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Beijing Snubs Microsoft For Municipal PCs' Software
jsse points to this Gartner article which says "that on 28 December 2001, the Beijing municipal government selected among seven vendors to provide operating system (OS), office automation (OA) and antivirus software for government PCs. Beijing selected six bidders, including Red Flag, but rejected the seventh bidder, Microsoft -- the only one that was not selected. Gartner listed several reasons why Microsoft lost the bid, but missed out the famous rumor that Microsoft has built a bad relationship with China since the first Chinese Windows 95, which was written by Taiwan programmers, contains Easter eggs carrying anti-communist messages."
So what's the problem with communist mentality? The mentality is great in my opinion. It's just that the implementations so far have been total crap.
0x or or snor perron?!
This is a small peice of what I posted in the other China newsbit.
You guys are -way- too easy on China on this site. When did China stop being the evil, ruthless country that they are? How many tiannamen square massacres, Tibets and Falun Gong witchhunts (where the chinese government hired people to hack American servers that contained Falun Gong information!) do you guys need before you start taking a critical stance against China's government?
The reason that China cares about software development is probably because they're trying to stop getting their web pages hacked by human rights advocates, or they're building some more Falun Gong firewalls or something.
This isn't just some bland racism, or an overboarding sense of "patriotism", China is a brutal, dangerous country, and a testament to the powers of corruption.
Oh, and speaking on the specific topic, I do recall the president of China's son having some connections with Red Flag Linux (their communist-toted linux -copy-), so I'm sure that Red Flag is going to win in the end. I'd rather have linux be chosen for it's technical quality, and not for it's connections with a bunch of sleazy corrupt politicians. God help us all.