In the comments below, EnviroTO pointed out that the referenced article is instead related to Taiwan instead of China. So the premise of this entry on being based out of Communist China is false... while interesting to read, it doesn't have much of a basis in reality. Thanks for catching that, EnviroTO!
It's funny how this works. Behind the Great Firewall of China, where freedom of information during globalization is sneaking through the cracks and where people are tossed in jail for expressing themselves in ways which the government believes to be less than amusing... in this land of China, 'Government says all new PCs must be Linux-friendly'.
And it's probably a step in the right direction.
Oddly enough, China may be helping give the world a bit more freedom by doing this. Microsoft has a history of monopolization, and the conspiracy theorists out there have some good points when it comes to Microsoft's domination of the hardware industry because it is a de facto 800 lb gorilla when it comes to hardware. There was a time, once upon a time, where software developers had to work toward the hardware. That's been inverted for the last 11 years. Manufacturers have been bending over (backwards?) to make sure that their hardware is compatible with Microsoft's renditions of Windows.
Richard Stallman can jump up and down about Freedom in the context of Free Software, Bruce Perens can preach about Open Source, but at the end of the day the philosophies both espouse just crashed into the Great Firewall of China. Freedom and transparency, which the majority of the nations in the world at least pay lip service to, almost always uses China as a bad example. Of course, a great many people in the world think George W. Bush is an idiot, but that didn't stop him from being re-elected. What's good for the gander is good for the goose, I think. And the PATRIOT Act affects most of the world which interacts with the United States in ways that are yet to be understood, but are mostly perceived as negative. In one country, you're not as free, but in the other, your freedom is closely monitored as well. I find that a bit strange.
But in it's own way, China has stepped up and become a leader in what has rapidly become a global problem. Just last year, at the Linux Journal editor/writer dinner for LinuxWorld (I forget exactly what SSC called it), one of the main topics Tom Adelstein, Don Marti and others were discussing was the issue of hardware and Linux. It's a severe problem. Don was talking about a skunkworks, and for some reason that didn't sit well with me but I couldn't think of anything better. Some communists in China, however, identified the same problem and are addressing it. To what end?
... The government-run Central Trust of China has mandated for the first time that all desktop computers purchased from now on must be Linux-compatible, demonstrating the government's desire to widen the nation's usage of open source software.
"It is a global trend that Linux is gaining wider adoption due to its lower costs and better adaptability," Mike Lin (林智清[Chinese characters]), a consultant at the Taipei Computer Association (TCA), told the Taipei Times yesterday....
Now, if you manage to get your brain cells coordinated, let's use some brute force on this. Where are almost all of the computer parts in the world manufactured? Where? No, try again, it's not the United States - land of the Free, home of the Bush Administration (oxymoronic twice!). So, China. And if China says, verily, thou shalt make sure thine hardware runs Linux, more hardware that works with Linux will become available. Device drivers, etc. And that is a good thing for the rest of the planet because China has a really big potential market. China's market is so big that companies such as Google are finding themselves under the gun from Freedom of Speech advocates.
So, we'll be getting more Linux friendly hardware - or so the theory goes. Is this going to change China, making it more open and transparent? No. In fact, the technology may well be used in the other direction.
A separation of Freedom; free software does not mean free speech and free speech doesn't mean free software. Open Source doesn't mean transparency of government. And, since I'm stating things that should be obvious, the sky is blue.
Free Software and Open Source need to stop acting like bloggers who speak mainly in terms of themselves (bloggers) - software is not supposed to be the center of the universe. People are. And looking around, I'm not seeing that happen in communist or democratic countries enough. But at least in China, it seems that they may be digging under their own wall.
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