OPEN SOURCE SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT IN CHINA

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OPEN SOURCE SOFTWARE

DEVELOPMENT IN CHINA

University of Oulu

Department of Information Processing Science Deepak K.C Deepak Lamichhane Muzamil Ahmed Abstract 1

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This paper is an exploratory introduction to the use of Open Source Software Development in China. It briefly introduces the principles of openness, the brief definition of open source and common open source licenses practices. It will also mentions the various initiatives that were taken to promote the open source software, open source software development, open source software community and its platforms in China. This paper will also gives the overview of the current situation of open source tools and application in China, their popularity and various software companies which are adopting open source and the benefits that can be brought to a company in china through the open source software.

Keywords

Open Source Software, Open Source Software Development, Licenses, Software Business, China

1. Introduction

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The emergence of open source software development is increasing day by day and the size of the open source communities are also increasing. Open source software development (OOSD) & open source software is the source of programming code and software packages, which are freely available to the users under some free licenses and liable to modify accordingly to the need without violating the licenses. Free license / open source software means the programs that are available with its source code, with specific licenses, and allows reusing and redistributing under the licenses policy (Ramanath Subramanyam & Mu Xia, 2008). Open source software lacks in the usability and user interface; nevertheless, we have an alternative to the proprietary software. We can look an example from operating system (OS) to application that run on top of those OS. For Windows OS, Mac OS x, we have Ubuntu OS, Red Hat Linux, and for IE browser, we have Firefox browser, for Oracle Standard/Enterprise edition database we have Oracle Express edition(Oracle, 2012) or MySQL. According to Morten Sieker Andreasen et. al. (2006), usability option has always remained as the less priority of many OSS projects. In China, unlike the operating system Red Hat Linux, they had their own open source operating system named Red Flag Linux. And this system holds the 30% market share of Chinese software market share & government is also supporting and playing the vital role for its improvement(Pan, G., & Bonk, C. J., 2007). It was found that, open source development initiatives & communities were not mature in the before 2007. And also there were few small scale open source development projects, but they were not well enough to compete with the proprietary software(Pan, G., & Bonk, C. J., 2007). It was claim that Red Flag Linux was the open source developments which come to rise and gain popularity among the Chinese peoples. This operating system has been introduce to compete with the proprietary software like Microsoft’s Windows, to take an economic initiatives, to reduce the piracy, increase the security issues, reduce the high cost of proprietary software, and to induce and promote the people to use the product developed by themselves i.e. Chinese people(Pan, G., & Bonk, C. J., 2007). In the last decade, organizational initiatives were starting, meaning that Hewlett-packard(HP) China had signed an agreement to provide the support for the Red Flag Linux based HP’s products in 2006(ChinaTechNews.com, 2006). In 2011, a giant company Dell in china announces to use the Ubuntu as the default operating system that will be pre-installed and will be available in 100 retailer stores (ChinaTechNews.com, 2011).

Security concerns are another driving force to adopt open source technologies. Today, Government and various organizations heavily rely on technology. Therefore information security remains a matter of concern for both government and other organizations. E-government initiatives are picking up and at the same time the security and vulnerability of commercial software have always allowed hackers an opportunity to hack the system. Even the major vendors like Microsoft have been under constant attack. The various kinds of vulnerabilities in commercial products have forced government in various countries including China and Korea to replace proprietary software with open source products. Therefore, the Linux momentum will continue (Chae, B., & Mchaney, R. 2006).

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It seems Chinese Open Source Software Development (OSSD) industry is quite small compare to the other western countries like North America & Europe. OSSD is in the startup phase and lacks the research studies in many OSSD areas. Moreover, the research areas are OSSD model, open source software distribution terms, open source licenses, movements for OSSD. The paper is focused on the descriptive analysis of the work done by different researchers/ authors in the subsequent section. We first give a brief introduction of Free/Open Source software in 1.1. Then a description of the open source software development in China in section 2. Section 3 describes the open source software movement in China. Section 4.1 describes the OSS component selection, integration & maintenance. Section 4.2 describes the OSS licenses & Licensing issues in China. Section 5 describes the impact of open source on china. Section 6 describes the challenges faced by open-source projects in China.The discussion and the conclusion will be described in 7.

