Look at the record From almost the beginning of recorded history to twenty years before the iPad was introduced, the tablet was a common design. There's nothing new about the iPad's basic design. There never was. 

By 2001,  designs like Fujitsu's Stylistic 3500 had made tablets a commercial success. While these Windows-powered tablets never saw mass popularity, they were, and still are, used in various vertical markets such as manufacturing and medical services. 

I will give Apple some credit for fictional tablets as well though. It sure seems to me that in Pixar's 2004 animated movie The Incredibles that they were already using iPads. The iPhone was still three years in the future. The iPad farther still. The bottom line though is that, as anyone can plainly see, there was nothing new or worthy of protection in the basic design of an iPad. 

The idea that there is something original in the iPad's design that's worthy of intellectual property protection is the real science-fiction. 

Fortunately, I arrived in time to attend the subsequent International Expert Roundtable Conference. Among the participants were Jim Zemlin, Mark Shuttleworth, venture capitalist Larry Augustin, Apache founder Brian Behlendorf, Linux Professional Institute CEO Jim Lacey, Professor Lu Shouqun, chairman of China Open Source Promotion Union, Dr. C. Joseph Lee, Microsoft China CTO, Sin-Yaw Wang VP and director of Sun China Engineering & Research Institute to name just a few.

The way the discussion went was not too unexpected. The Chinese participants, most of them high-level representatives of public institutions, emphasized the efforts by the government and local administrations to support and promote OSS. The reason is quite clear. China wants and needs a strong software industry, but it still faces a huge gap in productivity and know-how, compared to the United States, Europe and India. To close this gap, using OSS products as a base for progress seems to be quite logical, because it enables the growing IT industry to get into business without starting from scratch.

As for the foreign VIPs and experts, they touched on issues that are not really new. First of all, they said, China should put more effort into educating its software engineers and they can do that by using OSS software as the main content of the curriculum. They also criticized the Chinese administration a little for supporting OSS with a top-down approach, because most efforts are driven by public institutions. They wished China to support private enterprises, especially start-ups, instead. Last but not least, Mark Shuttleworth and Jim Zemlin raised the well-known issue that the world is waiting for China's re-contributions to OSS communities. The fact is there's not much visible partipation by the Chinese in OSS projects yet. And again, there was the conclusion that to address this problem, both sides have to overcome the language barrier.

OK, all this is not really false at all. But, I think there's still no real understanding of the real issues and challenges regarding the Chinese software market. Alright, so the different languages are a big problem indeed. Nevertheless, this is far from being the real barrier. So, what else is the problem?

First of all, the Chinese software industry, as well is the Chinese OSS community, has just started to become globally significant. Consequently, the education system for large numbers of top-quality software engineers is also still in its initial phase. As a result, there is a huge lack of highly qualified developers for the Chinese software market. And in terms of the availability of experienced staff who can drive projects, that is close to zero. And, if there are any high-profile experts, they end up joining the foreign IT companies.

It's generally the same story for graduates of China's top universities. A handful of international enterprises generally absorbs the Chinese software elite. The consequence is that the local Chinese software industry ends up with a poor management ratio and young, inexperienced engineers. Therefore, it's no wonder that China's OSS re-contribution through Chinese OSS companies is at a low level, because productivity is a big issue and the younger engineers generally lack experience, self-confidence and initiative to reach out to the OSS communities.

Start-ups, as suggested by the foreign participants of the discussion, can definitely grow in the current OSS ecosystem. All the small and midsize tech businesses that I know struggle to find the right personnel for their projects.

Another issue that the foreign experts overlooked is the structure of the Chinese society. They seem to have forgotten that excluding the glittering spots of growing prosperity in the major cities like Guangzhou, Shanghai or Beijing, more than 80 percent of the Chinese population are not plugged into the digital information age yet. Somebody has to care and ensure they are not left behind as the country progresses.

For me, it's hard to see an alternative for the governmental top-down support of China's OSS community at the moment.

