Any business interested in breaking into the Chinese market should look consider Microsoft as a case study. David Kirkpatrick from Fortune Magazine explains how Microsoft has turned things around in China. It’s a good read.

On that note, you’d think open source would have some natural advantages in China, right? Its low cost and the license mean freedom from a foreign firm. Those are just some of the reasons Linux has been pushed by the Chinese goverment in the past. Yet in actuality, open source faces a lot of challenges here. Low cost and licensing might be a driver of open source in developed economies, but when licenses are ignored and commercial software pirated for free, as they are in China, the game changes.

Microsoft has other advantages too. Bill Gates is a symbol of wealth in China and there are plenty of Chinese computer science grads hoping to strike it rich (which is one of the problems with the computer industry here). So add his reputation to Microsoft’s reputation as the biggest and best software company in the world and the attraction becomes obvious. Moreover, Microsoft can develop a focused China strategy while the Linux competition is split across multiple vendors, both local and foreign, and none of which, with perhaps the exception of IBM, have the brand recognition to match.

One the one hand, I commend Microsoft for finally getting their China strategy in order and seeing some success here. On the other hand, I wish the Chinese government and people would see past the shiny Microsoft image and consider the long term implications of basing their IT industry on a foreign monopolist.

That was the title of the open source conference held last week in Guangzhou, China. The conference lasted two days, followed by a smaller conference over the weekend in Macau. I estimate there were between 200-300 people in attendance for at Guangzhou. There were also several distinguished guests from the West including Brian Behlendorf, Jim Zemlin, Mark Shuttleworth, Simon Phipps, Chris DiBona, Larry Augustin, Dirk Hohndel and others.

The first day of the conference was filled with 15-20 minute keynotes that went on all day, only breaking for a wonderful buffet lunch. The second day was split in two. A thirty person roundtable session was followed by three tracts of smaller panel discussions. Translation services were provided for the first day and the first half of the second day. In my own opinion, the translations were not very faithful, but were certainly better than nothing.

For attendees of OSCON, this was not that kind of conference. This was not a developer oriented event. There were no technical talks, no demos, no training. This was all about policy, position statements and marketing opportunities. That said, it was an excellent networking event. It’s important that those investing time, money, and political capital into open source in China have a chance to meet together and share ideas, to be recognized for their efforts, and to develop new initiatives and lay the seeds for future ones.

Personally, I enjoyed the event. I had a chance to meet with several of the individuals I had first met in Beijing earlier this year. And I finally got to be introduced to many others whom I had been hoping to find. China is all about relationships, so this sort of face time is important.

The Macau event was similar, though only for a single day. I was invited to speak there and managed to give half my talk in Mandarin and half in English. Many of the attendees had also been in Guanzhou the day before, though I also met new folks some Macau and Hong Kong.

Some things I learned include:

• The Guangzhou region is investing heavily in open source, in particular with its Linux center
• You heard of Red Flag Linux? Well, now there’s Red Office.
• Kingdee, a ERP company in Shenzhen China, also offers Apusic, a JEE middleware server, and an open source implementation of JSF called Opera Masks
• Microsoft attended, gave a short keynote, but wasn’t necessarily welcomed
• There is a small, though active, open source community in Macau
• I bumped into a Tapestry committe, Kent Tong, who lives in Macau
• ObjectWeb has joined forces with a Chinese open source middleware group (Orientware) to form OW2 (not new news, but it was talked about at the conference)
• The questions everyone (still) has are “How to we make money with open source?” and “What is the open source business model for China?”

The discussion at the middleware panel in Guangzhou was a bit more technically oriented with questions ranging from “What do you think of Inversion of Control (IoC) frameworks?” to “What does Ruby on Rails mean for Java Enterprise?” to “What’s Apache’s future in China?”. Somehow or another, Brian found himself invited to sit up front and join the session. It was fun to see the Apache founder being quizzed in Chinese about Java Enterprise software. He did make out with a pretty nifty sword though:

I apologize for not better blogging about all the recent Hong Kong open source events. I’m promising to do better. Here’s a recap of some recent activities I’ve had the chance to attend:

Hong Kong’s Kapok Gallery recently featured an exhibit on the intersection between open source and art entitled, Right Click：Open Source New Media Art Exhibition. I had the chance to meet Josh Minor from Pixar whose work, Video Pong, was featured. I didn’t expect to find open source art exhibits here, so I find this event particularly encouraging.