1.1 Free/ Open Source Software in China

In China, a study reported that more than 80% of organizations both public and private use FLOSS applications. The FLOSS usages have been increasing with the growing size of IT departments. The main applications used widely are: GNU/Linux, MySQL, Apache, Mozilla, PHP, Open Office.org etc. Insurance companies and the service sector adopt Linux servers. The FLOSS has brought positive impact on small scale enterprises(SME) in terms of development, support, maintenance and integration. It has shifted the trend towards service-oriented business models (Rishab Aiyer Ghosh, 2007) instead of product-service-oriented business models. A Chinese newspaper, The People’s Daily quoted that “the countries would focus on the development of an Open source software certification system and Linux-based software standards, and evaluate Linux based products”. In January 4, 2007 Google search engine return the 109 million pages with the keyword “open-source in china” (Pan, G., & Bonk, C. J., 2007), and in October 31, 2012 it shows 284 million pages with the same keyword. This also shows that there has been lots of improvement and revolution in the open source projects. No research paper was found which reveals that Open Source Software Chinese communities had they own standards regarding the Open Source Initiative. So, we assumed that they also follows the open source distribution terms of Open Source Initiative (OSI). Open source is not just about the availability of the source code. Open-source software should comply the below open source distribution terms (OSI, 2012).

2.0 Open Source Software Development Model in China

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In the last decades, open source software development had gain the ample attraction and attention among the research and the business communities. The OSSD had just gain the attraction, but the open source communities and researcher are not very mature and faces many problems (Weibing Chen et al, 2007). The source code for the OSS is easily available to everyone and is shared with few restrictions. Likewise, in the proprietary software development model, it is necessary to have the development model i.e. processes, tools and communities for the development of open source software. Moreover, development processes and tools aid & ease on developing the software within the open source software community. OSSD occurs in the distributed manner and there is no fixed OSSD method.

According to Weibing Chen et al (2007), despite the china became to employ the OSS in the industry and government organization, especially operating software like Red Flag Linux, there are lots of challenges in the open source software development industry and only few research has been performed. Open source projects like Apache, Ubuntu had gained the success on open source development model (Yi Wang et al. , 2007, Weibing Chen et al. , 2007 ) and it’s also demonstrates that OSSD projects can assure many functionality with high quality. And the use of such OSSD projects model provides greater flexibility, and helped many organizations to reduce the developments efforts by reusing open source software code (Weibing Chen et al., 2007). The OSSD projects like Apache, Linux and so on had clearly maintained and mentioned their development model (Linux, 2012, Apache Software Foundation, 2012). Even though there seems to be no any hard and fast development model of OSS, many observations show that at least a set of common features like roles, activities, tools etc. are shared by many fully-fledged OSS projects. It can also be understood in a way that OSS development practices are continuously evolving in these communities. As Jacques Lonchamp (2006) mentioned, OSS communities’ members are autonomous. In China, there are few international and local open source communities which still exist despite the fact of financial & motivation problem (Yi Wang et al., 2007). The OSSD communities of china are not diverse in nature. It is because of the financial problem to hold the international conferences and domestic enterprises finds difficult on providing the financial assistant to the open source software communities(Yi Wang et al., 2007). The international communities are Ubuntu Chinese Team, Debian Chinese & local communities are C3CRM, Extmail, JiuJie, Linuxfans, LUPA, Rnby Chinese, UdClub China, WiseReal, WoodPecker Pythonic (Yi Wang et al., 2007 ).

We know open source software development take place in distributed manner. Typically, communication are quite often done through Instant messaging, Internet Relay Channel, projects web forums, mailing lists, FAQ and so on. In China’s Open source communities’ project web forums & instant messaging are popular compare to those Internet Relay Channel & mailing lists (Yi Wang et al., 2007). Due to financial matter, face-to-face communication through international conferences is rarely done, but developers within the same city meet and share the ideas between the core developers (Yi Wang et al., 2007).

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Most of the open source software project communities are in onion shape structured (Crowston, K., & Howison, J., 2006). They consists core developers, codevelopers, active users and passive users. Currently, in China they lack the active users because of which it is difficult to test the open source software and track the bug reports (Yi Wang et al., 2007). The governance in the open source community was influenced by the centralized governance. In the centralized governance, only small groups takes the decision and so the engagement of the public is low(Yi Wang et al., 2007).