Last but not least, I want to thank the China Open Source Promotion Union and their Chairman Professor Lu Shouqun for organizing such an interesting event.

The organizers managed to get quite a few interesting speakers down to Guangzhou, including some international OSS VIPs like Linux Foundation Executive Director Jim Zemlin, Apache founder Brian Behlendorf, Ubuntu's Mark Shuttleworth, SourceForge founder Larry Augustin and Sun Microsystems' Chief Open Source Officer Simon Phipps, to name just a few.

The conference started with the main forum on Thursday, with the usual welcome addresses by a Guangdong province government official and COPU Chairman Professor Lu Shouqun. Instead of boring you with a complete summary of all the presentations, here are my personal highlights:

Yu Jianfei, director of Linux Application Software Meeting of Guangdong Province, added some tension to the rivalry between the Chinese cities Beijing and Guangdong, both of which are eyeing to be the country's No. 1 software engineering region, putting a special emphasis on Guangdong's national leadership in embedded Linux development.

Apache founder Brian Behlendorf gave a presentation about the principles of OSS (open source software) projects. His most interesting statement from my point of view was: "You have the freedom to fork." While lot of other speakers continuously tend to warn about the risks of forking projects, Brian defines it as a fundamental mechanism to make different innovations happen simultaneously.

IBM's vice president of China Software Development Laboratory, Josephine Cheng, told the audience how the company's deals with "innovation with Linux and open source" and making it a billion dollar business.

Professor Li Guojie from the Chinese Academy of Engineering, put the spotlight on the duty of Chinese OSS projects and businesses to "re-contribute" to the international communities. This is a very big issue in my opinion because there are in fact only a small number of Chinese contributers who are visible (and participating) in international OSS forums. I hope this will change soon because OSS communities live from communication and contributions.

Simon Phipps surprised me a little when he called his employer Sun Microsystems the No. 1 Linux contributor, because the company does not do any work on the Linux kernel at all. But, when I gave it another thought, Simon's point of view is absolutely right. Looking beyond the kernel, there's the NFS (Network File Sharing System), OpenOffice.org, the Mozilla project, the Gnome Desktop and many more projects, where Sun is a major force, driving the Linux ecosystem successfully forward.

Larry Augustin, the venture capitalist and founder of SourceForge, gave a very interesting presentation about the "new breed" of profit and loss" with open source as the financial or business model. His conclusion was that these business models are very similar to those to the "Golden Years" of software business back in the 90's. So, investors, get ready for OSS!

Professor Xu Hongbo, China's coordinator of the Open Source Competence Center, spoke about the project Qualipso, an alliance between the European Union, Brazil and China to enhance OSS quality.

Zheng Zhongyuan, vice president of Redflag Linux, talked about the latest projects of his company. Their cooperation with Intel on the development of a new generation of ultra-mobile PCs, seems to be of special interest for the consumer. A cool device running completely on Linux and other OSS software.

RedHat's vice president Tom Rabon, discussed his company's business model, putting an emphasis on the benefit--such as choice, flexibility and cost reduction--for governments in using OSS.

Hu Caiyong, CEO of Redflag CH2000 (not affliated to Redflag Linux), a company producing office software based on OpenOffice.org, talked about "The Conflict between OpenOffice.org's Freedom Spirit and Business Economy Style". This conflict is still a major issue in China, as there a not too many successful business models based on software services yet. CH2000, however, is one of the very few Chinese OSS companies that are massively re-contributing to their community.

Jim Lacey, chairman of the Linux Professional Institute (LPI), the largest vendor-independent organization that specializes in training and certification of Linux professionals, introduced his enterprise and their network of services. While partly a self-advertisement, his presentation was nevertheless interesting because it raised the need for continuously education to keep up-to-date with the latest challenges in OSS business.

Dr. C. Joseph Lee, China CTO at Microsoft, gave a very promising presentation about interoperability and open standards. I am very eager to see results on this soon.

