[Linux-aus] Patent Insurance and other stuff

[Conrad Parker]

On Thu, Dec 16, 2004 at 10:02:32PM +1100, Craig Warner wrote:
> Now for some serious business,  I have been reading with great interest 
> the meeting between Open Source/Linux Australia and the representatives 
> of the Chinese Government. Not at least the opportunity Pia had, the 
> chance to talk about Open Source in Mandarin! 

oath, it seems the Chinese very well understand the benefits of open
source, and realize that Australia has many skills to share.

> Now that brings me to a point to discuss the operations of a American 
> lobby group called CompTIA ( http://www.comptia.org/default.aspx ), now 
> after the signing of the AUSFTA CompTIA has setup shop in Sydney. This 
> was reported in an article in the Australian on the 7th December titled 
> "US body sets up here to rival ACS". 
> 
> CompTIA has been very active  in the lobby arena in regards to China:
> 
> http://www.softwarechoice.org/download_files/China_letter_7Dec_scan.pdf
> and
> http://www.softwarechoice.org/download_files/Chinese_Software_Rules_Comments.pdf

it's an unfortunate play on words that they describe China's procurement
rules as running counter to a "spirit of openness". The rules quite
specifically allow the deployment of non-Chinese Open Source software.
In fact, their procurement rules mandate that newly developed Open Source
Software be released under the GNU GPL, a point which provided for some
interesting discussion at Sunday's meeting. While we agreed that the GNU GPL
is a good license, we stated that other Free licenses have their place too,
which is of course quite the opposite direction of argument one usually
has on that topic.

> PS I'm in Shanghai next month.

so get up to Beijing and say g'day to our mates in the Ministry, mate :)

Conrad.