Fred Muller Audit the fed support HR1207Paul
12 minutes ago by CharliePeters on The tech keeping Plastiki afloat
This is with great pleasure that this "little corner of the Web" is resuming activities through another member of the (now famous ;-)) Beijing Linux User Group (BLUG) doing the reporting.
I was reading my predecessors first posts to get a feel of what a first post should be, as well as Jonathan Schwartz interview by my fellow blogger Eileen talking about the same topic. Never an easy task it seems...
As BLUG current vice president, and former general manager for Dexxon in China while developing their Loongson based netbook, I spend a lot of time either promoting Linux or developing Linux-based products with both the Chinese government Chinese companies or Chinese communities.
So yes, I believe China is serious about Linux and open source (who is not nowadays?) and like everywhere else, closed-source companies are fighting as hard as they can to keep their current business model alive, even if that means allowing piracy in order not to lose against Linux.
And while this works rather well for big companies who have other means to generate revenues (or can wait), I still don't see smaller Chinese companies understanding that selling licenses doesn't work in China. In fact whether you run a closed source or open source software business, the problem is exactly the same: how do you get your customers to pay you?
I regularly hear the same excuses in open source conferences from such companies claiming it is difficult to go open source because of the lack of licensing fees (which is actually wrong), but in China I don't know of any closed source software company successfully selling licenses. I used to run a closed source software company myself selling licenses and it worked. But make no mistake, my clients were actually paying us for the service of having an engineer on stand-by, ready and able to help them process data and fix issues for them, not for the license itself.
So why are so few Chinese companies embracing open source development, especially since they can't sell licenses and need to be creative on their business model? I don't have a definite answer and there are probably more than one.
I can, however, think of a few reasons that are linked to human nature than China itself. And those are the same reasons many open source projects struggle with: ownership and getting credits. Why can we find so many similar unfinished or unmaintained projects in Sourceforge (a repository for open source projects)? Why can't developers unite and work on only one application, solving the same problem, and collaborate? As you can see, China has a lot of specificities but there are also more common ground than one may have thought.
These are of course based on my own experience. I'm definitely interested to hear from others on the topic, and the comment section below is just here for that!
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Open source blog reloaded!
Fred, really smashing to see you finally pushing the Open Source China blog here.
BTW, if someone reading this needs a random person to collect random license fees, I'm your man. ;-)