3. Software Development with Open Source Communities

in China

The trend of re-using OSS components is getting more and more popular among Chinese Software Firms(Weibing Chen et al., 2007). Despite the various benefits, it is always challenging to select the right component and successfully integrate the component. The licensing issue is also a matter of concern; component testing and integration testing of those components and system maintenance are also the critical issues. The localization of the software seemed a bit problematic as the localization caused a close participation with the OSS community (Weibing Chen et al. , 2007).

The use of OSS model helps to achieve lower cost, higher quality, better performance, robustness, higher reliability and adherence to industrial standards and shorter time to market.

3.1 OSS Component Selection, Integration & Maintenance

Chinese Companies use web search engines as the most common method to discover necessary OSS components in their system development. Local expertise along with requirements compliance is the decisive factor to select OSS components. The selection and use of the open source component depends upon the community comments and the reuse of the OSS components are so called “derived programs”. And many OSS licenses just tells the “derived programs” should be publicly available (Weibing Chen et al. , 2007).The numbers of OSS components have drastically increased over years. There are hundreds of thousands of OSS projects registered at sourceforge.net. The availability of numerous options with so many components available for doing the similar task makes it difficult to select the best one that can be integrated into a new system. The most widely used method to locate OSS components is the use of Google and Sourceforge(Weibing Chen et al., 2007). Finding appropriate OSS component is more based on search engines and internal experience. The internal experiences that were considered were like the prior use of components, reading magazines and getting advice from internal colleagues. The factors like requirement compliance, quality of component

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in terms of security, reliability and usability, functionality, reputation of components, quality and availability of documentation and support sites and the environment supported like the platform and hardware are also taken into consideration to find the appropriate OSS component. [Øyvind,Thomas,Carl,Marinela, 2009]

After the selection, the integration of component to the system is done after considering the technical issues such as API and programming language(Weibing Chen et al., 2007). The system is then tested. The requirements are re-checked and final version of a system is developed.

The system updates are to be done on regular basis so as to maintain the system for long run. It becomes difficult because OSS communities mostly provide their technical support via email and bulletin board. System maintenance and system support relies heavily on the community support sites and instructions.The bug fixing for the components were heavily relied on support from the OSS community and component user. Motivation to enhance functionalities and fixing bugs and monitoring updated component are key points here. The maintenance of the open source software components is just done by providing the feedback and reporting the bugs (Weibing Chen et al. , 2007).

3.2 OSS Licenses and Licensing Issues

Chinese culture believe more on knowledge sharing, their government’s official policy is promoting open source project (whose source code is easily available and can be distributed).Open source licenses (i.e. GNU General public license) are also supports idea of share and distribute knowledge by enforcing developers to provide source code with the software project and if someone use this code he/she also comes under the restriction of the same license and providing source is also becomes mandatory. The traditional copyright laws supports ownership of the software product so that author can get more incentives from his/ her work. The open source software licenses are being used to contrary with the concept of copyrights, author of software product use these licenses to promote the sharing instead of making profit from their work (Patel N., 2005).

China is facing multiple issues regarding license of Open Source Software,in year 2001 China accepted in WTO, and as member of WTO china has to implement TRIP (Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights) laws, The TRIPs agreement “is to date the most comprehensive [international] agreement on intellectual property. It encompasses every type of intellectual property, including Copyright” (Patel N., 2005) but it’s seems to like China is not very successful in enforcing these laws. According to an estimation in 2002 only 4 % in use software of China were legal(Patel N., 2005).

China build their Red Flag Linux Operating system based on Linux Kernel which is GPL license. GPL license is limiting China to own the independent intellectual rights of their operating

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system. Another main issue for them regarding license is that legal agreements for Open Source Software including GPL are based on mostly on USA’s law and its legal significance is only acceptable in English, which mean its Chinese translation is not significant enough. To get acknowledged OSS rights China need to formulate new agreements which can comply copyright laws of China after taking care of international laws and conventions. According to (Xie, R., 2008), the following several points should be paid special attention to.

(1) According to OSIA’s requirement on the OSS, the basic right and duty should be clear. (2) The patent permission authorization should be clear.

(3) The situation which can cause the agreement terminated should be clear. (4) Whether issuing source code according to this permit.

