China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) has reportedly urged for the rise of domestic open source software, hailing it as the “foundation of digital economic development.”
China’s software industry is lagging worldwide, and the country’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technologies (MIIT) said on Tuesday that it needs to embrace open source technology to improve.
According to MIIT, China’s software supply chain is weak, it lacks depth in homegrown applications, and it simply does not respect software or intellectual property. A shortage of qualified developers is both a symptom and a cause of these problems.
The Ministry is particularly concerned about international competitiveness and advises that China strengthen its software prowess to compete on an equal footing with global competitors through increased international exchanges and open cooperation.
A request to build a “emerging area of software products with ecological significance by 2025,” with some of it generated in one of 20 new Chinese software parks, is one of the strategies to enhance the state of homegrown software.
China’s leadership in the FOSS industry is hampered by a lack of open source foundations, insufficient control of the underlying technology, a weak open source culture, and a need for legislative support, according to MIIT.
