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?Thank you for reading this Techdirt post. With so many things competing for everyone’s attention these days, we really appreciate you giving us your time. We work hard every day to put quality content out there for our community.
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Taiwan, Province of China
That's a huge political hot spot, apparently.
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