chris horn's blog

Confucius was born in the state of Lu. When he received news that the powerful state of Qi was preparing to attack his homeland, he sent his gifted disciple Zi Gong to talk to the rulers of the surrounding states. Zi Gong went first to the state of Qi and observed to the military generals the flaws in a strategy to attack Lu. He succeeded in persuading the generals to first attack the state of Wu instead. Zi Gong subsequently went to Wu and instigated the king of Wu to attack Qi…Thus, Confucius saved Lu.

From ninth chapter of Chang Duan Jing.

At first sight, it would appear that there should be an excellent cultural fit between the open source movement in the West, and Chinese values. Open source emphasizes collective knowledge and sharing of competence. In China, the loyalty to the group is strong; communist philosophy emphasizes sharing, and Confucian teaching emphasizes the latent potential of the individual to attain skilled judgment from the experience of others.

The use of the web is growing fast in China – exceeding the US and growing much faster than the US - as reported in Forbes. Open source collaboration uses the web as a collaboration platform, so you would also expect this to add to the momentum of open source in China.

The Economic Intelligence Unit recently reported a ratio of 100 jobs for every computer science graduate in China, with this number expected to sky-rocket; and Duke University reported 60,000 computer science graduates from 4-year degree programmes in China in 2004, and 292,000 from 3-year programmes. This huge domestic demand, and huge output, of software developers might lead you to expect further momentum for open source in China.

A recent Eclipse Members meeting noted that China has the most number of the downloads globally (over a recent 18 month period) at 21%, followed by the US at 18%, and both Germany and Japan at 8% each.

So: what is the status of open source in China ?

Well, there are a small number of open source projects in China, but apparently not as many as you might expect. XOOPS (a content management framework) is quite well known and Stephen Walli’s blog contains an interesting presentation by Tiaiwen Jiang, the community leader in China, on the project from the Chinese perspective. Huihoo is a leading open source middleware project including a J2EE implementation, JFox. Qianqian at Harvard Medical School initiated, in 2004, a collaborative project Wen Quan Yi to develop an open source font set for the 70,000 Han characters encoded by Unicode.

An interesting development is the merger of ObjectWeb in France and Orientware in China at the end of 2006, to form OW2. They are sharing open source contributions in a variety of middleware technologies and their deliberations are documented in their Board of Directors minutes...

But, perhaps predictably, the main interest in open source in China is Linux: just google ‘china open source’ and you’ll see! In 2003, China enacted the Software Government Procurement Regulation (SGPR) which excluded foreign companies from the federal software market. As recently as the end of 2005, CIO Magazine was discussing China’s federal commitment to Linux – for multiple reasons at the time, including suspicions of US intelligence agencies “trojan horses” in US proprietary code (remember the B-767 government jet delivered in 2002 to Beijing, but with eavesdropping devices discovered on delivery ?); overcoming WTO IP concerns by promoting open source; localization to the Chinese market; and kick-starting a strong domestic software industry.

But then things changed in 2005, despite CIO Magazine’s analysis above: in trade talks, China laid aside the SGPR in favour of concessions on industries such as textile and colour television.

So now, according to Lou Shouqun of the China OSS Promotion Unit (a non-government organisation) in a recent presentation, the Linux revenues in all China last year (2006) were about 218M RMB (20MЄ), with a market share (by revenue) of just 3%. Other UNIX systems were 52% - the financial services and telecommunications industries in China have heavily used Solaris, AIX and HP/UX, amongst others. Windows was 42%. While the overall market is growing about 10% per annum, Shouqun believes Linux in China is growing faster than the market, albeit from a low base.

Things have changed even more significantly since the 2005 abandonment of the SGPR directive: Microsoft seem to have successfully found favour with the federal authorities. Fortune magazine documented Bill Gates recent summer visit to China; the history of Microsoft in China, and how Microsoft has very successfully wooed the Chinese policy makers creating an apparent “win-win” situation. It is a fascinating article, and I recommend it to you if you haven’t already read it.