Gregory Lopez, OSS consultant of Thales, introduced the Sino-French OSS cooperation in the e-government sector. It's quite an interesting project because the target is to create an interoperability framework for public administration IT systems across the European Union and China.

I'll touch on some highlights from the second day of the summit in my next blog posting, so watch this space.

Typically, Linux User Groups all over the world consist of a bunch of geeks who come together to discuss their passion for open source software (OSS). That's great, but the BLUG is simply different from most of them.

Beijing is where all the global industry players are gathered, and most of them have big R&D (research and development) centers here.

If you get a chance to visit the BLUG one day, you will find a lot of dedicated IT professionals from major technology enterprises as well as local rising startups. At our monthly meetings, you'll also get a chance to attend very interesting presentations about the latest and greatest innovations in OSS development, because it all happens in Beijing.

Interested now? We meet every second Tuesday of the month. For the location, please check our Web page here. Everybody is invited to join us. Finally, I strongly recommend the BLUG as a top tourist spot for OSS fans visiting Beijing.

I also want to thank ZDNet Asia for choosing me to pick up where Michael left off. I hope I can continue the great work that Michael has done, particularly where he emphasized the agenda and developments of China's OSS scene while adding his critical view on it.

And, oh yeah, I forgot to introduce myself. My name is Peter Junge. I'm from Germany, I live in Beijing now, and I have been working on OSS for several years. I hope the things I write about in this blog will be more interesting than myself ;-)

Next week, I'll be attending the China OSS World Summit in Guangzhou and that should hopefully give me some material to discuss in my next blog posting.

So, stay tuned and thanks for reading.

Scott McNealy, the keynote speaker, had a fairly long presentation, walking the conference attendants through Sun's history with the Chinese educational system as well as launching Sun's latest open source project, Curriki . Sun hopes for widescale adoption of Curriki, especially in China where open source education is not keeping pace with the rest of the world. Curriki will give educators a chance to share curriculum and educational tools with other professors around the world.

Sun had helped China years back to establish the first educational Extranet where professors and students could download and upload open source software. This movement proved largely popular with students who did not have access to the Internet in those days and wanted greater access to development tools. Students of yesterday are the professors of today, and hopefully their patronage of Sun's contributions will be passed on to the next generation of students who will further develop the open source curricula being offered in Chinese universities today.

I highly recommend you go through the presentation that I have linked above for a more thorough understanding of this--and, mainly, theChinese open source community. The XOOPS project gives some very interesting insights into some of the challenges the open source community faces in China, namely, recognition of the GPL. Taiwen Jiang had mentioned that in exploring the legal recognition of GPL in China is at best a grey area, but at most unrecognized due to limited government regulations and confusion of whether or not GPL requires copyright since it is interpreted as free.

However, taking this into account, what does this GPL dilemma mean to the IP rights of the open source community as a whole? Firstly, this is a pretty good reason for why there are not more contributions being made to the community, from China, as obviously, many small companies, and perhaps larger OEMs are too involved in profiting from the Community and not building it up. A bit of a 'Commons' dilemma if you ask me.

Secondly, Taiwan Jiang made an interesting argument, that if legal recognition is not going to be given to those that have contributed their time to the betterment of the community then why should they contribute at all. Obviously, recognition is not the main reason for why developers open source their work, though there is some vanity in it. But, if the bulk of the benefactors of a project are taking and not giving back, then the project is more likely to die, as is the case of many projects in China.

Chinese officials have a long way to go to understand what "free" means. Until they do, developers in China are going to find a better way to cooperate and ensure the longevity of their projects. XOOPS is managing to stay alive and grow, but there are some commercial interests behind them.

The rational behind Google developing curriculum is that as a major recruiter they have seen too many graduates entering the workforce with too little of an understanding of distributed systems, and in particular parallel processing machines. During Christophe's presentation he showed us several pictures of the evolution of Google's serving environment, from eight hastily thrown together PCs to form a cluster, to a warehouse full of the most tightly packed racks I have ever seen. These racks were by no means hastily thrown together; they were the most space efficient rack installations I had ever seen. Christophe further went on to show how Google worked with vendors to specially develop hard drives and other such server components.

