Interesting
article on Baidu in the NYT today on the significance of China, which, as the world's fast growing (large) economy, is seen as the next great Internet battleground -- an analysis in line with ours.
I'm very happy with the progress we have made in Greater China since we stepped up our activities in early August, when we
signed up with Shenzhen Menglongyitong, the company behind China's largest open source Java portal
matrix.org.cn.
China has constantly been our second largest userbase and source of web traffic since, and we have seen a lot of grassroot project's such as recent translations of several whitepapers and cases studies. The local community is now working to set up a mirror domain db4o.cn to bypass some of the bandwidth and screening limitations for foreign websites and also works to establish a series of user group meetings.
I'm often asked: "Yes but how do you make money in China, they don't observe IP over there." True, this is a problem. But I think this will change over the next 3-5 years, once its high tech industry becomes more export-oriented. A flavor of what to expect is India: Traditionally India has traditionally not been very respective to IP: Just think how Bajaj copied the Italian Vespa in the 60s! Now the Indian software industry is at par with anything in the West, including the respect for IP and licensing terms.
In the meantime we can grow our userbase in China with our community-driven model with little cost, something which is simply unsustainable for a closed-source software company.