Sunday, Sep 7, 2008
Fearing the Taiwanese flag would irk China, Red Hat yanked it from its version of Linux -- and started an international geek uproar.
Oct 31, 2002 | On Oct. 2, Chang Chung-Yen, a Taiwanese Linux enthusiast, was startled to find that his country had been erased. While fiddling around with the desktop interface included with Red Hat Linux 8.0, he discovered that no matter what he tried, he couldn't get Taiwan's flag to show up when he configured the system for his country and language.
The KDE desktop included with Red Hat has excellent tools for adapting the operating system for different languages, and Chang was well familiar with them. A programmer who works for a voice-over-IP company in Taiwan, Chang is a member of the Chinese Linux Extension project, which provides a suite of Chinese add-ons to GNU-Linux operating systems. He has also volunteered on a team that works specifically on adapting KDE for Chinese use.
He knew that when he picked out his country and language, a window should pop up that would include a small image of Taiwan's flag next to the country's name. And even though all the other countries in the window had their flags readily apparent, when he saw that Taiwan's was missing, he first thought he must have made a mistake. Maybe he'd forgotten to install some necessary piece of the operating system.
Further sleuthing revealed that he had made no error. Other distributions of Linux-based operating systems included the flag in their KDE packages, as did the source code for KDE itself. Chang alerted the Chinese-Linux using world, and in the lightning-fast way that these things happen over the Net, word raced out across bulletin boards and mailing lists, blogs and geeky news sites.
Closer examination revealed the ultimate indignity -- the presence of Taiwan's flag had been deemed "a bug" by Red Hat! Boycotts were organized, Taiwanese Linux fans started switching over to alternative distributions such as Mandrake and Debian, and recriminations flew through cyberspace.
Once again, the political rivalry between the People's Republic of China and the Republic of China on Taiwan has reared its ugly head in the world of computing. China considers Taiwan a rebel province, and frowns upon any symbolic representation of Taiwanese independence. So Red Hat, mindful of the size of the Chinese software market, removed the flag on the advice of its "internationalization group" because, according to Red Hat legal counsel Mark Webbink, "China does not approve of the use of any reference to Taiwan and could have blocked the product from being imported into China if the flag remained." Later, in response to the uproar that move provoked, Red Hat announced that all flags from every country will be removed from its version of KDE. But that hasn't done much to assuage the feelings of aggrieved Taiwanese.
Chinese computing has been politicized before. But the flag incident may be the first time that free or open-source software has become embroiled in the long-running conflict between Taiwan and mainland China. And that's significant, because free software itself has an ineluctable political component. By shrugging off the strictures of proprietary code, by declaring that it is not bound by geographical barriers or corporate mandates, free software -- in which code is freely available to all for reproduction or modification -- has been adopted around the world as an alternative way of doing business. In fact, both China and Taiwan have explicitly promoted free and open-source software as an alternative to Microsoft, for political and economic reasons.
Red Hat has historically been one of the prime leaders in commercializing free software, and the decision to remove Taiwan's flag for fear of offending the PRC is yet another sign that the struggle to make money off of free software inevitably involves some unsavory decisions. It's probably unlikely that this particular move will have any significant impact on Red Hat's success marketing Linux, but in a world where reputation is gold, Red Hat is suddenly a bit tarnished.
Get Salon in your mailbox!