(5) Possible property right of obtained source code should be prompted by legal.

4. Open Source movement in China

The open-source software movement is getting popular in China. The Chinese government has supported Open Source movements by giving more preferences for Linux(Pan, G., & Bonk, C. J., 2007). Various initiatives are undertaken in China to promote open source software in China. Open Source Software movement was started in China after announcing a combined initiative by China, Japan and Korea in 2003 to promote the OSS (Chae, B., & Mchaney, R., 2006). There are multiple reasons behind this movement.

Firstly, they wanted to discourage the piracy, according to studies there was approximately 92% of people were using pirated software in 2003(Piracy Study, 2007) and the best solution to reduce this high rate of piracy is to provide low-cost alternative to people.

Secondly, China wanted to build and develop their IT industry infrastructure, for this reason Chinese government was looking for the alternative solution to proprietary software. If we go more depth into this idea, we can found that the base of this idea is more closed to cultural and political aspects (in context of cyber war between China and USA), as Microsoft is USA based company and Chinese official was more concerned to this matter they think US Government can use this monopoly they can embed some compromise able code and can use those backdoors against China at any time that’s why they want not to use windows as their operating system(Pan, G., & Bonk, C. J., 2007). It was stated in (Pan, G., & Bonk, C. J., 2007), "the Chinese Government is a bit paranoid about having proprietary code; it is worried about a backdoor into its systems", according to Madanmohan Rao.

4.1 Organizational Group Movements

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Many organizations like China Open Source Promotion Union, Hong Kong Open Source Software center, GuagDong Linux Center, Beijing Linux Users Group, Taipei Open Source Software Users Group are actively participating to promote the use of open-source in China. China Open-Source Promotion Union (COPU) was formed in 2006 in China, which consists of various members who were open source executives around the world. They meet annually to give suggestion to COPU on how to motivate people in development and adaptation of open-source software in China(Pan, G., & Bonk, C. J., 2007). Chinese governments installed the open-source software in various governmental sectors. The open-source software promotion founded by the Chinese Ministry of Information encouraged to enhance the China’s open source software industry and did alliance with different software vendors. In addition, the Chinese government combined with the French Atomic Energy Commission to develop a new low-cost, high performance software platform that leads to the development of complete chain of compatible open-source systems for China (Pan, G., & Bonk, C. J., 2007).

4.2 Chinese Software Vendors Movements

The other important movement is the alliance formed by the Chinese software vendors: Red Flag Software, Beijing Co-Create open-source, Zhongbiao Software, Wuxi Evermore Software, Kingsoft, and Beijing Red flag Chinese 2000 with Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Novell and Intel China’s first open- source software organization. This alliance is formed to support and cooperate in Linux development as well as to promote open-source development in China(Legard, D., 2004). RedFlag Linux, Pugs, XOOPS, Open Foundry are some of the popular open-source projects in China.

4.3 Education Sector Movements

The open-source software also seems to be beneficial (in both financial and intellectual terms) to Chinese educational institutions and many of them are with an opinion to join hands to develop open source software projects. For example, in year 2005, more than 70 universities and Zhengjiang Linux Center (ZJLC) formed China’s 1st Leadership of open-source University Promotion Alliance (LUPA) which initialized a new open source community named as LupaWorld. Another noticeable contribution in Open Source from Chinese education sector is localization of western Open Source projects: 1) Websurvey(a course survey and evaluation system); 2) Sakai(a course management system); 3) EduCommons(an open courseware tool) into Chinese language(Pan, G., & Bonk, C. J., 2007).

Chinese Ministry of education is also encouraging higher educational institutions to form partnership and build OSS communities with colleges in China and also with other countries. This will help to resolve many financial issues faced by many education institution in China.

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The other idea behind this movement is knowledge sharing. This movement will build and expand the social and intellectual capital to each participating institutions providing an ample opportunity to the talents each higher education institution holds to nurture their initiative and innovation (Pan, G., & Bonk, C. J., 2007., Hu, B. , Scotto, M.(Eds.) and Succi, G. (Eds.), 2007). These open-source initiatives and movement in China prove the clear determination of Chinese software vendors, organizational groups, educational sectors and Government of China to have open source software substitute for various licensed and closed source products and spreading the motivation and education to use open source software.

