The Ongoing Saga of Linux in China

Dan Gillmor, who's currently on the road in China, has sent a report about the role of Linux in China. We've talked about this before. Dan hits on some of the high points for *why* the Chinese are interested, which makes for interesting reading.

Comments

My chinese labmates use Windows because

[sam_handelman]

They don't like the Linux Chinese language support. None of the Linux boxes in the lab have chinese installed on them, in any case.

I don't know exactly what they find wrong with it, but Chinese readers who don't use Linux should take a look here; which btw is actually hosted from here and then give comments to people on sourceforge who will, given the attention this is getting, help to develop tools that better fit whatever people's needs are.

The Chinese language is very different from English and features that are hugely convenient for English users can seem irrelevant while things that it would never occur to English users to want, or which are downright inconvenient, are very helpful when you're typing Chinese. This is a situation where Linux needs.... marketing (dum dum dum) and in a terrible way.

Nice balanced, realistic article

[Rogerborg]

In anticipation of the site being /.'d, or you lot being too lazy to read it, a few quotes:

• More than 10 percent -- possibly as many as 15 percent -- of the desktop computers sold in China this year will come pre-loaded with Linux [...] In a nation that is paying somewhat more attention to anti-piracy campaigns, PC vendors have more incentive to sell legal systems. [...] But she and Liu agree that most of the pre-loaded Linux computers don't stay in that condition once buyers take them home or to the office. It's only slightly more difficult than it used to be to buy an inexpensive, unauthorized copy of Windows, which tends to make its way onto many of the hard disks that housed Linux when they left the store.

This is very pragmatic stuff. The basic message is that users want Windows, and vendors will give then Linux only if they have to for budget reasons. But the important point is the 10-15% figure, and the following:

• Red Flag's Liu thinks even this is progress. If end users even touch Linux briefly, he argues, some of them will stick with it. [...] Sun Microsystems will soon release [Star Office 6.0] localized for the Chinese character set [that] will sufficiently close the gap with Microsoft Office

Bingo. If you haven't tried the Star Office 6 beta, try it now. It's the killer app. For Harry Homeowner or Cathy Cubeville, a KDE/Gnome/GNU/Linux distro with Star Office 6 will do everything they need, for a fraction of the (retail) cost of a Microsoft solution. And if it's pre-loaded, why would you pay even a few dollars extra to replace that with a pirated Redmond solution?

I say this not as a long time Linux afficionado, but as a recent convert. Red Hat 6.2 and Star Office 5.2 came off my drive after a week, but SuSE 7.3 and Star Office 6 beta 3 do everything that I need. There's no way I'd pay £444 (UK retail prices) for WinXP + Word 2002, but I will pay £60 for boxed sets of SuSE + Star Office (assuming 6.0 ships for the same price as 5.2).

And maybe that's the point in China too. You can afford to bundle real versions of non-M$ software, but the M$ stuff is just too damn expensive. The choice for OEM's and purchasers is to use open source, or to pirate Microsoft. Right now, many of them are still choosing the latter, but at least they're being given the choice. I really think that when Star Office 6.0 ships, they'll find to their surprise that there's just no need to do that any more.

Fig Leaf?

[cygnusx]

But she and Liu agree that most of the pre-loaded Linux computers don't stay in that condition once buyers take them home or to the office. It's only slightly more difficult than it used to be to buy an inexpensive, unauthorized copy of Windows, which tends to make its way onto many of the hard disks that housed Linux when they left the store.

Excuse me for being cynical, but I know what software piracy in Asia is like. These are places where you can pick up Mathematica, STAAD, Oracle - for $20 or thereabouts. So is this bundling of Linux anything more a fig leaf from rock-bottom assemblers to not appear as selling "naked pcs" to clueless consumers?

The only two good points are -

a) since pc penetration in china is less than that of the US, the avg pc user in china is a lot more savvy than the avg us pc user. hence the chances of staying with linux is higher.

b) maybe (like the article notes) the users will dual-boot. At least the bright school/college goer will take a look at Linux and realize choice does exist.

Re:Taiwan

[Anonymous Coward]

At least a few years ago, FreeBSD was also very big in Japan compared to Linux. Part of the reason may have been pc98 support and an extensive set of japanese ports at the time; I don't know what the state of equivalent Linux functionality was at the time.

Re:Persistence

[AlanBreck]

According to Adam Smith, in "The Wealth of Nations", written in the 18th century, monopoly is a lousy system. He has been proven right time and again. One of the worst faults of monopoly that he lists is the stifling of innovation. He might not have anticipated the level of professional lying available to Microsoft, but the essential point in our crude modern parlance is that ALL moopolies suck sooner or later. And the only decent software MicroSclerosis ever wrote was Word and Excel for the Mac OS. Then they changed it.

Red Flag Linux not very popular in China

[marhar]

I lived in China for four years, where our company was building the China Internet Backbone. I came back to the States this Fall.

Based on what I saw, Red Flag is not a very popular distro. I saw it at the store for about 900 RMB (about $US 108). It could be the case that they are concentrating on large govt or corporate accounts.

Xteam Linux seemed very popular at the stores, where it sold for 38 RMB (about $US 5). They had a nice-looking poster, which was displayed all over.

You could buy current versions of both Slackware and Red Hat from the CD street vendors for about $US 1 each.

Most of my Chinese colleagues seemed to prefer a localized version of Mandrake. It looked pretty nice... all the screens/menus were presented in Chinese, and it supported an input method for Chinese characters.