Homo homini lupus est.
There's an interesting article here from "The Standard, China's Business Newspaper". The EU's worsening trade deficit with China (currently circa €10b) is hardly news however the following caught my eye :-
The pain is being particularly felt in the 10 countries that joined the EU in May. The mostly ex-communist states are still trying to overhaul their economies and in some areas, have set themselves up in competition to China.
The electronics sector in Hungary has notably lost jobs to China, which has poured investment into cutting-edge sectors such as production of dynamic random access memory chips to leapfrog past eastern European rivals.
Whereas Chinese exports of information-technology goods to the EU-15 countries rose by about 25 per cent over 1996-2002, they soared by more than 50 per cent to the 10 new members over the same period.
A similar picture is evident in domestic appliances, chemicals and the textiles trade, with the EU-10 taking in far more Chinese imports over 1996-2002 than the richer, older member states.
This brought to mind some of the discussions at the recent Calibre workshop in the Hague.
The organisers ran a workshop session in the afternoon and divided the audience up into 8 or so groups who then used De Bono's Thinking Hats to assess the role of libre software in Europe's secondary software industry. Each team was named after a philosopher and was asked to find a quotation to summarise their results presentation. One team (that included Simon Phipps from Sun) came up with Jean Paul Satre's "Hell is other people", another Hobbes' "Homo homini lupus [est]".
The common theme was that these companies felt threatened by China. Being a libre software promotion event the specific concerns were mainly around the fact that China would consume EU funded research and innovation and comply with the terms of the libre license.
The point is subtle and sometimes missed - libre software depends just as much on respect for intellectual property as non-libre software.