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The Story Of Red Hat And The Taiwanese "Bug"
from the the-politics-of-open-source-software dept
Salon has the whole sordid story of how Red Hat decided that the Taiwanese flag in KDE was a bug that needed to be removed. It seems that Red Hat was afraid that officials in mainland China wouldn't be too happy to see that Red Hat Linux considered Taiwan to be a separate country, and took it out in an effort to sell into the Chinese market (though, declaring it a "bug" seems especially harsh). Not surprisingly, many Taiwanese Linux users are not happy. Of course, beyond hurt feelings, I'm really not sure why this is such a big deal. It's open source software, so anyone can modify it. What's to stop someone from adding back in the Taiwanese flag and posting their own pro-Taiwan distribution online?
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Ha! One of the developer sites I work on got a bunch of negative feedback when we listed Taiwan in our country drop down list on forms as something like:
Taiwan, Province of China
That's a huge political hot spot, apparently.
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