China: Nvidia Loses Face and a 10 Million PC Order over Linux Drivers and NRE's

This concept of "losing face" may seem like just a small word or minor loss of reputation to Westerners, but in a sense is more important in China (and to varying extent all over the Far East) than even money.

If the story is true, and the depth of detail leads me to believe it is very likely, then the reputational damage to Nvidia would be high and, more importantly, entrenched (an aspect of face that makes it different from mere temporary reputational loss) due the public service, government angle and the size of the proposal.

Otherwise, your post will tend to get downvoted around here for not saying anything a simple upvote can.

1. http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

In Brazil we had some interesting questioning regarding the security of electronic voting systems - in 2002, I was on the team that developed the WinCE version of the electronic ballot - we had the source for the application and some of the device drivers, but we didn't have the sources for the compilers, libraries and operating system. Any of those layers could harbor a known (or unknown) backdoor that could allow tampering with the voting data.

I'm pretty sure my compiler was clean (I installed my development machine from my MSDN subscription CDs before the corporate IT folks could get their hands on it, so I imagine nobody could have sneaked into my house to place the CDs in my backpack)

Thus, you still have to trust that code you view is the code you run -- which is almost as bad as trusting documentation.

> I think the difference is that China can write the source for Linux.

I think the key here is that they are able to verify that the code they review is the code the run, by building the system.

And, I'm aware of "reflections on trusting trust", but I'm sure that they have a clean-room bootstrapped C compiler capable enough of bootstrapping tcc or gcc and thus the linux kernel.

Now, for an organization operating at China scale, it's possible that a fork could be sustained (so, the "China Syndrome" becomes the "China Fork"), but it's likely still not an optimal strategy, and for mundane areas there could still be substantial leak-back.

So long as changes aren't distributed "outside the organization" (quotes applied in context of defining "organization" relative to a Communist state in which nominally all property is State property), legal GPL code release requirements aren't triggered. Though you and what nuclear-tipped army plan on enforcing that against Beijing is of course another matter.