Cool, now can China invest in fixing 1000 upstream bugs in Gnome, KDE, Wayland, Pipewire, LibreOffice, NextCloud, Firefox, and so on? Also, could they develop open source drives and firmware for all the hardware they are exporting? I am not sarcastic. I just wonder why all this big players that use Linux create an own Distribution, but beside from that, not doing much.
this post was submitted on 05 Jul 2022
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It's probably because those with decision making authority have no idea what open source is and how it works.
That being said, China is a huge contributor to open source. For example Huawei and Alibaba are among top kernel contributors.
Hwawei has been called out for KPI farming on the Linux kernel (i.e. lots of bogus contributions to boost their support numbers): https://lkml.org/lkml/2021/6/18/153
There's some more insight on this Hackernews thread where an ex-Samsung employee defends Hwawei and notes it's not intentionally KPI farming, but rather poor internal performance tools.
I would gladly be proven wrong, but a quick Google search doesn't discuss any concrete contributions Hwawei makes (only Git simple git diff metrics, which fall under the discussions linked above)
Huawei is not the only one. Almost all software companies have some KPI that employees are farming. (speaking from experience here)
China investing into Linux and RISC-V are the two best things to happen to tech in a while.
Several RISC-V SBC use one of the Alibaba Libre Hardware cores (C906 if I remember correctly).
I would be glad if the SoCs were also Libre Hardware though.
Yeah same, SoC really seems like the future just because it's so efficient compared ot having separate components communicating over a bus.
Glad to see they rebased onto the Linux kernel (was originally on FreeBSD). The MIT and BSD licenses are trash and only invite corporate greed.
I hope the Governments of other countries do the same. Trusting Windows with Government related stuff is a mistake, Linux on the other hand can be a very trustworthy alternative if they set it up securely enough(for example, prioritizing security modules like SELinux/AppArmor, Yama and such).
Turkey has a pretty ambitious plan for Linuxification. Same with the Münich city government in Germany.
Same with the Münich city government in Germany.
However, they failed with their LiMuX project in the past, since the politicians got coffers of money from Microsoft. No shit, it was not a technical failure, but they completely fucked up the IT department in terms of resources and then blamed it on Linux.
And they still do it! See this for LiMuX news: https://www.heise.de/suche/?q=LiMux
Example:
Munich City Councilor Judith Greif complains that the Information Technology Department of the Bavarian capital is not committed to the new course toward free software that was adopted after a change of government. The IT coordinator of the Green Party refers to a demand of the city council, for instance, according to which the department should propose five projects that could be realized as Open Source in the short term. These have already been named – "But nothing has happened since then."
(source)
Good article, but I was more intrigued by the mention of Windows 10 China Government Edition (https://www.theregister.com/2017/05/23/redmond_puts_wall_around_windows_10_for_chinese_government_addition/) Quick little read.