Huawei case prompts F/OSS reconsideration (German)
m.faz.net
m.faz.net
Huawei will hurt in the immediate future but after a few years they might come out even stronger and the losers will be the US companies because their government created an artificial situation that forces non-US companies to really look into alternatives.
Your point about unfriendly nations not merely treating these corporations as non-combatant tools, but instead as legitimate targets, was very interesting.
But I don't see how the only way to fix this is to abolish all hierarchies. Having less jingoistic world leaders would be a start.
I don't see how Huawei can become #1 international smartphone brand without having access to Google Play Store.
Things can change very quickly in that industry.
Google may not be as secure as some believe they are.
I guess that, in the worse case scenario, they will ship sone alternatives services and app store, like in China.
If they would do that with a smooth transition out of google services, I can see this working, as a lot of people don't care about google, as long as the phone works.
If Trump really cares about the trade deficit blocking US companies from access to China won't help.
Because the US doesn't do business with one company?
I'm not sure I see that occurring for the reasons given.
There is a reason why economists don't like tariffs very much.
Don't just look at Huawei, ZTE also faced similar treatment last year. As result:
> ZTE will employ a compliance team at its expense for 10 years and hold two compliance forums in China as part of US settlement for violating export controls[0]
The U.S. maybe just trying to do the same to Huawei. But, if U.S. do this too much (maybe already), "Get rid of U.S. dependencies as much as possible" will be China's next goal.
There was a lots of people in China believes "The 'China CPU' is waste of money, Intel/ARM is good enough". Today, I don't see anybody can still say that out loud comfortably.
The potential good thing is, if China's investment on RISC-V[1] can eventually pays off, then maybe we will have some free and open ISA CPUs.
[0] https://www.scmp.com/tech/article/2150310/zte-replace-board-...
[1] https://riscv.org/2019/03/technews-article-china-actively-de...
US companies have now been shown for what they really are: an extension of the US government.
As such those companies can and will be used to make political points and advance US interests.
Caveat emptor: using US technology has big risks.
There are several ways to mitigate this:
- Open Source. Android itself falls into this category, and it can not be taken away. This is the best way, but let's be realistic here: it is not for everybody.
- Multiple suppliers, from multiple countries, so that we have real competition.
Bear in mind the US and China are currently engaged in an espionage war[1]. The US has an active network of informants in the Chinese government, while the Chinese are actively conducting espionage and counter-espionage in the US including stealing commercial secrets and suborning US intelligence operatives to undermine the CIA's Chinese network. Google and Huawei are being caught in a crush between the spy war and the trade war.
EU companies are no different. If Google was a German company and Germany decided to impose trade sanctions on a non-EU country, they would have to comply.
This is part of the trade war, and the fact that the US is openly lying about the motives of the ban shows how risky the position of US customers have become: there is absolutely no recourse.
And even if the security claims were true (they are not), so what? Why I, an European customer, must be affected by security concerns of a far away country? Why is Huawei in a position to be forced to let down its customers?
Non-US companies must rethink the way they rely on an increasingly isolated and belicose US.
I'm not sure we (the general public) have enough information to know either way. There are legitimate reasons for not releasing supporting evidence about counter-espionage operations. It's also entirely believable that the U.S. executive branch (POTUS, CIA, etc.) would lie as you suggest.
The idea that Chinese hardware is somehow more troubling in this regard only holds true if you're in the US (and fully trust your government).
But US has spies in all countries, so why is in China an espionage war?
Any idea if US wants a concrete thing? Like if China does X all is fine or is just an economic war and US is trying to weaken China and fix the trading balance ?
Not just with US companies. ZTE, Huawei and others are extensions of the Chinese government, Gazprom and the Kreml are interchangeable and the IMF is finance weaponized by the Western economies as a whole.
> Caveat emptor: using US technology has big risks.
Using and especially depending on any technology from a foreign power, especially one that may turn to an adverse power or outright enemy, is a risk. The Western countries have all, over the last decades, shifted most of their production to China - and now are surprised that China has them by the balls, literally, as many countries don't even have people with the skillset required for low level manufacturing.
