Whither China?
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China has been in the news a lot for the past few years, probably because of inter-imperialist competition, or something.
Anyways the Party has decided it likes open source:
China also wants to build "two or three open source communities with international influence."
"software defines the world of the future, open source determines the future of software"
https://www.theregister.com/2021/12/01/china_five_year_software_plan/
"It falls short of mandating FOSS, but strongly recommends participation in global FOSS creation efforts."
https://www.theregister.com/2021/10/29/china_encourages_foss_in_fintech/
We're familiar with Deepin and openEuler and Chinese contributions to free software projects. I wonder if people are optimistic or not regarding the Party's embrace, and if there's anything we can do to help software freedom in China considering the language barrier.
Something else I'm interested is that as some of the younger generation is rediscovering Maoism if this may shift any developer's ideology as disseminating Stallmanism does. Computing is often overlooked in studies of the Mao era but the party was actively involved there too:
http://www.signalfire.org/2015/09/12/contributions-from-a-round-table-on-computers-1975/
I am a translator!
I never identify the inhabitants of a country with the state authorities of that country. Besides, for a country of 1.4 billion inhabitants, it is clear that the diversity of attitudes towards free software can be huge.
I use Seafile, which is a great piece of software, under Apache 2.0 license (it is in the Free Software Directory, which is where I found it), made and maintained by a company in Beijing, which helps me synchronizing files accros my computers and sharing files with others to whom I create an account on my Seafile server (now running on Debian, but I think it would work on Trisquel).
On another aspect, I work with many Chinese people living in China, unfortunately they use mostly proprietary software, like most people I know in my home country. One thing that I have a huge problem with: in LineageOS, the support for input in Chinese is very poor, so I cannot suggest to any of my Chinese contact to install LineageOS, it would be unusable for them. To me, providing good method to input Chinese on LineageOS and Replicant is absolutely necessary to enable Chinese people to adopt such systems, which would be far better than the software provided by mobile phone manufacturers.
On my side, for someone learning Chinese, being able to draw characters with a finger instead of searching in the index of a dictionnary by number of stroke and radical is a bit like switching from a world without electricity to a world with it, it makes a radical difference. I searched for a free software dictionnary doing that and found none. So I am still using a proprietary software for that on a smartphone with LineageOS.
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