...and has funded a number of open source initiatives and research projects. Last year, the Chinese Ministry of Information founded the Open Source Software Promotion Alliance to encourage the development of China's open source software industry. The government is also working with a number of other countries on open source projects, for example, it is working with the South Korean and Japanese governments to develop open source alternatives to Microsoft Windows, and is working with the French Atomic Energy Commission to develop a Linux-based platform for online services and communication applications.
The Chinese government's enthusiasm for open source software is partly to lower cost, and partly to benefit the local industry, says DiMaio of Gartner. But, there are also cultural and political reasons for its pro-open source policy, according to analyst Governor.
"There is a lot of distrust of American imperialism in China," says Governor. "As Linux is not owned by an American company it appeals to them. China also has communitarian instincts, which open source plays into"
There is also concern among some members of the Chinese government that Microsoft software contains secretly embedded code that the US government could manipulate, which would allow the US to bring down China's computing infrastructure.
Madanmohan Rao, a research director at the Asian Media Information and Communication Centre (AMIC) agrees that anti-Americanism is a factor in China's promotion of open source. "The Chinese government is a bit paranoid about having proprietary code — it is worried about a back door into its systems," he says.
Talkback
Funny, I always thought Brazil was located in the western hemisphere. Oh wait! It is!
anti-Americanism ???
Most of the major Linux distributions are American.
So tell me again how using Linux is anti-Americanism?????
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_Linux_distributions
DO NOT click the Times of India link! It threw a bunch of popups right past my blocker, and started trying to install something(!) When I tried to kill the installer, my whole system hung.
The link to the Times of India has been removed.
Thanks for your feedback -- it seemed to work alright in testing earlier, so apologies for it causing problems.
You can ask every serious IT security expert to learn that it is not paranoid to be afraid of backdoors in closed source systems. For example, do you remember the NSA-key in Windows NT which could be interpreted as a backdoor? What about the CIA-made software bug which caused the explosion of a soviet gas pipeline and was the biggest non-nuclear explosion ever? Finally the US-american spy plane which stranded 2001 in China represents the relationship of the USA to China. Now tell me that there are no good reasons for China to distrust the USA! This is not paranoid and it is not anti-Americanism as well. Anti-Americanism is to decline everything from America without a reason. (In fact you are talking about anti-US-Americanism and not anti-Americanism)
F/OSS is pro-American. Where do you get this anti- Americanism from. MS is not the US -- yet -- as much as Gates would like you to think so. Gates has no respect for US laws whether traffic laws or trade laws. No respect for the US DOJ. MS pays little or no taxes and causes billions of damage every quarter through lost productivity in the work place caused by its defective products (downtime, maintenance, viruses, cracking and phishing).
What's more "American" freedom and self governenance which you get with F/OSS? Or the one-size-fits-all, top down Soviet style monolith provided by Microsoft?