IBM Permits China To Review Source Code (wsj.com) 64
An anonymous reader writes: IBM has permitted the Chinese Ministry of Industry and Information Technology to review its proprietary source code in a 'controlled' environment, said IBM Senior Vice President Steve Mills yesterday. The company didn't make clear which of its products would be available for review. According to a (paywalled) WSJ report: "IBM has been willing to strike closer partnerships with China’s government than many of its fellow U.S. tech companies, people familiar with the company’s strategy said. Still, it isn’t clear to what extent IBM’s move might be a symbolic gesture. The people briefed on the practice said Chinese officials can look at the code only during visits and can’t remove it for a thorough review. In a short amount of time, it would be extremely difficult to comb through all the code for a product for potential “backdoors” that would allow spying on users."
China's Source Code (Score:5, Insightful)
I wonder if any American company will get to see any of China's source code.
Re:China's Source Code (Score:4, Insightful)
Oh wait, that is Racist of me.
We can't do that because it might offend China.
Re: (Score:3)
China isn't monolithic as the west assumes. There are racist Chinese who are racist against ethnic minority Chinese. In the same way that Italians aren't the same as Irish or German.
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That's what IBM is doing, they are entering a new sandbox, with different laws and different corruption that the U.S..
Bottom line is, noone forces IBM to comply with chinese laws and enter that market and vice versa. They are willing to do it.
In other news... (Score:1)
Chinese ministry of computing announces the formation of Chinese Business Machine incorporated...
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They could've bought IBM in one night.
Foxconn alone is 3 times the IBM in simple numbers and makes everything.
Huawei another company that makes the rest of what Foxconn does not make.
IBM is already sold many parts to the chinese, Lenovo being one of them, and the rest are sold here and there.
It's just the rule. They are so important, as a market, that they can even make IBM to obey every rule they want.
IBM already has China's Source Code (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
I wonder if any American company will get to see any of China's source code.
Has happened:
"“Huawei provided our source code of our products to Cisco for review"
http://blogs.cisco.com/news/hu... [cisco.com]
Of course it's anyone's guess if the code shown was 'the right code' but the old bait and switch could work for IBM in this case as well.
Re: China's Source Code (Score:2)
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me code you long time (Score:2, Insightful)
A new startup (Score:3, Funny)
Strangely enough, shortly after the IBM code was reviewed, a new startup in China called "RYE-BM" plans to hire 1000 new employees.
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Damn those Chinese.
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There, I fixed it.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:1)
Nah, they've already got Microsoft Office.
Can't comb? (Score:2)
>> Chinese officials can look at the code only during visits and can’t remove it for a thorough review...it would be extremely difficult to comb through all the code for a product for potential “backdoors” that would allow spying on users.
Then why would the Chinese find value in these reviews? (Unless they really are spiriting code out - love those Google Glasses, Xi - or are being allowed to bring their own code analysis tools in.)
And why isn't anyone raising "ITAR" here? I know
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Then why would the Chinese find value in these reviews?
Per an old Chinese saying: "a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step".
This is a start for them getting the source code for everything without having to hack into servers.
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This is a start for them getting the source code for everything without having to hack into servers.
Why you so mean? We promise Supreme Leader Obama we no do that anymore.
Re: Can't comb? (Score:2)
I know where to start (Score:2)
Sites that should be banned due to paywall (Score:1)
WSJ and the NYT makes it hard to see full stories and should be banned.
Also, we should see more from sites like the Guardian and the Atlantic, the latter of which still has Vannevar Bush's "As We May Think" [theatlantic.com] available.
It appears that most all of the articles about this is linking to the WSJ article, but at least they are not the WSJ site. Here's a Reuters post. [reuters.com]
Me chinese, me make joke, (Score:2)
Compiled? (Score:2)
How do they prove that this source code is actually what was compiled?
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This was my first thought as well. They could be showing them watered-down code for all they know.
New reality of global business (Score:4, Informative)
From a business perspective, this sounds like China wants some assurance that IBM's mainframe software, DB2 and other stuff doesn't have any detectable backdoor code in it. The same thing happened with Microsoft a while back, and other governments including ours audit source code for the same reason.
I think the difference between the US and China in this case is how closely Chinese companies are tied to the government. I doubt there's too much in the way of trade-secret code that a foreign government couldn't reverse engineer given enough time and resources. But, it's much more likely that any information gained will make its way back to state-funded/supported companies in the Chinese environment. IBM isn't stupid, but they probably are greedy, and didn't want to lose access to the Chinese market.
My opinion is that China seems to have the right ingredients in place to be the dominant global player in this century. They have a mix of authoritarian control and an insane focus on economic growth, and are willing to do whatever it takes, popular or not, to achieve their goals. Look at their massive infrastructure build-out during the financial crisis, or their direct intervention in the stock market to fix volatility. We (the US and Europe) aren't there yet, but we'll have to get there at some point.
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> IBM isn't stupid, but they probably are greedy, and
> didn't want to lose access to the Chinese market.
IBM is actually being pretty stupid here. It's just that everyone else is being stupid in a similar manner. Handing your source code, or any other designs or technology, over to the Chinese government* is, as you say, the same as handing it over to their domestic businesses... your competitors, current and future.
* (Arguably to ANY government, but especially China's.)
But it's a combination of shor
Having used several IBM software packages (Score:1)
I imagine the source code is written in children's breakfast cereal Alpha-Bits.
some real facts (Score:2)
One word... (Score:2)
What products? (Score:2)
Operating systems? DB2? Compilers? Other applications?
The source code for proprietary operating systems isn't much good without the hardware it's designed to run on, unless some clever programmers can port the functionality to other hardware.
Give me access to OS/2 Source code (Score:2)