Taiwan, an island populated by some 21 million people, has played a disproportionately large role in the world's computing industry for decades. There was even a time, in the mid-'90s, when the country accounted for more Internet usage than all of Japan or mainland China. More generally, the worldwide community of overseas Chinese has also included a high number of computer scientists, and wherever they have gathered in cyberspace, political disagreements have always fueled debate.

In 1996, Taiwanese programmers inserted politically volatile catchphrases such as "Communist bandits" and "take back the mainland" into Chinese editing software for the Chinese version of Windows 95. Even earlier, Chinese computer scientists had struggled with the problems inherent in computerizing the two different versions of the Chinese character set employed by the mainland and Taiwan. China uses a "simplified" character set, under the rationale that literacy is easier to promote if there are fewer characters to learn. Taiwan uses the far more numerous "traditional" character set. The difference creates technical challenges that at one time were not trivial to solve, and political arguments sometimes infiltrated the technical debate.

Taiwanese patriots -- who, themselves, are divided into at least two groups, those who advocate Taiwanese independence and the dwindling group who believe that the Republic of China is still the rightful ruler of all China -- have long been accustomed to disrespect from the world community. Taiwan's 21 million is a tiny fraction of China's 1.3 billion; when decisions are made about markets, China trumps all. Taiwan is not a member of the United Nations, and is diplomatically recognized only by a handful of small, relatively unimportant nations.

But to have your national flag declared a software bug? Taiwan happens to be a fully democratic nation, in sharp contrast to the Communist regime in China or the one-party rule of Singapore. Taiwanese programmers have embraced Linux and other free software programs with open arms. The prospect of participating in a global community in which the efforts of all are freely shared is especially enticing to citizens of a small nation always looking over their shoulders at the brooding giant across the Taiwan Straits.

For "imacat," a Taiwanese programmer who manages the mailing list for the Taiwanese Linux Users Group, Red Hat's action is discrimination, pure and simple.

"I think it is an insult," he says. "I'm not a nationalist. I don't particularly like that flag, either. But, just because we are in Taiwan, we have to lose everything? Taking our flag away pleases some powerful big heads that don't like us, so that they no longer see our existence. But now nobody can see us. We become invisible. Our existence fades away ... That is discrimination, and it's very shameful that this discrimination happens in the open-source world, in which the society's achievements come from the efforts of its members ourselves."

Imacat noted that he is moving his three computers from Red Hat to Debian GNU/Linux. As for Red Hat's explanation that the mainland Chinese market required the removal of the flag, he says, "This can be reasonably understood as 'the existence of Taiwan would have prevented the introduction of Red Hat to the Mainland China ...' That is the discrimination that Red Hat does not admit, but we the Taiwan Linux community can clearly see and feel.

"We are no bug to no one. Removing one's existence to please another will make Red Hat a bad name in the history of human rights. I saw they decided to remove all the national flags in KDE. This may achieve some equality and avoid the discrimination. But that will not 'resolve any issue that may exist,' as they claimed. Next time the Chinese government may ask to [attach] a 'Province of China' after the phrase 'Taiwan,' as listed in the ISO-3166 [country codes]. Will we be removed again? This may happen again any time, as long as they don't start to learn to respect each individual community member that composes the Linux society."

Chang Chung-yen, the original discoverer of the missing flag, says that distinctions should be drawn between governments and software: "Let politics be politics, and open-source/free software be open-source/free software, I think."

His hope may be overly optimistic. With U.S. congressional representatives already beginning to marshal their forces against government adoption of free software licenses such as the GPL, it seems clear that politics and software are inextricably entwined. And as China's booming economy and surging computing sector continue to accelerate, software companies looking to do business with the Middle Kingdom will continue to kowtow to Chinese sensitivities.

The irony is that free software is all about choice, and technically speaking, there is nothing to prevent anyone from producing a version of Red Hat that includes Taiwan's flag, and one that doesn't. It's really just a matter of a couple of lines of code -- even Red Hat, theoretically, could produce multiple distributions.

Red Hat doesn't appear to be inclined to do so. According to legal counsel Mark Webbink, "If one assumes that the efforts of our engineers are free, then certainly it would be easy enough to have a different distribution for each market. However, such efforts are not free, and the cost to build and manage different distributions for each conceivable market would be staggering."

In the long run, expecting even as open-ended and cooperative a phenomenon as the free-software movement to provide for ways to make an end run around tensions across the Taiwan Straits is probably unrealistic. The problem won't go away until hostilities cease, no matter what the forum. And perhaps, in pursuit of that fix, Chinese computing will play a positive role.

Economic relations between Taiwan and the mainland are closer than ever before, and Taiwan's computing industry is playing a major role in that integration. Right now, Taiwanese capital and engineers are helping to duplicate Taiwan's computing success on the mainland on a colossal scale. In the environs of Shanghai, semiconductor manufacturing facilities modeled on Taiwan's hugely influential wafer foundries are popping up like, as the Chinese enjoy saying, "bamboo shoots after a spring rain."

In at least some respects, things always get easier with computers. Today, the once-formidable technical challenges involved with reconciling different Chinese character sets in ones and zeros are a footnote of computing history. Where a decade ago, getting your computer to display and print Chinese, online and off, could require endless tinkering and induce great frustration, now, it's hardly worth a thought. Most current browsers and operating systems and Chinese productivity applications allow effortless switching between both traditional and simplified characters, depending on the need.

Looking toward the future, is it too much to hope that, politically speaking, the interface between China and Taiwan might become as seamless, productive, and responsive to individual inclinations?

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