Sorry if I digress, but it is important to note the investment Google has made in its infrastructure and the concern they have about graduates entering the workforce who are unprepared to contribute to their systems. It is also worth noting that China is a prime battle ground for Google and Microsoft. Microsoft alone does two recruitment rounds a year at the top technology universities, sitting 5,000 students at a time into a gym and having them take handwritten programming examinations. I guess in order to one up Microsoft, the next best thing Google can do is educate the graduates before they sign up for any recruitment tests.

As to the open source movement in China, Google plays two very important roles. It is making an early investment to open students' minds up to experiment more with open source technologies, and secondly, even if these students don't go work for Google, they will be well prepared to contribute to community and Internet related projects--and that Google will indirectly benefit from.

Before I go into the story behind the conference, I want to reiterate how important it is for the China open source community to interact with the western communities, and that since the ability for the Chinese to physically travel, and in some cases even correspond via the Internet, can be hampered by various "issues" in China, western open source personalities and projects will have to find a way to come to China. However, as this conference will show, that will also not be an easy task.

What started out as a XOOPS conference, evolved into a government panel discussing the importance of open source in one conference room and in a remote corner of the hotel was another conference room, more relevant to the conference, filled with guest speakers from the US. The guest speakers were Stephen Walli, Mike Olsen, Nat Torkington, Jim Grisanzio and Christophe Bisciglia. I will let you Google their bios for their backgrounds, but by no means are these small-time open source players. The question is how did they get tucked away in a corner of the hotel so far away from the people who needed to be educated by their message.

Well, in order for the conference on XOOPS to take place, a local partner needed to be brought in, someone who could get the right "approvals". Once this partner was brought in, they had their own idea of how the conference should be run. What they didn't have was any clout or influence to bring in notable speakers. This is where Stephen comes in. However, to Stephen's surprise he was also going to need to raise capital to pay for his speakers' time on the podium. A podium, which I will add, was far from where it should have been. To make the long story short, XOOPS ended up with a 20-minute presentation, along with all the other guest speakers, and those in attendance were some software engineers, a few people from private companies and one or two government officials, who seemed to disappear after the first few presentations. The presentations were good, insightful and encouraging to those who needed reassurance that open source was a good move.

My advice to anyone looking to do a presentation in China, especially on open source, is to make sure your message is heard by those whom it needs to be delivered to. It is unfortunate that the government and industry officials in the other room were only able to deliver their party line on how important open source is, but were not able to be educated by speakers who were there to show how open source can be used as a viable business strategy. Furthermore, I don't think the good intentions of those behind this conference were fully realized and the lesson in all of this is that if you come to China, you better be prepared to manage and control all aspects of the visit, even if you need to pay a big premium to overshadow anyone with any personal ambitions that will conflict with your mission.

The second reason why open source projects, outside of distros, need to start making in roads into China is that they can be the force that brings more contributors out of the woodwork in China. With such a massive programming pool, large projects like Open Office, can draw out more programmers to grand stand their talent, stand up and be recognized and attract more programmers to the 'cause'.

Mr. Suarez-Potts is scheduled to be in Beijing between 12th and 20th of May. It appears the principle reason for the trip is to speak at Beijing University. I hope to get more details on this trip soon, as I would like to confirm if what I suggest is the actual reason. If Mr. Potts is here for any other reason, I would like to impress upon him my two goals for his visit. I can assure the confirmation of this trip will be posted on www.beijinglug.org as soon as a confirmation can be made.

Turbo Linux and Red Flag, as of last year, have created their own communities, following on the heels of Western companies like Red Hat and Oracle, but these companies are so focused on the current market, they are not innovating for tomorrow, unlike Lemote and E28. These companies are doing R&D for the sake of R&D; they are leveraging any and all resources from the community and in essence creating a platform for others to innovate from.

