Re: [tlug] Sony: Proprietary Jailkeeper . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Re: Baby Steps for Command Line Backups

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen@example.com>]

>>>>> "essertier" == essertier  <essertier@example.com> writes:

    essertier> I have had the feeling for awhile that there is a bias
    essertier> towards proprietary software among GNU/Linux
    essertier> programmers in Japan too.

Actually, my feeling is that it's the other way around---there was a
deep-rooted, historical bias against dealing with the needs of the
Japanese language (and other Asian languages) in the free software
community.  This combined with the insanity of a national standards
body that basically forced the industry to maintain dozens of
proprietary standards---including various local governments, who had
jinmei kanji in their records that were not admitted to JIS until
2000.

For fonts and input methods (including OCR), there's very little hack
value.  It's all about painstaking accumulation of databases and
kaizen-style tweaking, not bug-fixing.  Companies are better at doing
this kind of thing than open source is.  So if you want quality stuff,
you need to buy it.  Also, with text input, the failure of the FSF to
jump on the Unicode bandwagon and the resulting tendency of Japanese
developers to write software that could handle all three major
"native" encodings, and only sometimes Unicode, made it difficult to
get Japanese-capable software into the main repositories.

The net result is that the Japanese open source community is generally
quite comfortable with value-added proprietary software.  The problem
that you run into with proprietary devices is that all too often
proprietary software is value-subtracted. :-(

    essertier> Ubuntu is less commercial than the other two, isn't it?

Politically, Ubuntu is a mess.  The parent company, Canonical, talks
the talk, but they do not walk the walk.  It's not clear to me whether
their road is paved with good intentions or not, but their Launchpad
(specifically, the Rosetta translation management component)
automatically makes excessive claims of IP in other people's work.
And they don't seem to be releasing any of their internal process
control software under free licenses, or have any process in place to
transition their innovations to free licenses.

This contrasts with such companies as Red Hat, with its well-defined
separation between its proprietary activities and its contribution to
open source, Sourceforge, with an open source version of its tracker
easily available for download, or even BitMover, which made no bones
about the limited nature of its support for free software.


-- 
School of Systems and Information Engineering http://turnbull.sk.tsukuba.ac.jp
University of Tsukuba                    Tennodai 1-1-1 Tsukuba 305-8573 JAPAN
               Ask not how you can "do" free software business;
              ask what your business can "do for" free software.