So, why are there few committers in China, and apparently meek participation in the global open source, particularly when the number of software professionals in China is rising so rapidly ? Why is it that Windows is far more successful in China than Linux, and is Microsoft’s new strategy truly a “win-win” ?

The urgency to make money is IMHO a national obsession in China. Consumerism, and chasing Western fashions and brands are all-consuming. You must remember that, within the life times of those of us in our 40s or more, very many Chinese were incredibly impoverished to appallingly abysmal standards of life. It really is only in the last twenty years or so that national living standards have consistently dramatically improved – while admitting of course that there remain many challenges and disparities today across the huge country. In my own experience, making money is far more important to many Chinese than political discourse.

If your parents and grandparents have supported you, a single child, through your professional education as a software developer, their expectations (and needs in their senior age) will be that you will support them. Your partner’s parents and grandparents will have similar expectations. An engineer, including a software engineer, is considered a respected professional: many policy makers, senior business managers, and senior party members also have engineering backgrounds. As a software engineer, your own, your family’s, and society’s expectations are all that you will be financially successful.

Can you be truly financially successful in China if you are an open source developer ?

In the West, much of the open source activity in fact is carried out within companies, including Intel, Novell, IBM, Sun and Oracle, amongst others. Foreign companies in China with recognized global brands – such as Microsoft, with its very wealthy founder – are highly attractive as employers, since they not only in general pay well by local standards but also potentially open the possibility of international travel.

But, which foreign companies have so far established software development laboratories in China which contribute to open source development ? IBM have a Linux technology centre in Beijing. Intel announced in 2004 development centres in Beijing, Xi’an, and Guandong to help Chinese companies develop desktop applications for Linux. Oracle promotes its products on Linux in China, including via the Oracle technology centre in Beijing. But these centers appear, on the surface, to be solution centers which promote Linux based application solutions perhaps as a response to the apparent promotion of Linux by the Chinese authorities and prior to the SGPR retraction; rather than development centers actively contributing to globally available open source. I of course am very open to correction, but it would appear that to date only Novell has opened an R&D centre in China specifically for Linux system development. It is also noteworthy that IONA (of which I’m Vice-Chairman) has Chinese committers from its Beijing R&D centre on the Eclipse STP and Apache CXF open source projects.

For domestic Chinese activity, the largest player in open source Linux is Red Flag. It is ambitious to develop into an international player in Asian Linux, and has recently announced a specific initiative. However its current sales revenue is still relatively small, even by Chinese national standards, at just 40M RMB (3.6MЄ).

To the extent that open source development is being conducted in China by foreign companies, with Chinese committers, then arguably these initiatives need to be more openly promoted and publicized to the Chinese software development community. The open source movement in China needs major foreign brand name companies to visibly invest and recruit in China for development of open source.

Well, then how about Chinese open source start-ups ? Are there any budding MySQL ABs, SugarCRMs, or xTuples ? Yes, and I mentioned Huihoo and Red Flag earlier, as examples. But IMHO the open source industry in China is currently fragile and considered so both by potential employees (ie software developers) and, as importantly, Chinese corporate customers. It is frankly easier – and perhaps more socially acceptable with one’s parents – to work for an established organization, particularly if it is a foreign brand.

Let’s now look at that second question I posed above: why is Microsoft now being much more successful in China ? Microsoft seems to have overcome concerns by Chinese policy makers by pro-actively taking a number of steps. The “trojan horse” threat has been overcome by allowing access (and hence inspection) under appropriate conditions to Microsoft source code, and China now has a federal laboratory to do exactly so. Microsoft has been very actively investing in the education sector, including rural classrooms and software engineering universities, and so aligning its investments with the federal desire to strengthen software skills nationwide – Microsoft is training 1,000 instructors and 20,000 software engineers, and offering online courses to another 50,000 engineers. It has worked with the federal authorities in the context of WTO obligations to ensure that more Chinese PCs have legally licensed pre-installed copies of Windows. In turn this is overcoming piracy issues since the pre-installed versions are more current, have less bugs and more features than older copies of Windows. It has also dramatically dropped the price of Windows in China. In summary, President Hu Jintao on a visit to Microsoft said that Bill Gates is a friend to China and the Chinese people: in China, this is an incredible endorsement, and it is difficult to find any analogy in the West for such an important and powerful public ratification.