Interesting. Isn't that exactly what the US is blaming Huawei for?
The US is equally eager (or more) to tamper with the free market, with the small difference that they are in a position to actually do it. From my point of view, the US is a huge problem, and is making my life difficult, but the Chinese are just another producer of cheap and good quality goods.
Isn't the alleged problem that without restrictions on how Huawei technology is deployed in the U.S, neither may be true.
I understand why this is happening. I understand the motivations.
What I am saying is that we outside the US should plan accordingly, and reduce our dependency to US technology.
I welcome this event, since I consider it a wake up call. I am convinced the Chinese will lead in making the technology stack a free market again.
Using technology that might do something you don't want for any reason (government, company decisioms) and that includes any government involvement.... US, China... anyone.
Here we have an article about FOSS and folks still play these weird games where they only mention a specific government.
Hmmm. These are among applications that I just can't seem to remove from my Sony Xperia. Perhaps, I should have a look at one of these Huawei spyware free phones :-)
[0] https://developer.sony.com/develop/open-devices/guides/aosp-...
And what will come of this?
A highly capable purely non-US produced phone using a set of cloud services running in Europe on under european law. That is my guess.
Why do people assume that the Chinese military wants to spy on random european citizens? If they can just prevent the US from their systematic data collection, I am sure that they will see that as a major strategic win.
Same reason(s) they or anyone spy on their own?
Because it has become tiring to always rely on the United States, half a world away, whenever Russia feels like playing the imperialist card, instead of just keeping them in check with the help of the Germans. And as long as the Germans depend on Russian gas they will have no incentives of seriously saying no to Russia. Source: me, living in an Eastern European country that is geographically close to Russia.
There are some Europeans who would prefer we chose the Russians (including a recent German chancellor who is now employed by Gazprom), I think that that would be a disastrous option. Going at it alone is also not a very good decision, as proven by the fact that the mighty French and British were not even capable of bombing almost defenseless Libya all by themselves, they needed the help os US tanker aircrafts.
1) (Reluctantly) do what U.S. tells.
2) (Eagerly) subvert to whoever offers a good deal.
I'd really love EU having a consistent stance on human rights, democracy, international law and free trade worldwide, and there are even some steps in that direction (like European army project), but until we're not there, I'd rather prefer option 1) to being corrupted by Chinese or Russian regime.
The amount of head bowing to Putin and Xi from European politicians is, troubling.
https://www.translatetheweb.com/?from=&to=en&refd=www.bing.c...
The EU should start requiring contractual assurances by technology companies for customers of US products, guaranteeing that:
- data is 100% portable between providers
- services will not be disrupted in case of political conflicts
Failing to provide these assurances should be punished with steep fines, and eventually by forbidding said companies to operate on the EU markets.
This is true, and the world has just seen a great demonstration of the risks involved in using US companies.
As pointed out by others other countries could do this as well but none of them could have such an immense impact as the US doing it.
Sure China is being targetted now, but other countries will wonder who is next, especially with a president who acts as fast and arbitrarily as Trump
The most positive outcome of this mess would be if enough countries get scared of being cut off that they work together to create alternatives. Or less so they work independently to create local alternatives.
When it comes to CPUs though I am not so sure. The x86 line is a complicated beast with lots of patents, and it would take a long time to build a fab to create them.
It's not like they have to...
Meanwhile all these articles and folks play the game of "X country bad"...
There are plenty open source projects from China, so I do not see why you think they do not know the benefits of the open source. The problem with Android is that there is a large part that is closed source so they can't fork that, if they reimploement it then they are not forced by any license to make it open source.
Given something like a mobile OS, I'm concerned other pressures / motives would come into play.
I don't think any given good behavior means anything.
What I dislike in this topics is the fact US people will assume the worst about a thing if is somehow related to China, there is nothing suggesting that Huawei would not respect GPL.
Any examples that got popular outside China?