News China's Government, State-Backed Firms to Scrap Foreign PCs Within Two Years

[Admin]

China doesn't want Dell, HP, and Microsoft to be used by government, state-backed companies.

China's Government, State-Backed Firms to Scrap Foreign PCs Within Two Years : Read more

 

[mitch074]

... or, more than likely, provide an incentive for local resources to develop an alternative to foreign software, since a massive captive market will soon appear. This may also lead open source projects getting huge official and thus a lot of development in the short to medium term - stuff like Gimp, Scribus, Inkscape and Blender are close to production ready if they're not already there, I would expect they'd get there VERY quickly (either natively or as forks) if half a million Chinese developers suddenly got interested in them.

 

[Eximo]

People have been using GIMP, Inkscape, and Blender in production for decades at this point. Particularly Blender. There is enough open source software to run entire enterprises, and it does happen.

China already has an official Linux distribution, and their own home grown CPUs and GPUs, in addition to Hygon's licensed Zen products. They are just transitioning away from using Western software and hardware. They even announced they were doing this some years back when the likes of Microsoft complained about the rampant piracy of Windows at government agencies in China.

 

[hotaru.hino]

This may also lead open source projects getting huge official and thus a lot of development in the short to medium term

I'm not confident China will honor any of the copyleft licenses, if not outright avoid software licensed with such, to avoid requiring sharing what they did.

It's the same reason why say Sony and Nintendo use FreeBSD instead of Linux for their consoles. They don't have to share any modifications they made to suit their needs.

 

[thisisaname]

More signs that while China is a big market they want to exclude imports as part of the Made in China 2025 plan. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Made_in_China_2025).

To sell in China you may end up giving more away than want and still end up getting shut out.

 

[mitch074]

I'm not confident China will honor any of the copyleft licenses, if not outright avoid software licensed with such, to avoid requiring sharing what they did.

It's the same reason why say Sony and Nintendo use FreeBSD instead of Linux for their consoles. They don't have to share any modifications they made to suit their needs.

It's not efficient to fork a project and never contribute back : maintenance becomes a hassle, even Apple ultimately contributed back to KHTML and opened up webkit due to the pain in the butt it was to keep merging back hodgepodge patches.
The Chinese are nothing if not practical - if a project works better by contributing back, they will contribute back.

 

[hotaru.hino]

It's not efficient to fork a project and never contribute back : maintenance becomes a hassle, even Apple ultimately contributed back to KHTML and opened up webkit due to the pain in the butt it was to keep merging back hodgepodge patches.
The Chinese are nothing if not practical - if a project works better by contributing back, they will contribute back.

Well I won't deny they'll contribute some things if only to score PR points, but for anything that would give them a major advantage over anyone else or only suits their specific needs I wouldn't put it past them to hold onto it.

Though to put a stick in the mud in all this as well, China did recently pass a law saying any security researcher that finds a vulnerability can only disclose it to the government and the affected party. If said affected party is a Chinese owned company that happens to have products elsewhere, well, you could guess what that implies.