It would appear that Microsoft is on a roll in China. It is very interesting to reflect on the Microsoft strategy and their execution of it within China, and contrast that to the open source industry and initiatives in China. Of which open source project or company will the President of China publicly endorse as a friend of China and of the Chinese people ? If the open source industry globally is to benefit from China’s rapid development, it is clear that investment – perhaps akin to Microsoft’s commitment to China – will be needed.

It is also very interesting to ponder to what extent the prices Windows customers in the West are paying are being used to subsidise Windows customers in the East. Cross-subsidies are of course not at all a new idea in any industry: I find the Microsoft case interesting because it is part of a much broader initiative.

Let me finish by a hypothesis for policy from the Chinese Government perspective. The war is not about whether Windows or Linux will ultimately win. Both are sufficiently low cost here in China to be usable. Microsoft is generously up-skilling the national software engineering talent pool, and the open source industry is also helping by publishing its source code and inner workings. The war is rather about building a vibrant software industry in China, capable not only of satisfying national needs, but also exporting and becoming a world leader.

The main requirement is excellent application development, on whatever foundation systems and middleware technology are de facto in the global industry (it doesn’t matter which, as long as they are low cost in China). Open source by the Chinese industry – and for the Chinese industry - could play a very significant role indeed. By fostering a national repository of re-useable Chinese application components – with documentation and test suites – written by Chinese developers (in Chinese first, and then maybe English), with a framework put in place and re-enforced by Government policy and investment, then the national industry could be rapidly enhanced.

“Therefore the Master concerns himself with the depths and not the surface, with the fruit and not the flower….When his work is done, the people say ‘Amazing: we did it, all by ourselves!’’”

The Tao Te Ching, by Lao Tzu


This was the basis for an invited keynote I was to give at the OS Summit in Hong Kong at the end of this month: but the conference has now been postponed until sometime in 2008.

There’s an interesting interview with Niall McCullough, architect, yesterday in the Irish Times weekend magazine, about the new version of his book “Dublin: An Urban History” (unfortunately the Irish Times online is only premium paid-for content so I can only give you this url to the article). There’s also an interesting web site, giving additional histories of Dublin and the patterns which have shaped it at www.reflectingcity.com.

One of the things which I had not realized about Georgian Dublin is that the buildings, which of course are a part of our heritage, were apparently in general not built to last! The article says: “Based on a land-lease system, the terraces and squares were designed to stand for the lifetime of the lease, usually between 40 and 100 years, whereupon they would be torn down and built again.” Perhaps this is one reason why the Georgian Society has had so many challenges in trying to preserve the best of Georgian Dublin for us and for future generations.

Earlier in the last week, I was in Liaoning province in north east China, for Sli Siar, for discussions relating to the “Five Points, One Line” strategy to re-invigorate one of the old industrial parts of China. As you probably know, Chinese government policy (until recently) is that land is only available for lease, and is owned by the State. The lengths of leases are set by national law, and vary between 40 and 70 years, depending on the land use: residential, commercial, industrial etc. In fact, China has been through various land reform policy changes: the 1946 reform in which land was expropriated from the landlords and equitably distributed to individual households in rural villages; the collectivisation period during the Great Leap Forward in the 1950s in which land was grouped into shared communes; and the current system introduced in the late1970s during Deng Xiaoping’s reforms. I say “the current system”, because in fact just last month, the National People’s Congress passed a new property law, after many years of deliberations, which recognizes the status of private property including land. In my own experience, urban planners and developers today in modern China in general expect their buildings and developments to survive the length of leases of the land on which they are built.