Professor Bebo White, concluded his most recent visit to Hong Kong with a talk at the University of Hong Kong on Open Source Software—A Collaboration Platform for Web Applications. His presentation was well attended and he the session went a little long due to all the discussion he stirred up. I heard a lot of questions about open source business models, open source versus commerical software, and some criticism noting that most open source software are very technical low-level tools and components. I’ll have an article up soon responding to some of those comments. It was great to meet Prof White and I look forward to his next visit to Hong Kong.

Finally, yesterday I attended a short seminar on How to successfully develop an open source software market hosted by the Hong Kong Open Source Software Center (HKOSSC). The meeting included speakers from Linux Pilot, IBM, Red Hat / JBoss, and HKOSSC. I’m grateful that at least one of the speakers, Ben Wang from Red Hat, spoke in Mandarin as my Cantonese is pretty non-functional. The fact that such events are occurring is a sign of interest in open source here in Hong Kong, but that interest still appears to be mostly top down. I expect a similar format and approach at next week’s open source conference in Guangzhou.

Speaking of upcoming events, I’ll be in Guangzhou next week for Open Source China, Open Source World. I’m also getting the word out about the new joint Apache and Eclipse conference here in Hong Kong in November: OS Summit Asia. I’ll have another article about that soon.

It’s bad enough that I can’t get Wikipedia here in mainland China. The other day I went to view a Google Tech Talk and got the following message:

*Thanks for your interest in Google Video.*

Currently, the playback feature of Google Video isn’t available in your country.

We hope to make this feature available more widely in the future, and we really appreciate your patience.

Lovely. Even Apple iTunes allows me to purchase music from my account here, but no Google Video. So I did what I had to do and ssh’ed into a server back in the states and used lynx(web_browser) to get to the video webpage. From there I could download a version for the iPod and I could then take that MP4 file and put it somewhere I could download back to a computer here. I’m going to have to write a server side script that does all of this for me. Oh well.

News is out that China’s GDP growth rate hit a 10 year record at 10.7% for 2006.

What might be more important is that 50% of Chinese economic activity is from fixed asset investment. When you consider that India’s fixed asset investment is under 30% of GDP and the US and UK’s is around 17%, then you begin to understand why China is using up 30% of the world’s supply of raw materials. The signs are apparent everywhere you look in China’s booming cities. Looking around Shanghai or Guangzhou you could easily see a dozen skyscrapers under construction in any direction.

Everyone’s looking for the Chinese economy to slow down a bit. However, the US economy hasn’t slowed down the way it was expected to. The appreciating yuan only serves to check inflation pressures (at 2.8%) and attract more foreign investment.

What may eventually trip China up is domestic demand. As the IMF pointed out earlier this week, China’s economy is still too dependent on trade and foreign investment. As I mentioned before, this definitely seems to be the case for the software market. Were investment to truly slow down, the shift to domestic consumption could be rough.

Wikipedia never looked so good. I’m in Macau now and after almost a month of not being able to access wikipedia and a couple other sites, I’ve finally got a clear, fast, uncensored connection. I’m not sure if the speed is due to not having to deal with the Great Firewall of China or if the undersea cables are finally being repaired. More likely the former. But even better than the speed is the ability to connect to Wikipedia which has been censored in mainland China since last fall.

It wasn’t just Wikipedia that was missing though. Access to Slashdot and SourceForge was slow or unavailable often, as were a number of other sites. However, these I suspect were more due to the damaged connections than political blocking. In order to access a few sites and files I had to resort to ssh-ing into a server in the US and using Links and wget to grab what I needed. That was actually faster in some cases than waiting for a file to download directly. Oh and let me go on record here and now that Sourceforge’s choice of using an ajax dialog to switch your download mirror is a bad idea. The dialog would never return, so I had to jump into the source, find the URL myself and get the list of mirrors manually. What an unnecessary pain.

But all of that is behind me now. At least for the next month or two as we travel through Macau, Hong Kong and Taiwan. And if we do end up settling back in mainland China (which is likely), I’ll be sure to setup proxy software first this time.

For the last two weeks I’ve been in Beijing researching the state of open source efforts here in China. With the help of some of my fellow members at the Apache Software Foundation I was introduced to the Chinese Open Source Promotion Union ( COPU ). I met with Mr. Lu Shouqun and discussed internals of ASF and how we build open source communities there. We also discussed the state of open source here in China, what success and challenges they’ve faced. Thanks to Wu Jinnan, I had the chance to visit CSIP and talk to those working on Linux and open source there. Other meetings I’ve attended here included a short visit with Intel and the Beijing LUG that I already mentioned.

The case for open source in developing countries is strong; however, the US, Japan and Europe are still home to most open source developers, projects and companies. Within the ASF, we have no Chinese members and only a few Chinese committers. While I’m here in China I’m hoping to change that and help bridge the gap between oss communities in the East and West.