5. Impacts of Open Source on China

The government of China is applying a huge amount of efforts to develop a state version, open source software solutions. The support provided by the government is potentially a backbone of Chinese Open Source Industry. The domestic software industry based on Open Source can achieve a huge advantage by tailoring services to an exclusive market without the need for bothering to build necessary application from the scratch. Industry can utilize the built in open source source code and customize it to meet their requirements(Pan, G., & Bonk, C. J., 2007). There are already several Linux companies being established in China. Red flag, the distribution company, founded in the year 2000 which is favored by the Chinese Government is the largest and most rapidly developed Linux vendor in China. It has maintain its unique status in the open source community and is backed up by the government. Red flag provides high quality Linux based products and services. The product includes desktop operating system, Linux server operating system, cluster system, embedded system, technical support services and different kinds of trainings related to open source. The technical solutions and services developed by Red Flag have been adopted by different types of industries including government, schools, telecommunication, finance, insurance etc.The company employs more than 150 people and has its headquarter situated in the capital of China, Beijing. The company has also opened its two subsidiaries in two different locations namely Guanzhou & Shanghai. It deploys a very well established sales channels and services networks all over China (Red Flag Software, 2010).

The Open Source solutions are often obtained free of charge or at minimal cost. The maintenance and the support services costs are relatively less in comparison to closed source solutions. Due to this nature of open source, the Open Source industry like Red Flag has brought substantial impact on Chinese industries. The open source solution has facilitate the chinese industry to reduce the hold of proprietary vendors. The openness of the open source community attracts a lot of Chinese customers who are taking steps to avoid being locked up

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by a particular vendor. The software industry in China has been reshaped with the open source movements (Patel, N., 2005).

China remains one of the worst countries in terms of copyright infringement and trademark violations(Piracy study, 2007). Most of the best Chinese software developers either immigrate to the United States or work in the Chinese offices of US firms. This trend has resulted a number of developers trained and funded by Chinese government to work for foreign companies on proprietary software. The intense problem of piracy also makes it very difficult for the Chinese software firms to survive. Piracy has damaged the Chinese software industry in a very concrete way. The entire people get easy access or cheap access to Microsoft and other proprietary software, which makes it no reason for them to pay for Chinese Software (Patel, N., 2005). With these existing problems of piracy, Chinese government have realized and made a crucial movement to develop a version of Linux to be used by the government as per the terms of GPL and also make it freely available to the public. The prevailing situation makes open source to be the only alternative for Chinese software firms to compete with foreign companies. The economics of open source do not depend on the direct sale of software; the Chinese companies can freely distribute their product and compete in the marketplace to win critical mindshare (Mingzhi,Zhangxi & Mu, 2005).

There are already several Linux companies being established in China. Red Flag, the distribution company favored by the Chinese government is the most prominent one, which has the unique status in the open source community and is backed up by government. Red Flag utilizes its resources on customizing Linux for the Chinese market and marketing the world’s only operating system designed to serve the needs of Chinese people. Open-source provides an opportunity to work on the imported technology plus the knowledge of Chinese market that definitely gives domestic enterprises a comparative advantage over foreign companies. This way of technology transfer being practiced in China offers enormous benefits both financial and political (Patel, N., 2005).

6. Challenges faced by Open Source Projects in China

The domestic software market in China is unable to provide all required software products for the country. China heavily relies on foreign software products. The domestic software industry comprises a very small part of country’s economy. China has to establish its own software industry to greater extent to reduce its dependency on imported products. The current situation of the software industry in China offers a lot of opportunities for Open Source solutions as it is not necessary to build up an application from the scratch while at the same time the piracy of imported software are a greater challenge to overcome for the open source projects in China

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(Apco Worldwide, 2010).

Despite various movements and initiatives, adopted by Chinese Government and various other software organizations in China, open-source projects in China faces an enormous number of challenges. The long adoption of commercial products in various Chinese companies also makes it unrealistic to switch over an entire company’s systems from proprietary software to open-source. The other reason for Chinese companies is a rampant software piracy. Pirated copies of Windows and various other commercial applications are openly sold at Chinese electronic markets.The availability of windows copy for a relatively less amount or free makes no sense for companies to adopt open-source operating systems and technologies (PCWorld Good Gear Guide, 2009). Software piracy is of major concern that has hindered OSS to steal ground from proprietary software.