Then on Friday, having traveled back to Europe the previous day, I was with some folks from IONA, visiting one of our customers in the financial services sector, in Zurich. The meeting was with their senior architect – let me call him Tom. Tom is responsible for their group-wide, global IT architecture, and the meeting was to discuss SOA strategy. One of the very interesting points he and I discussed was that there is a sense in the enterprise IT industry, that at long last, we collectively in the enterprise software industry are “building to last”.

As an aside, I do wonder whether “architect” is the appropriate title for somebody like Tom. I tend to think of civil architects as professionals who design buildings. Rather somebody like Tom is really an “urban planner” – he presides over the current and future infrastructure of an entire software city, on which individual applications – buildings – are built.

Anyway. With previous middleware technologies – DCE, DCOM, CORBA, J2EE, etc – and with all due respect to those thousands of technologists world-wide who worked to create these technologies, I think there was always an expectation amongst senior architects (urban planners ?) and IT visionaries, that each of these technologies would fade in time. Sure, each might be strong enough to last for a decade or so, but business logic and applications that were built to exploit any one of these technologies were constructed in the expectation that a more modern, better middleware technology, would emerge within at most a decade. It was perhaps like the relatively short land leases of Georgian Dublin I mentioned above: build your artifacts in the expectation of re-building them a few years later. And so the middleware world proved to be,

Tom postulated that, at long last, enterprise software architects (urban planners ?) can be like the Victorians of over a century ago: laying down infrastructure – whether it be urban water supply, underground and metro train networks, or even sewage pipe networks (what is the best analogy for middleware ? – I leave it to your personal prejudice!) – that will last for a hundred years or so. Is SOA the end of middleware as we know it ? Isn’t SOA good enough to give us a stable infrastructure for at least a hundred years ?

Well, my view is yes, I agree that it is but with one proviso: one has to construct a SOA based (urban-like, city) environment in the expectation that middleware technologies will in fact continue to evolve and change. SOA may mark the end of middleware as we know it, yes Tom, but its chief contribution in this context is its meta-level. In the same way that metadata in a database allows one to reason and manipulate the underlying data, so should a SOA system enable one to reason and manipulate the underlying middleware.

SOA capabilities in frameworks like Artix and its open source companion Celtix allow a de-coupling between business logic and services, and the underlying middleware. In particular, future middleware technologies can be inserted into such frameworks. The meta-level capabilities enable dynamic re-configuration, including for example interface versioning, data versioning, retooling and end-point guardianship.

With SOA, we have indeed reached the end of middleware as we know it, and can now enable enterprise applications which can be built to last.

Intel confirmed yesterday its 2.5B$ commitment to build Fab68 in Dalian, China Apparently it is the first green field development since 1992 when Intel came to Leixlip Ireland. Dalian is one of China’s greener cities, and set in Liaoning Province near the border with North Korea.

By complete coincidence, there is a large delegation of Chinese software companies and associated Government officials visiting Ireland at the moment, with many of them from Dalian. I attended a meeting yesterday morning hosted by the Department of Enterprise, Trade and Employment, along with the IDA, Enterprise Ireland and the Irish Software Association for the visiting delegation.

Listening to the alternate presentations – Irish and Chinese – it struck me how different our two software industries are at this time.

The Irish software industry focuses on the global export market, because the home market is so small. From the figures presented this morning, most Chinese software companies currently focus on their domestic market, and do not export very much at this time by comparison.

The Irish software industry has six times as much revenue generated by multinationals operating in Ireland as by indigenous Irish companies. The Chinese numbers are the converse: more indigenous activity than multinational at this time.

The Irish software industry is primarily focused on the creation of new software products, and associated services. The Chinese industry at this time is focused instead on software outsourcing and business process outsourcing.

One can understand the Chinese focus, given the need to create employment, particularly in the private sector. At the same time, it was interesting to hear an official from Dalian readily admit to staff shortages, leading to upwards cost pressures: in fact the local government is apparently offering housing subsistence allowances and tax breaks to software professionals, so as to keep labour costs down in the area. It would be wonderful if our own Government in Ireland took such an enlightened view!