Why is Microsoft, Google and a number of other software companies setting up shop in China? One, it is obviously because of the market potential, but the most significant portion of their budget is being spent on R&D. China's 'Golden Children', Sun Wah, Co Create, Red Flag, etc, aren't making money, yet they are surviving. These companies are not taking full advantage of their privileged position in China. Instead of the Western business model of looking after the bottom line, these companies should realize that their place in the market is safe today, but tomorrow is becoming more and more uncertain. They should look at how they can better leverage the assets that Microsoft and Google and fighting over.

So, my proposal is thus: Lemote and E28 are not getting any where near as much government funding as the top 5 open source companies in China, yet they seem to be best positioned for tomorrow. They have created links with the community in and out of China. They have created channels for contribution and given what the community likes best, a clean slate to develop and build on. After my first post on Lemote I had someone from Italy contacting me for a Lemote box and within 24 hours of passing along his request to the Lemote CEO, Dr. Zhang Fu Xin, Dr. Zhang replied and had a box sent out. In the past I tried to make an argument for Western open source organizations to push the community in China, but now, I am beginning to see that China needs to do a better job of reaching out to the West and they may just be surprised with how much support they will get. It is unfortunate that the majority of companies here are so dependent on handouts and think that "if we establish a big enough presence a Western company or the government will do the rest".

I hear a lot of talk, I see a lot of pictures of prominent Chinese open source figures with Western open source champions, and I see a lot of handshaking and exchanging of ideas, but what I don't see is the majority of Chinese organizations taking the matter into their own hands. My point being, is China publicly wants to support Linux, but the West has done very little in regards to promoting community ideals which are sinking in at the upper most echelons. Aside from Lemote, E28 and the Linux Virtual Server Project (LVS), very few Chinese companies are giving the West something to think about. China's Top 5 are going to have to turn their businesses inside out and focus on building the community around them and then through that community innovate and establish links to the West.

This all goes hand in hand with my conspiracy theory I eluded to in my previous blog titled "Good reason to strike a compromise". China uses Linux in the same way it used the threat of its own RFID and Wi-Fi standard, to leverage better deals with the West.

I should have stressed the relationship to the community further. Small businesses, just as much as IBM, Sun and other large Linux businesses, are responsible for encouraging more activity in the open source community to attract more people to learn and contribute. Too many local developers see no future in Linux, and part of that is because very few businesses, if any at all, have a good business model.

However, when I read this thread, mind you it is 8 months old, it reminds me of how so many local companies corrupt the very value of Linux, or they simply just don't understand it. The easiest business practice to accept, but the one most quick to fail in the field of open source software is to "support" someone else's innovation. Sure the software is free and all you have to do is charge for installation and support. However, what if you don’t keep up with the project or contribute your knowledge and patches? The project either passes you by, falls apart or takes a turn your client base isn't prepared to follow. I know, because I made this foolish mistake years ago when I was launching my company, CANDIS. I followed the lead of my engineers, delivered solutions to my clients, fixed bugs and then when it came time to scale up for my client or to update their system I found that the project we used didn't evolve any further and I was left having to tell my client, "time for a new solution", which they didn't like to hear because there was a migration cost and new learning curve to take on. My actions hurt the community. Soon after this I started the BLUG and learned the errors of my way.

However strong the entrepreneurial environment in China is, it is still prone to taking short cuts and shows bravado that revels any other country, even America. I read this thread and I think, 'man 8 months ago I could log on through my ADSL connection, which costs US$11 a month and download the ISOs in about 30 minutes, as well as could every market segment this 'Entrepreneur could be targeting'. Mind you this is only one example of thousands that exist. This gentleman shows a complete misunderstanding for the community, but at least he is honest enough to seek a relationship. Maybe there is room to educate him. However, countless other companies actually sell the software, in their own packaging, and then capitalize off the installation and service fees as well.

My colleague, Richard Ford, who brought this thread to my attention, had this to say about it: Typical Chinese approach to competition, sharing and business development style... no wonder (profitable) linux companies here are scarce... – Please note the BLOG I linked Richard to will be online by March 5.

