FOSS in China: Hypotheses
August 6th, 2008I have spent a bit over three months in China, trying to find out how FOSS is organised and how it’s different in China from what we see the West. When I met Basile two weeks ago in Beijing, we have come up with the following hypotheses:
- Language is an impediment. Most FOSS activities take place in English.
- There is no culture of innovation in China.
- The discussion culture in FOSS projects is too confrontational.
- FOSS is still too young in China to be successful.
- There is only little support for FOSS in the Chinese software industry. Piracy has a negative effect on the creation of a proper software industry in general. Customers are not willing to pay for software.
- Students don’t learn about FOSS at universities and hence don’t know about it.
- Individuals can’t make money with FOSS in China.
- Chinese government policies are not favourable towards FOSS.
These hypotheses are an extension to the ones presented in an earlier entry I have posted in February. They are specifically applied to China (because that’s the country I am currently studying) rather than Asia in general, though I do think that most of them could be applied to other countries like Thailand too.
Despite the fact that these hypotheses are rather negative in their formulation and might have some other shortcomings, I believe that they provide a good basis for further discussions. Also, hypotheses are there to be proved or disproved, they don’t need to be valid in the first place.
Why am I posting this?
Because I would like to get some feedback. I would love to know if there is something completely wrong with them, if I have totally missed the point, if I have forgotten something important, or anything else you have thought of while reading them. Please let me know :).
August 6th, 2008 at 5:21 pm
I think the biggest factor is piracy. I am from Pakistan and people don’t think of software as a product to pay money for.
I think open-source flourished in the West due to strict laws on piracy. People in poor countries cannot afford to pay so much for software. It is simply out of reach for them.
On your points let me answer them from a Pakistani perspective (Asian):
Language is an impediment. Most FOSS activities take place in English. (false)
There is no culture of innovation in Pakistan. (true)
FOSS is still too young in Pakistan to be successful. (true)
There is only little support for FOSS in the Pakistan software industry. (true)
Piracy has a negative effect on the creation of a proper software industry in general. Customers are not willing to pay for software.
Students don’t learn about FOSS at universities and hence don’t know about it. (true)
Individuals can’t make money with FOSS in Pakistan. (true)
August 6th, 2008 at 9:28 pm
I do have more thoughts but I’ll leave a few right now.
Language is practically an impediment, true, but there are many, many FOSS developers where English is not their native language, so I think it’s not a very strong hypothesis.
The “no culture of innovation” hypothesis is pretty absurd when you look at the long history of China. I think this can be modified but as it stands it’s a pretty insane hypothesis.
“Customers not willing to pay for software” - I’m a bit confused. FOSS is free, so why is this an issue?
Students don’t learn about FOSS at traditional universities (at least in the CS courses at MIT or Stanford they don’t.) Of course most students learning CS will be exposed to FOSS but not often in their course program itself. CS students learn the fundamentals of programming, and in the more traditional courses don’t even learn OOP or dynamic languages, let alone what FOSS is.
“Individuals can’t make money…” how about “Individuals _can_ reduce costs with FOSS.” Turn it around and it reads positive, not negative.
More thoughts later or if I see you at BarCamp
August 6th, 2008 at 9:34 pm
FOSS does not need innovation. the whole GNU project and also the linux kernel are not built on innovation, but on copying of existing software with the intention to make it free.
FOSS needs a culture of sharing and willing to help each other and a motivation to contribute to society.
confrontational discussion culture is a problem for getting people to join existing communities, but not an issue for creating a new chinese FOSS community.
FOSS also does not need a software industry. (companies trying to sell software or services may need it, but they are only a part of FOSS)
piracy is also not a central problem for FOSS, it only means that cost does not work well as an argument, and instead other advantages need to be emphasized. like the ability to access the source and fix problems and improve the application, or the ability to learn from the source. cost was never a good argument anyways and often created false expectations.
government policies have not been favourable towards FOSS in most countries. same with students learning about FOSS at universities. both are only now slowly changing because of FOSS becoming popular, so they were not a factor in making it popular.
and on what grounds can’t individuals make money on FOSS?
how do individuals make money on FOSS in other countries?
greetings, eMBee.
August 7th, 2008 at 4:10 am
Just curious, have you read Bruce Peren’s thoughts on FOSS economics?
http://perens.com/Articles/Economic.html
It’s a lengthy read, but it gives a few interesting ideas on the economic questions you have. Not sure if you’ve already discounted his arguments.
As for the rest of the arguments, I believe many have been addressed elsewhere or can be quickly researched. e.g. A google search on “china government open source” shows a fair number of Chinese government initiatives or at least press releases. By this count, the Chinese government is probably one of the more supportive countries in the world.
http://www.linuxdevcenter.com/pub/a/linux/2002/07/15/osgov_timeline.html
http://www.infoworld.com/articles/hn/xml/02/08/13/020813hnchina.html
Now whether they got the results for their support is another matter.
August 8th, 2008 at 9:57 am
That’s great stuff! Thank you! I knew that just posting the hypotheses without any further explanation was rather risky. I will try to elaborate some of them in future blog posts.
@tabman: I would be very interested in learning more about FOSS in Pakistan. Do you have any links/irc channels/other resources where I could learn more?
@Gen: I would love to discuss that at BarCamp Bangkok (I am still not sure I will make it though). I will try to explain the hypothesis about innovation culture in my next blog post.
@eMBee:
I partially agree that piracy and software industry are not central to FOSS. As a matter of fact, I used to believe that for a long time. But more than 50% (depending on project, of course) of all contributions to FOSS come from people who professionally contribute. This means that the people contributing to FOSS are employed by the software industry. Same holds for China with Novell, Red Hat, Sun, IBM, and Intel being major FOSS contributors.
Now, how does piracy fit into this? I will need to do some more research to find out, I am not sure yet. From a superficial point of view I think that the fact that proprietary software is as free as in free beer, definitely affects the way how people think about FOSS.
@Ken: Thank you for the link. As a matter of fact, I haven’t discovered this paper yet.
As for government involvement, I agree that China has done a lot in the past (the links you post are rather old), but they seem to have withdrawn their support for FOSS in the last two years. I am still not sure about the effects of this withdrawal.
August 8th, 2008 at 5:07 pm
As far as I know open-source is totally dead in Pakistan. The first time I came to know how big open-source is when I participated in Google Summer of Code 2006. I was the only one from Pakistan who got selected in GSOC in 2006. Off course there are people and companies who would use open-source software but I don’t think there is any culture of giving back yet.
I personally have not come across any blog, project or anything related to open-source and Pakistan. The most active blog related to IT in Pakistan is this one http://greenwhite.org/
You can definitely get hold of some pakistani IT fellows on this blog
August 12th, 2008 at 6:40 am
I can see where you’d come to the conclusion that there’s no culture of innovation in China since especially in recent years China has developed an expertise in manufacturing (which focuses on execution and not necessarily innovation), however the longer I live here the more innovation I see around me. The engineers I work with (at Sun in Beijing) file patents all the time so there is definitely some great innovation here. And I know this is anecdotal but the Opening Ceremony was one of the most innovative things I’ve ever seen. I think China is going to surprise the world with more and more innovation in the coming years.
August 17th, 2008 at 12:53 pm
@ muriel I came across the following I guess you would be interested
http://www.osrc.org.pk/
http://www.new.facebook.com/group.php?gid=27138955736
March 17th, 2009 at 11:06 am
>Students don’t learn about FOSS at universities and hence don’t know about it.
Currently it is true. But things are changing. More and more universities and students, especially master students, are willing to learn and use FOSS software.