets copied the B-29 in WWII and immediately after. A documentary was just on the History Channel about this. During the war the Soviets seized some damaged B-29's that landed in Vladivostok (the Soviets were officially neutral in the Pacific war and didn't want to piss off Japan and have a two front war on their hands, so they kept this sort of relationship at arms length and the Allies understood.) Stalin ordered that the bombers be exactly copied. They were--exactly, down to damage patches on one of the bombers that was disassembled. The result was that the Soviet aircraft industry was catapulted from being far behind the West to being on roughly even terms

Now China wants an exact copy of Win98. One can't help but think that they have some of the Windows source or API that they're working off of. Probably wouldn't be hard for a halfway decent intelligence service to obtain it, given the number of very skilled Chinese nationals working in the industry. Will these efforts catapult the Chinese software industy to being on par with the West? Is an effort to duplicate Win98 really the way to go about this?

It seems that totalitarian states are much better at copying stuff than innovating. I guess it's less risky to make an exact copy of something you know that works than innovating to make something better and risking failure (and the possible dire consequences that entails.)

Just thought this perspective might be interesting, giving what I've been watching on TV tonight