letter to mark shuttleworth

Dear Mark,

please forgive my bluntness, i write to you because i have some thoughts regarding the ubuntu popularity in China and some of my personal ideas.

From the day that i tried unbutu distribution on, i felt the urge to contribute my efforts to help others use ubuntu and introduce my close friends to get acquaintance with Ubuntu. i then joined the Chinese Translaton Team and had done some work in that team.

in the past several year, linux has be evolving fast and gaining more and more attention and deployment in both home and business sphere. As for China, many obstables have been conquered, as you may have seen, like decent Chinese input method(scim), usable free Chinese font (wqy fonts), ability to handle office daily works(openoffice. though openoffice can be used on many platforms.), etc.

despite those, there are still many "dark forces" against linux(or ubuntu) development in China. some of them may not be in the technology aspect, but in the so-called Public Relation side. Please refer to the following:
1. many banks' online service adopts only windows/xp related technology, discarding open technology. In this case, people using linux (or any systems other than windows) will be deprive of the convenience of online banking. No long ago, a guy named Bill Xu had gathered many users' protestions to a big banks' using ActiveX technology and required conversation with that bank, but he got no face to face talk and no results. it is a big setback to me.
2. China Telecom, the biggest (monopoly) internet access service provider in China, adopts some operating system depent(windows especially) technologies to prevent users from using internet "freely". By saying that, i mean that it uses a small "virtual dialer" to connect every computer to internet, that dialer automatically shrinks to taskbar of windows platform. in many cities, it can detect if you are trying to act as a gateway for other computers in the same room/house/office to access internet. If so, it automatically cut down the connection. So if more computers need to connect internet, more money should be paid to Telecom. It can cause great trouble to those who want to use Linux, since a lot of work needs to be done online.
3. Talking about the computer education in China, both teachers and students have no much sense about piracy, about what is the essence of computer science. most textbooks stick to the "windows-microsoftoffice" stuff. narrow-minded and short-sighted.
The above mentioned 3 things puzzled me greatly. I am young, open minded and long for freedom in many aspects. But when dealing with those 3 things, my effort/strength seems so humble, so weak, helpless. what a frunstraton!

anyhow, i have not lost faith in the development of Ubuntu. i hope things change not dramatically, but gradually.

best wished to you.

stone, gao
wuxi, China.

PS. the Launchpad site revision has caused some trouble for people to join the translaton teams. please consider making "people&team" easier to access, so that more people can add strength to Ubuntu.