Dr. Zhang began his work at Lemote at the urging of ICT. ICT has a 50 percent stake in Lemote, the other 50 percent belonging to the government. The government has funded the ICT and indirectly Lemote vary handsomely. This funding is what will allow Lemote achieve its goals which are to challenge Apple and Microsoft in the home media market, to further innovate computing in cars, and to mass produce a computer for the rural people of China.

The Lemote box is largely dependent on an ICT innovation, the Loongson Microprocessor, which is the first general purpose microprocessor in China. Interestingly enough, Loongson is licensed to a French company, ST Micro, for manufacturing and sales, of which its largest client is Lemote. The Lemote box is currently using the 2nd generation processor, 2E, which peaks at 1 GHz, 500@Spec CPU 2000. A 3rd generation is currently being designed and will have a multiple core design and be compatible with multiple platforms, including x86 and SPARC. The current processor only supports MIPS, which is a slight problem for community involvement as not many people have access to MIPS hardware.

Dr. Zhang has a strong passion for the open source community and has offered to give a box to anyone who wishes to contribute to the Lemote application platform. One of the reasons ICT brought Dr. Zhang into this company was because of his strong ties to the community--they want to leverage free software as the means for cost-effective development and as an avenue to innovate.

As to the Lemote box, its Boot Loader is pmon 2000, the box has been certified to work with MIPS, debian and SUNWAH. Certification for Gentoo, Hiweed, Magic, Red flag, Co Create and other distros is currently under way. The Lemote box is a mini PC that costs 1,600 RMB, but can be yours for free if you lend a hand. As one BLUG member commented, "Now I can imagine what it must have felt like in 1981 to have Bill Gates introduce his idea, to sit there and have someone put all the pieces together that could eventually begin a revolution." Whether or not the Lemote box will revolutionize the PC world I doubt, as does Dr. Zhang, but what it will do, like the E28 phone, is allow more people to have a cheap platform to innovate from.

The event, as reported to me, ended up being more a networking event for diplomats and company executives then a planning or even an investigative meeting on Open Source promotion in China. I am all for more groups being active in China, however, I would hope groups coming in, and especially groups as high profile as Open Tuesday, would at least bring with them the case studies and experience gained in Finland and try to indoctrinate their Chinese counterparts on the benefits of Open Source Software, from a business as well as technological point of view.

I may be a little harsh, and I should be more understanding, this was only their launch meeting, but their inability to light the imagination of the technologists in the room will make it hard for them to get people to return to their meetings. I guess I am also a little disappointed that when a friend of mine mentioned cooperation with the BLUG they didn’t seem too interested. In any case, they supposedly did a great job creating an environment for many Open Source professionals to share ideas and interests.

Beijing welcomes you Open Tuesday. I hope you will live up to your mission and promote Open Standards and be active in the China community. However, the first meeting left some wondering if this was merely a house call promoted by Finish business and government interests.

They have historically culled a group of enthusiasts that generally like to troll for interesting issues to solve in their spare time, but not much "communal" spirit was extended beyond that. However, these are the heart of the open source community in China, a community that is more devoted to work than to contributing.

Although these groups do form a foundation, they are at risk to new groups rising, groups with commercial interests, groups looking to fill the void that plagues the open source industry in China. These groups are Turbo Linux's Whitefin and Red Flag's Linux-Ren. These aren't the only groups being commercially sponsored, more are forth coming.

The government, I learnt, as well as universities are also forming communities, which are sponsored and intended to attract talented developers, or more, to point the contributors to the cause of the sponsor. The government mainly funds the top open source companies in China--those being Red Flag, Turbo Linux and Sun Wah, and these groups in turn need to devote a portion of their funding to the government initiative to promote skills in this area. It makes sense because how can the government grow its infrastructure if there is no skilled labor to develop and support it?

So, what we have now are competing communities, and those communities that existed previously will be seriously in danger of losing traffic. Why? Because of the Chinese mentality, specifically in the information technology Industry, to follow the money. These "sponsored" groups are good in one sense because they will popularize focus on "community" and draw attention to the need for skilled labor in this area, but they are also dangerous to the community because the focus is not on contribution and creativity.

