The Road to Chinese Software
by Paul McGoldrick
The elections this year are going to be clouded with all sorts of issues
that don't necessarily deserve airing, but are going to be out there anyway.
One of the juiciest to have been caught in their teeth by Democratic hopefuls
is the exporting of jobs from the US, particularly to places like India.
In a remarkable interview in Business Week, Marc Andressen, co-founder
of Netscape and now the principal at Opsware, makes very cogent arguments
as to why concern about such job movements is junk, and how those service
jobs will be replaced by other jobs. He admits he doesn't know what those
new jobs are going to be, and he urges a lot more job retraining than is
going on now, but he believes that is the history of industry in this country.
"Always, always, always, always…"
But the ability of these outsourced countries to connect to complete networks as if they were in the office down the hall has potential problems that they should face: We will be told in a book being published March 9, 2004 by Presidio Press, At the Abyss: An Insider's History of the Cold War (ISBN 0891418210), written by Thomas C Reed -- Air Force Secretary during the Reagan administration, whom Edward Teller (father of the atom bomb) described as, "One of Livermore's most creative designers of thermonuclear devices" -- about one CIA operation which allowed the Soviets to steal software that was deliberately faulty. The result of that theft was one of the biggest non-nuclear explosions ever to occur, with the destruction of some miles of the Soviet-to-West Europe natural gas pipeline after the software allowed pressures to build up well beyond safety limits. The explosion (which took no lives) and the discovery of the faulty code so shocked the Soviets that they had no idea what else they had stolen might also be compromised; what equipment would work and what wouldn't. Or worse!
The Chinese were well aware of those software shenanigans and it has made them extremely cautious about employing any software where the source code is closed to the user. It is putting Microsoft and Beijing at one another's throats, and even though Microsoft has promised to allow the Chinese government full access to source code, they are not fully believed. Beijing is really concerned that there will be backdoors where the US Government can sneak a look at what is going on. And from a practical engineering viewpoint I have never been involved in a product design where someone didn't sneak a personal backdoor into the controlling software; have you?
Things have got to a point where Microsoft has literally offered to give away VisualStudio.NET to Chinese developers and students as a way to try and bind them to the Seattle camp. It probably won't make any difference and it is possible that China will become the first nation to be an official Linux operation. But if they think they can prevent software bombs just because of that, they are very mistaken.
One has to wonder why so many corporations are so anxious to do business
with China, anyway, when the "Free Trade" seems to be rather unidirectional.
My daughter thinks that everything we buy comes from China and I suppose
that if you analyzed the offerings from a store like Wal-Mart you might
begin to believe it as well. We seem to be very tolerant of the repression
of the Chinese people and the gross capitalistic behavior of the leaders
of the country in favor of business. It is said that more than four times
as many jobs have been lost in China in recent years compared to the US;
no, not because the jobs were exported to India, but because of automation.
Maybe one of the observations that Andressen could have made in his interview
would have addressed the fact that if the Chinese continue to have such
a low regard for female children -- and isn't it interesting that the country's
"cash-only, please, in US Dollars" baby-exporting business from
"orphanages" consists almost entirely of girls -- then they will
run out of women capable of producing the next generations.