One wonders how these positions will change over, say, the next five years. The Irish industry may need to become less dependent on foreign direct investment and more focused on its indigenous companies. The Irish Software Association is strongly lobbying the Irish Government to considerably increase its IT procurement from indigenous Irish software companies: it is very ironic that many Irish companies in general have much more success selling to Government agencies outside of Ireland than within it. Maybe the Irish domestic market can be grown for the indigenous companies.

The Chinese focus on outsourcing and BPO is also interesting. We were told this morning that in the same way that Bangalore is a centre for outsourcing and BPO for the US and the English speaking world, Dalian is as successful as a centre for outsourcing and BPO from both Japan and South Korea. However, I suspect the Irish appetite in general for outsourcing is more focused on central Europe, driven by the expansion of the European Union last year and the availability of low cost air connections directly out of Ireland to a large number of central European destinations.

Some Irish agency officials pitched Ireland as an opportunity for investment by Chinese companies as a gateway to Europe. In return, some Dalian officials pitched Dalian as an opportunity for investment by Irish companies as a gateway to both Japan and both Koreas. I think this reciprocal perspective holds a mirror to both arguments: frankly I suspect most Irish companies will chose to invest directly in Japan or a Korea and choose to bypass Dalian to do so; I suspect most Chinese companies may think the same in regard to the rest of Europe and using Ireland as a gateway.

A little bit of Yin and Yang this morning. The true opportunity for collaboration comes from a closer working relationship, and working together to deliver whole products jointly together to specific market niches and opportunities. There are many commercial opportunities in China, and my own experience shows that a visible commitment on the ground – for example by opening a development centre – reassures Chinese customers and prospects that a company is in it for the long haul.

A couple of weeks ago, I gave a keynote address at a Science Foundation Ireland seminar in UCC. A few people have asked me to post a copy on my blog, so with apologies to those of you uninterested in Irish science policy who may want to skip this blog entry, here it is.

The event was a public presentation by all seven Centres for Science and Engineering Technology, to the general public and media. Minister Michael Martin attended. The seven CSETs are:

· Alimentary Pharmabiotic Centre (APC) led by Prof. Fergus Shanahan, and researching gastro-intestinal health

· Biomedical Diagnositics Institute (BDI), led by Prof. Brian MacCraith, and researching early detection and diagnosis of disease

· Centre for Research on Adaptive Nanostructures and Naondevices (CRANN), led by Prof. John Boland, and researching nanotechnology applications

· Centre for Telecommunications Value Chain Research (CTVR), led by Prof. Donal O’Mahony, and researching telecommunications technologies

· Digital Enterprise Research Institute (DERI), led by Michael Turley and Prof. Dr. Stefan Decker, researching the semantic web

· Lero, led by Prof. Kevin Ryan, and researching software engineering

· The Regenerative Medicine Institute (Remedi), led by Prof. Tim O’Brien, and researching gene and cell therapy for tissue repair

I had returned from Beijing the previous evening, and got up very early that Monday morning to drive down to Cork for 8.00am. The address follows:

--

Welcome. 24 hours ago I was in China, where I have been a regular visitor this decade. I am sure many of you here in Cork will be proudly aware that your city is twinned with the city of Shanghai, since 2005. Perhaps only some of you will be aware that in addition to a sharing of challenges and opportunities as a nation’s second capital, that both cities have 021 as their city telephone dialing code!

China is one of the few nations to have put a man in space. They have a stated ambition of a man on the moon within the next decade. Just recently, they demonstrated a millimeter accurate trajectory in intercepting at high speed, and thus deliberately destroying, one of their own satellites. They have just two weeks ago launched their first satellite of the first non-US global positioning system (GPS) constellation, a full two years ahead of likely launch of the first satellites of the European Galileo GPS constellation.

China is widely accepted as the global focus of manufacturing, including high value intricate parts and systems. But it is quite clear that China is also increasingly undertaking world class scientific research and development, and is doing so specifically to enhance the national competitiveness. Large science parks co-exist alongside manufacturing zones to further improve their processes and capabilities. There is high investment in research and development for improving the environment, improving energy efficiency, and improving health care. Biopharma and biodevice research and manufacturing is collocated with large clinical hospitals. There are rumours of nanomanufacturing and nanofabrication initiatives being planned. There are high levels of technology literacy, appreciation and fascination, particularly amongst the young. Space science merely accelerates a scientific and technology culture, together with an immense national pride.