Looking at Linux in the perspective of the Pig, we know that Richard Stallman began his path down the open source road at MIT, and Unix version 1 was written in 1971. In 1983 Stallman announced the GNU project and SCO Xenix was released. Outside of these events, there were no other major open source events in the Year of the Pig. However, Apple released its first GUI in 1983, and Windows 95, well I think that speaks for itself. Maybe 2007 will prove to be Linux's year.

News of Motorola's release of two new models, ROKR E6 and MING A1200, PDAs, utilizing Linux, as well as the launch of a Linux mobile phone in Hong Kong by a Shanghai-based company called E28 shows that Linux has taken the fight to a new field of battle--wireless. Japan's NTT DoCoMo has already adopted Linux for it 3G phones.

The Linux kernel being utilized in mobile phones is nothing new, I recall engineers from Nokia presenting to the BLUG (Beijing Linux User Group) in 2003 about how they had developed a whole range of tools for the kernel and how these tools furthered the development and testing of Nokia phones. I also recall Peter McDermott of Nthcode coming in and presenting Motorola phones running on Linux in 2005.

Apple is already off to a big start with the iPhone, E28 seems to be a silent contender and possible champion for bringing Linux to the commercial fore front, and fortunately Microsoft is still pushing the old business model to non-innovative partners happy to bleed this model for all its worth.

So what does this all mean? To me, the new frontier is the mobile phone. Apple enlightened us in the 80's, Windows exploded in the 90s and well into 2000. However, PC computing is a fading monster. The Internet is allowing virtual computing to become a reality and if we could agree on a measure for productivity, I would argue mobile phones are well on their way to making desktops obsolete. So, Apple had its decade, Microsoft had theirs, its only fair in this world of Ying and Yang that Linux gets a taste of the glory.

Last question, where does China fit into all of this? Well, a market like China is great for new technologies and solutions to proliferate. I hope Microsoft is successful in its fight against piracy, as the Chinese, with their burgeoning salaries and hunger for an easier life won't be turning to bulky desktops and costly software. Stylish, cost-effective and fully integrated solutions are what will dominate this market, as well as all the developing markets of this world

The answers weren't what I expected, at least not considering how critical I am of open source professionals in China. The answers were what I would expect of a Westerner. The only obvious difference was when they were exposed to Linux, which for almost all were in college. This is obvious because most didn't have access to a computer before college, and even then it was restricted to computer labs, so god knows how many closet geeks out there never got a chance to come out. For one respondent, his first experiences was in 1989 with GCC, emacs and then 1991 with Softland Linux System, and then from there he began customizing his own distro. For the younger generations, it appears that Slackware and Debian were the most fun to toy around with when they were just getting their feet wet.

Disappointingly, though, was that not many contributed to projects. There is one friend of mine, Zhang Wen Song, the creator of the Linux Virtual Server Project (LVS), but for the most part many of the top professionals were more academic about their work and if they did contribute it was mainly patches. Perhaps my sample is not big enough and perhaps the open source champions revered here are more academic, as opposed to innovative.

I will, of course, stay close to these new friends and purge them for more insight into the open source community. The good thing is they said they all like to help out other users when they see a user in need. Not many belong to user groups, but they do like to troll through old Newsgroups and an occasional list or two just to see if there are any interesting challenges.

Four times in the month previous to the earthquake, DNS foul ups knocked out connections to a lot of mail and Web servers, for durations of up to a few hours. This is of course not as bad as yesterday's DNS issues, which occurred after the earthquake and ran approximately for eight hours. How can I be so sure this is more a case of DNS and not just connectivity in general, caused by over-capacity, backup lines because servers were still accessible by IP.

