Clownstrike fiasco continues in West, while Russia and China virtually unaffected
While the Clownstrike fiasco rumbles-on in the West, and people in our particular part of the planet can’t even purchase a train ticket, it seems both Russia and China are almost completely unaffected.
Editor’s note 2024-08-17: Seems we’re not the only site referring to Cloudstrike as “Clownstrike”. Crowdstrike has issued several takedown notices to a parody site called clownstrike.lol – which has thus far ignored the threats. Meanwhile Clownstrike – I mean Cloudstrike has legal problems of its own, as it tries to fend-off law suits from its own customers…
According to the Guardian, Clownstrike hasn’t been able to flog its ill-fated anti-fungus product in Russia since the Ukraine war kicked off. Meantime according to the BBC and other sources, China’s government made a decision more than two decades ago to wean the nation off Microsoft’s products and develop an IT infrastucture that was stronger, cheaper and that could be maintained by themselves. Therefore making China’s IT infrastructure significantly more resilient to both natural and man-made disasters, and significantly less prone to the whims and profit-driven motives of foreign IT corporations and their billionaire owners.
Kylin
Seems much of China’s critical IT infrastructure now runs China’s own official version of GNU/Linux, called Kylin. It’s named after the mythical “qilin” beast and was originally developed by China’s National University of Defence Technology. When the project kicked off, back in 2001, it was originally based on FreeBSD. But it adopted the Linux kernel from version 3 onwards, primarily so that its developers could share the work of the huge mass of open source developers around the planet.
In addition to the military variants, there is now a public version called openKylin. It was developed in cooperation with a British company, Canonical, who also owns Ubuntu. Today’s openKylin is currently worked on by 3000 developers, 74 special interest groups and over 200 commercial enterprises, which of course feeds code back to the official government version. Open source projects can do that too.
In any event, there are a couple of brief articles discussing Kylin over at “Its FOSS”…
Control
It would be naive to think the Chinese government has implemented open source purely for the good of its people. Of course, being able to maintain and further develop a product offers control. But there is a limit to which Beijing or anyone else can assert control over an open source product. Users such as the Chinese government have control over what they do with an open source product. But they do not control the product itself. No one really does. That’s the point! That’s why people like me run open source software. It’s run by a communities not corporations and cannot be controlled. All its source code is a matter of public record, not some dark corporate secret where we are forced to trust its corporate developer’s honesty. Whereas the openKylin source code is freely available.
Compare and contrast this with closed source products such as Microsoft Windows, where you cannot see the source code, because Microsoft deliberately keeps it secret. In recent Windows releases, it has become a very dirty secret too. When you buy a new Windows 11 computer, Microsoft and its mates start spying on you, the second you switch it on and give it access to the internet. That’s before you even open a browser or install any software…
That’s why openKylin and similar projects (e.g. Red Flag et al) have given China a significant advantage over western countries such as ourselves. No foreign corporation can control or shut down China’s IT infrastructure. For example, in the case of openKylin. If Canonical (the British company that helped develop openKylin) were to disappear overnight, openKylin can still be maintained by its huge community. Subsequent products can be derived from it’s source code, and/or critical software can be ported to other open source Unix-like platforms.
Trust
To be clear, I’m not advocating that the British government, NHS, railways, utilities etc. should deploy openKylin, or any Chinese or Chinese-derived software for that matter. Debian or a close derivative would be a much more sensible choice for us, particularly as lots of Debian and Ubuntu developers actually reside and work here in the UK.
My point is that the Chinese do not trust big foreign tech corporations or the proprietary, closed-source software they produce. Clearly, neither should we.
- Featured image is by by RootOfAllLight. The file was converted from: Chinese dragon asset heraldry.svg which was originally derived from: MET 36 65 6 O.jpeg, Image is licensed under Creative Commons: CC BY-SA 4.0, Link
This clown has just been able to access the internet and your site. Love Sir Kier.
Speak soon.
K.
Hello, great to see you here. As they say on the other side of The Pond, “Don’t be a stranger!” 🙂