Even though the Chinese Government backs multiple domestic open-source projects, their software is not widely used. The low awareness, lack of big open-source projects and difficulty to find source expertise are various other issues that hamper the development of open-source in China. A very few large commercial organizations have switched to Linux. Common people in China are not using OSS. The open-source are still limited only within the government agencies and the education sector.

Among several reasons, the biggest reason why Chinese companies do not choose open source solutions is the rampant software piracy. According to the PC world news, the piracy rate in the year 2008 was 80%. The pirated copies of windows and other proprietary software are used in countless pcs in both offices and homes. The availability of pirated software at low cost overtakes the opportunity of saving money by switching to open source solutions. The business opportunities for the Open Source industry are also extremely difficult without the support of government. The open source projects that have guaranteed big deals with the Chinese government are the ones that have been able to survive in China(Open Source Adoption Obstacles, 2009).

The open-source business model proves to be ineffective in China due to low-cost labor. Open Source industry relies on giving away software for free and then selling related services. This model of open source doesn’t seem to work in China, as it is cheaper to hire own technical support staff for a particular company than to buy services from some other vendors.

The lack of awareness regarding open source software, software piracy, low-cost labor and the unwillingness of various Chinese industries to adopt open source solutions are major challenges for Open Source projects in China.

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7.0 Discussions & Conclusions

The discussion aforementioned are based on the different research paper and some other sources of information. It can be concluded that due to lack of research paper on those sub-section heading, the information provided cannot be generalizable and can’t be adopt for describing the open source software development in china precisely. However, those information are based on few research paper, governmental information, & technical news. We can say that open source software development in China is in the startup phase. In most cases, the FLOSS projects are based on voluntary contributions. The number of FLOSS projects is increasing every day that provides several opportunities to select a particular application for the similar task. They don’t have the good voluntary organizations and people promoting the open source software development because of the financial problems & high extrinsic motivation. The government had taken some initiatives to use the OSS because of which the investment in the proprietary software decreases. China open source communities also lack in the OSS development models. The further research can be done China’s OSSD development model, OSS communities’ motivation.

China’s Government is also backing up strongly to avoid multiple issues like piracy, low cost solution for software industry, building and using software to avoid any type of unsafe situation, to ensure privacy and closure of back doors into the system to avoid cyber-attacks. To promote Open Source China’s IT ministry formed alliance with different national and international companies, Chinese government took initiative collectively with other countries to promote Open Source Software development, different organization are putting their efforts into making Open Source Software communities. Multiple sites are built to provide awareness and education about Open Source Software, China’s education sector also played their role into the promotion of this movement as this provide low-cost software solutions to different educational institute which are facing financial issues with software field and also help them to increase their intellectual capital.

Selecting software component for Open Source Software system are not an easy task, there are multiple issues attached with this selection (i.e. compliance of license, Quality of component, integration testing and maintenance), especially when there are a lot of choices available in the market providing/doing almost the same tasks then it becomes very difficult to choose the best component which can integrate with system. China needs to do more research in these issues.

License is tricky part in OSS; there are multiple types of Open Source Software licenses. There are some difficulties for Chinese government to get independent license for their Open Source software and also facing issues related to national laws of copyrights and language problem

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(English to Chinese conversion) of GPL or other mostly used OSS license.Creating/modifying local laws of intellectual property which can comply with international IP laws in more effective ways (like TRIP) is also a challenging task for Chinese government.Open source Software license in China is influenced by their culture and law structure directly or somehow indirectly. Piracy seems to be one of the major challenges to open source and Chinese software firms. The other problem is the low awareness among people concerning open source software. Relatively the number of big open source projects is also lacking in China however in recent times the situation has improved. The open-source solutions are very much used in the government sectors. Many people still are using the pirated software over open-source software.

Open-source in China despite a number of challenges seems to be booming in the current period of time. The Chinese Government has taken a number of initiatives and movement to support open source development and tools in China heavily backs it. The software industry like Red Flag are signing deals with various vendors like Dell, IBM etc. to use the open source software in their hardware which are sold in China which makes it more convenient to spread open source in Chinese market.

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OPEN SOURCE SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT IN CHINA