The earthquake struck at 8:56pm the day before and most Web sites, despite this, were still accessible--albeit slow--till about 8am the next morning. I imagine traffic forced China Telecom and CNC to react because they couldn't coordinate much before the working hours of the next day, and when they did react, even connections to all local servers were lost, at least via DNS. I would love to be educated on this further and will definitely investigate further, but till now, all my staff and I keep getting are 'earthquake' excuses, and no matter how many times we pepper the ISPs here about IP-related issues, they all get dismissed with shrugs of the shoulders.

Other interesting DNS abuse can be read at my friend Bjorn Stabbell's blog. If not being able to get a Web site is frustrating when the right domain is typed in, I have to say getting the wrong site is even more frustrating, especially to ad sites quick at trying to download spyware.

I guess we will have to find out more in February, and I hope to be the first one to update our ZDNet Asia readers ;). As for OSDL in China, Xia is the only staff in China and he is tasked with accelerating and helping Chinese open source related organizations, companies and individual developers to take part in global open source promotion and development activities, especially OSDL activities. Recruitment of Chinese companies to OSDL is another large task, but he is primarily tasked with the duty to execute OSDL's activity plan in China.

OSDL has seven members in China. They are collaborating with the Chinese government to promote some open source related projects, with the aim of making these projects a part of global development efforts. Last year they hosted OSDL joint Face to Face meetings in Beijing, which provided a good opportunity to Chinese companies to communicate with global industry leaders. Also they are planning a developer seminar in Beijing, which will be a periodic event.

Along with our e-mail dialogue, Xia Fang sent me a recent OSDL press release, giving an idea of the changes going on at OSDL.

OSDL and other Linux kernel contributors have released Linux serviceability improvements including new kdump and SystemTap features which are available in most major distro's by now. These changes will offer the following benefits:

"The kdump enhancements are expected to improve the ability to reliably and quickly create crash dumps that can be analyzed offline, while new SystemTap features will improve debugging and performance analysis of production systems...The SystemTap improvements give IT managers, system administrators and developers the ability to debug a running system in a real-time environment. With the latest improvements, SystemTap's features have surpassed similar tools by adding the capability to debug production systems without performance degradation or recompiling. Other new features include easy to understand rich scripting language, safety built in for production systems, and system level performance analysis and debugging.

The improvements are the result of a community effort facilitated by OSDL with contributions from Fujitsu, Hitachi, HP, IBM, Intel, NEC, Novell, NTT, Red Hat, and VA Linux."

The conference is the first gathering ever of China’s biggest native OSS development groups, XOOPS. XOOPS is a highly sophisticated content-management system created and supported by the Open Source CMS XOOPS Project (http://www.xoops.org.cn), in which some 10,000 Chinese software users and developers participate.

The sponsoring institution is the China Co-Create League, an organization under the dual governance of the Ministry of Science and Technology and the Ministry of Information Industry. Co-Create was established by the Chinese central government in order to support research and development of core open source software systems that will drive diverse industrial and commercial applications. The Chinese government places an extraordinarily high priority on open source and is justly proud of the XOOPS China group, which produces some of the most innovative software in the world. The conference is certain to receive heavy press coverage.

I was given a first hand glance at the agenda and was quite impressed by the list of speakers and sponsoring organizations. This conference is really speaks to the Chinese Open Source Community and has very little Western Involvement. It does promise to be a step in the right direction as the discussion topics hit on all the key areas where China seems to miss the point of an Open Source Community.

I do have my reservations however. The conference appears to be trying to tackle every issue facing OSS in China and with such a grand list of participants it would seem an almost impossible undertaking to be able to find any consensus or provide any meaningful and clear directives for moving forward, especially in such a small span of time. Undoubtedly many ideas will be shared and a lot will be put on the table for participants to take home and dwell on, but I can’t imagine being the organizing community and trying to collate all the discussions into action points for moving forward. Secondly, following up on an event of this size can only occur in two ways, either annually or by breaking the conference down into working seminars with specific areas of interest. I would be hesitant to go the annual route as that is how many of these conferences have soon faded away and become more of tool for profit than for debate and exhibition; i.e. Linux World China.