Posted on 08/18/2003 2:08:13 PM PDT by Feldkurat_Katz
A new policy by China's governing body the State Council will rule that all ministries have to buy only locally-produced software at the next upgrade cycle.
The move, aimed at breaking the dominance of U.S.-based Microsoft on desktop computers, will eliminate Microsoft's Windows operating system and Office productivity suite from hundreds of thousands of Chinese government computers in a few years' time.
Gao Zhigang, an official with the Procurement Center of the State Council, told reporters that the new policy will be in place by year-end.
At a special congress held to encourage ministries to upgrade to WPS Office 2003, a China-made office productivity suite, Gao said that only hardware pre-installed with domestic operating systems and application software will be purchased by government. Those seeking exceptions will need to submit a special request.
The new policy is expected to increase the number of government officials using domestic-made office software from a third to 100 percent eventually. Gao said that the new policy is meant to support the local software industry and protect state information security.
The new policy will continue till at least until 2010. These protections are standard and are not meant to discriminate against other countries, said the Council. China is a member of the World Trade Organization and it is unclear if the new bans contravene the body's charters.
"The domestic software industry is very insulated. There is poor interaction and partnership with user companies. The increased use of domestic software will make the China software industry more open," said Fei Lin, an official with the State Assets Supervision and Administration Commission.
The ban comes as part of China's efforts to challenge Western technology. Chinese software company Kingsoft used to take 90 percent of the market with its Chinese word processing tool, but lost nearly all market share to Microsoft Word when the product entered in the early 90s.
Experts say that the WPS system is the only product that will challenge Microsoft Office's dominance of the Chinese market.
In addition to commercial reasons for protecting local software, there are security concerns. China is placing official support behind the Red Flag Linux operating system, which they trust because the open-source code allows officials to see that there are no data spyholes installed by foreign powers. In response, Microsoft has been on a charm offensive, including granting the government inspection rights over Windows source code and creating a new CEO position for Greater China.
Recently, China rejected globally-dominant MPEG for its own audio-video compression standard, known as AVS. China is keen to move its IT infrastructure away from the dominance of Western companies and the fees levied by such firms.
ZDNet China's Zhang Xiaonan contributed to this report.
The only difference is that our elected officials are surrendering the lives and fortunes of all our future generations also.
A nice payback for all this outsourcing!
Because it's an American product, versus your foreign conceived and maintained Linux. That is the point of this thread, but you seem to prefer defending Communist China for some reason.
If you like steve50 support the Chinese in this line of reasoning, then you wouldn't want any Linux in the US government, right?
I said that it would be stupid for China to use software that they couldn't be sure was secure, the same as it would be stupid for the U.S. of A to do the same. Not sure how you get supporting China out of that, I'm supporting common sense. You must have cash riding on M$.
Sure, MS works very closely with the US government on many projects, especially for DoD. Here's one I found with a simple Yahoo search:
http://www.gcn.com/vol19_no27/dod/2868-1.html
Creating a "son of Windows" to run an aircraft carrier.
No that's not what you said, you said it made sense for China to use Linux, because MS was not Chinese. However you refuse to accept an equivalent argument that the US should use US derived software instead of foreign derived software like Linux, because you indicated the US derived software was somehow inferior.
It's obvious your bias is against US software, or you really need to straighten your position up, a lot.
And if you cared to read the rebutts of thread, you would see the the constant attempts by the Linux crowd to infer that it is somehow an endorsement by the NSA of Linux is simply incorrect. It is clearly not an endorsement of Linux, provide me the link there and I will show where it is only some testing going on, and is "not a secure solution" I believe it says.
Unless I missed your point, SuSe is not an American product. Germany is where it comes from.
Probably in some mutual somewhere, but my cash is riding on the US economy. Technology is our #1 export now, and your precious little Linux is now shutting out MS, Sun, Oracle, Apple, you name it out of the Chinese market. This is about a lot more than MS, although many of you can't ever see beyond that.
The only difference is that our elected officials are surrendering the lives and fortunes of all our future generations also.
At least the French are doing it out of a sense of self preservation and some have showed elan.
I don't go along with your narrative because:
1) I detest the way M$ has done business through the years. A bad example of capitalism.
2) M$ has hired tons of H1-B workers so is not particularly loyal to American workers nor patriotic. When I think of corporations that are patriotic M$ never comes to mind.
3) Linux is developed by people from all over the world through I'll admit it is a collective/collectivist effort
1. Who is "us"?
2. Does the government have your permission to use BSD, since it was developed in the US?
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