G'Day All,
We have been supporting linux as a side business for a while (because we use that skill set in our own value chain internally) and we are now going to start targeting the wider local Chinese market and not just the foreign companies and joint ventures.
As such we expect to see tremendous growth in this market segment this year due to the quickly dwindling support of local support outlets due to the poor local skill sets and fundamental understanding of computing and Linux practices. But this growth may be short lived as the segment itself disappears (Linux and anything not Microsoft off the shelf) as evidenced by less and less exhibitors and attendees at Linux World here over the past 4 years.
I am trying to figure out a way to change this. Of course we can donate money back to the project itself - but does anyone have any idea on how to help the local Chinese get better as a form of donation too? Maybe offering free support services?
Point is, people should be paying IT professionals money to do UML and process design as they do in the west (Accenture, CA, IBM, et al) and not to play with technology day in day out. However in China, IT is more dumbed down and is akin to "Computing Services", backup, servers, hosting, windows/linux/cisco/et al is what comes to mind. While this is all fine and dandy it is hardly IT and it is a very price erosive market (China and India combined) and seems to be destroying the local demand for real IT and everyones chance to start more off-shoring operations here in competition with India.
The concept of technology being a support service to a greater operational goal and process (value chain) is quickly shoved to the side as people here consider IT to be a "cost" and focus on the "lego" aspect of it - computing services, mutton dressed up as lamb. And Linux is not seen as a fertile bed to develop, create and explore, it is often just used to plunder and get something for free...cheap, cheap, cheap......
I know that I can't change a country on my own, however, the atrophy in Open Source Community development and IT service demand is really sad here. I saw a post before from a chap who said words to the effect of:
Meanwhile, if there are many companies engage in same product, they will have price competition with each other. That will make companies could not survive after that. So, we hope your company could authorize us as a exclusive distributor to sale and market your product to share our resources and Chinese sales network.
And it is any wonder that open source cooperation here is failing as people fail to understand the "knowledge economy" that is central to open source? And IT is not expanding as it continues to be percieved as purely bits and bytes and not also opportunity cost and risk.
So I on behalf of the Beijing GNU/Linux Users Group ask for some advice, pointers and tips for how in my own small way I can get some change happening here before all creative technological thinking and successful open source development becomes even more extinct. And before real IT has a chance to take off and operate in harmony with all the business analysts and accountants as opposed to with just the motherboard and disk driver retailers at the various tech depots. :-(
Don't get me wrong, there is Linux use here - but nothing new and nothing is ever thrown back into the community - just take and abuse. :-(
Cheers, Richard Ford. centos.candishosting.com.cn www.beijinglug.org