Minister Martin has stated that “Ireland’s sustained economic growth and prosperity depends upon establishing a culture of scientific and technological innovation‚ a high level of research and development‚ and a globally competitive knowledge-based economy”.

In my view, we have yet to establish a deep culture of scientific and technological innovation. Given the major economies – the US and China - and their investment and momentum in science and engineering, where is there room for us here in Ireland ? What should be our focus, if we are not to conduct catch-up “me-too” science ?

A world class scientific result is now increasingly no longer the privilege of a single dedicated science professional. Today, it is far more usually the work of teams, collaborating domestically and worldwide. As but one example, consider how laboratories world wide collaborated extensively with their peers in China to identify the virus in 2003 which had led to unexplained deaths amongst poultry workers in Guangdong province: hitherto virus in poultry which was neutral to humans, but which had mutated. To my knowledge however, Ireland then played no role in the international detective work.

Today, I believe that the greatest opportunities for novel discovery lie on the boundaries between disciplines, areas in which specialists from a variety of backgrounds work together on a common challenge. Equally, the activities with the likely highest benefits to society and economic opportunities may be discovered when others may be too narrowly focused. The most likely successful structures are inter-disciplinary and highly collaborative, both science and engineering, teams, which is why we have – centres for science and engineering technologies – CSETs.

The Minister has mentioned the Alimentary Pharmabiotic Centre, and this morning we will hear more about it and each of its six peer CSETs. All the CSETs are inter-disciplinary. As an example, the convergence of biological expertise with semiconductor engineering and nanoparticle scientists in the BDI CSET is leading to highly sensitive and hence early detection and low cost detection of diseases. The collaboration of radio frequency physicists, with software and electronic engineers, with market trading theorists and business analysts in the CTVR CSET means that radio frequencies need no longer be exclusively licensed and auctioned to the most competent bidders, and instead that right to use specific frequencies can be dynamically traded as a new global commodity: COMREG has described this initiative as Ireland’s potential new gold.

We need an integrated national focus to yield economic and social success. Cross agency co-operation on sustaining research, and development, nationwide on a small, carefully chosen, number of specific scientific and engineering problems which, if solved here in Ireland, will yield intense value for our tax payers’ investment. Such investments clearly need to be thoughtful and nationally strategic.

As taxpayers, we now own seven highly energetic CSETs, led by seven outstanding scientific chief executives whom you will meet today, our centre directors. Will the portfolio of economic and social agencies as part of our civil service now build on the CSETs, these seven people and their teams, as the foundation for a sustainable economic and social benefits for the decades ahead ?

The focus is not solely on increasing R&D undertaken in Ireland, but also problems which if solved will provide immense value to our society and to our economy. If the agencies can collectively execute well on the CSET model, I believe that Ireland will have built a global show case which we will hold in pride in the years ahead.

The LeMass era, also associated with TK Whitaker, opened Ireland to international economies. The IDA was established, leading to substantial manufacturing jobs, and also which a decade ago gave birth to its sister agency Enterprise Ireland. The concept of a free economic zone was one important tactic used in the national strategy, and which has been widely admired by the Chinese and others. Today, now, in this – as yet unclaimed and unnamed - era, our administration has established SFI. In this era, the CSET model, if fully developed as a national initiative of carefully orchestrated strategic impact , will I believe be even more significant than the model of a free economic zone.

2007 has so far been of public concern here in Cork, with plant closures. But Cork is uniquely placed through its formal alliance with the east to demonstrate the economic and social benefits of a sustained focus on science and technology, including in particular international co-operation. Like Shanghai, Cork has the number 21 associated with it; and like Shanghai, Cork has an opportunity to come of age, as a dynamic and energetic location in the 21^st century.”