As to what challenges exist, well, I’m still learning. :-) One of my first impressions is that there’s still a lot of misunderstanding about how open source communities work and what motivations drive oss development. I heard a lot of talk about looking for business models. And the Chinese software market certainly does have it’s own peculiarities. For example, in the past there was strong government support for open source projects but the actual local demand was very small. In fact, the entire Chinese IT and software market, while growing, is still pretty immature. I’ve also seen a lot of focus on desktop projects and heard talk about trying to get Windows APIs into Linux (but not with wine ).

Later this week I’ll be in Shanghai and then after that I’ll be visiting several cities in the Pearl River Delta—Guangzhou, Macao, Shenzhen and Hong Kong. While there I’ll be meeting with Scott McNeil who’s been working on the Global Desktop project. I think his approach of working with universities to introduce students to open source may have the most success of any OSS program here in China.

I’ll be sharing what I discover here on Cubicle Muses. I’m also hoping to collect up some of what I learn and present it this year at ApacheCon or OSCON.

We’ve been in China for about two weeks now and we’ve started to adjust to new timezone, food and weather. I’ve also had to adjust to not having regular access to the internet. This is more a matter of us switching hotels and the fallout of the earthquake last year than it is an indictment of the internet in China. Apparently it’ll be another fifteen days before connectivity is back to what it was before the undersea cables were damaged.

Gnus has become a good friend of mine now. With gmail access spotty, I’ve relied on good old POP3 access more and more. My only trouble is learning the key shortcuts. I’m starting to get the basic ones down but I still have to regularly refer to the manual. I thought about going back to mutt, but I like having access to my mail, rss feeds and news feeds all in one client. I tend to get between 100-150 emails a day that I have to go through, so a reasonably fast client is a must.

And for those wondering, I’m finally going to start putting up some articles about both the startup and my investigations into open source in China. Stay tuned.

If you’re ever in Beijing on the second Tuesday of the month, try to stop in at Steak & Eggs to attend the Beijing Linux User Group. Last night I was surprised to find that most of the 30 some people who attended were foreigners. The meeting was even in English! (about changes in the lastest draft of the GPL v3). It was a good crowd and when I’m next in Beijing I’ll definitely be there.

Finally got my laptop online here in China which means I can start blogging again. I’m having difficulty hitting several sites in the US and most of this trouble I assume is due to the earthquake. Photos will be up on Flickr and Peregrinari shortly.

Of all the accounts I had to cancel and possessions I’ve had to give up or sell in order to prepare for this trip to China, canceling Netflix was one of the hardest. Well, giving up my cellphone number (not the phone itself, but the number) was difficult too. If anyone is wondering exactly what we’ve done to prepare for our trip, you may want to check out our latest article on Peregrinari, our travelogue blog.

In one week I and my family will be off to China. We’ve got a one way ticket and definite travel plans through April, but beyond that we’re not quite sure where we’ll end up. You can follow our adventure in more detail on our Perigrinari blog.

William and I are in the midst of launching a start up. I’ve been independently consulting this year in order to help raise funds and over the next couple of months he and I will be putting together our first software product. There’s not much to say about it yet, but we’ll post more info here when we’re ready.

My goals in China are two fold—first, I hope to become involved in open source software efforts there. Thanks to some friends in Apache I’ve been introduced to several prominent individuals in the free and open source software (FOSS) movement there. For the first month or so, my family and I will be traveling from Beijing to Shanghai to Hong Kong (with a few stops in between). Even though many use our software there, we don’t have any Chinese members in the Apache Software Foundation and that’s something I hope I can help to change.

Secondly, I’ll be on the lookout for any interesting opportunities for my new company. However, William and I have some plans for the US market first, so it’s with a long term vision that we approach this visit to China. And he’ll be staying in Florida to handle things in the US while I’m abroad.

I’ve very excited to go. It’s been over six years since I came back from my two years in Taiwan. My Chinese is a little rusty but I believe it’ll come back to me once I’m there. We’re not quite sure where we’ll settle down yet—one of the goals of our first few months of traveling is to decide that. When we do find a stable location, Jenny hopes to teach English while I keep working on the start up and my open source contributions. And of course, our wonderful two year old, Maeli, will be with us to make things more interesting, er, uh, I mean fun. :-)

For those hoping to keep in touch, we’ll be regularly updating our blogs on Cubicle Muses and you can still reach us via email or Skype. More updates and details, coming soon!

And just in time for our trip, Taiwan experienced a large earthquake that interfered with internet access throughout Asia. It’s going to be an interesting trip!