Korea Replacing 120,000 Windows with Linux

The Korean government has just signed a contract with Hancom to purchase 120,000 copies of HancomLinux Deluxe 2.0 (which is basically Red Hat OS + tweaks + korean language support + KDE localized) and HancomOffice 2.0. Thats quite a big achievement. Here is Hancom's Press Release about it.

Comments

Major achievement

[Grishnakh]

This is a major achievement for the free software world. Let's hope that other enlightened governments will do the same, instead of helping support the American monopoly.

Re:Major achievement

[Anonymous Coward]

What's that supposed to mean? If you're insinuating that only communist governments support "free" software, then I suggest you open up a fucking map.

Remember, there are 2 Korea's: North and South; and for ignorant ass people like you, the former being Communist and the latter being a Republic. Big fucking difference.

Though I don't blame the editor as much for not being more specific about which government the article is referring to, I DO blame your ignorant ass for not reading the article where it actually states which one: South.

Nice try at being witty, dumbass.

Re:Major achievement

[mooshoo]

sure it's great news that this is happening, but I fear many people have forgotten something, It's because of companies such as Microsoft that the US economy is doing as well as it is. So many people hate MS and want them to die out of business but this destruction would only harm our economy.

Re:Major achievement

[Waffle Iron]

OTOH, maybe Microsoft is just parasitically sucking capital out of the US economy and adding it to the $36Billion hoard of cash buried in its back yard. It's not like they have that many employees on the payroll to cut checks for; nor are they sending out dividends.

Re:Major achievement

[efgbr]

Youre a fool to think like that. Microsofts monopoly only hurts the American economy, as it stops competition, which is the base in which the US Economy was founded.

In the short term Microsoft brings money to the US, but it stops a lot of bussiness in the process, which would earn a lot more.

Re:Major achievement

[VAXman]

That's not strictly true. Sales of Windows is good for Microsoft and its suppliers (which, true, is a huge part of the economy). If a suitable replacement for Windows was available at a lower price, it would help Microsoft's customers (which are also a big part of the economy). It would lower the cost of the operating system software, which would increase the amount of money consumers will spend on other things (increasing production throughout the economy), and which would allow businesses to increase profits (or lower prices), since their costs would have lowered (either case would increase production).

Re:Major achievement

[Phil-14]

sure it's great news that this is happening, but I fear many people have forgotten something, It's because of companies such as Microsoft that the US economy is doing as well as it is. So many people hate MS and want them to die out of business but this destruction would only harm our economy.

And it's because of Hancom that South Korea
actually has a word processor that handles
their native language. About two years ago
Microsoft tried to buy Hancom with the intent
of taking their native-Korean-language office
suite off the market and replace
it with MS Office (which isn't nearly as
functional in Korean). The sale was blocked
by the Korean government. So you think M$
should make decisions that make other people
suffer for its own business gains, but you
act suprised when people hate it? Microsoft
has earned the hate of many people,
both in Korea and the US.

Do you think it's
good for US business to have to keep spending
billions of dollars fighting off the Outlook
Virus Of The Week? I can't afford to take the
time off of real work to keep trying to keep
the work M$ computers virus free. Is it supposed
to be a comfort to me and the millions of small
business owners like me who have substantial
productivity drains from Microsoft software that
Bill Gates is making lots of money? To be blunt,
if you think M$ is more important to the economy than ten thousand randomly chosen small businesses, you're making the same sorts of mistakes the Soviets did. Personally, I don't want the US to go the way of the Soviet Union.

Re:Major achievement

[juuri]

For those that don't understand part of the above.

Microsoft doesn't pay dividends on stock you own. Hence many critics complaints about their shifting of money to avoid paying any taxes at all. When you are buying msoft stock you are hoping it will be worth more in the future to sell. There is no revenue side for you as the investor other than this. Because of this msoft MUST continue to increase the dominance it has to push the stock price up and keep investors happy. The gist? msoft can't be a well behaved company and keep the stockholders happy.

Gates gets richer and richer by year at an incredibly rapid pace because of the particular "loophole" in taxes on stock.

Re:Major achievement

[Znork]

Oh, yes, so lets have the government confiscate all buisnesses and replace them with monopolies. This pesky competition thing sure cant be the best thing for consumers and the economy.

Face it, Microsoft is harming the US and world economy constantly, and the harm the company causes will only grow worse.

Re:Major achievement

[Anonymous Coward]

Your crazy.

Gates took 10s of BILLIONS of dollars OUT of our economy by his extortionary pricing, something he could only have done by breaking the law in creating a monopoly.

Think of the lost rollover that occurs when money is normally allowed to recycle through the economy... by most counts as many as 7 times.

Think of all the smaller businesses he destroyed by stealing their code and rolling it into his OS.

Think of all the REAL INNOVATION he (and other companies) stifled by agreggious patents and copyrights. The mind boggles at where operating systems and software could be right now if progress hadn't been held back.

Gates took and took and took from the community, primarily through the BSD license and a lot by outright theft, and gave back only agreggious EULAs, higher "license" fees, and an army of lizard lawyers to intimidate the 'lower class' into submission.

Think of the lost revenues, increased expenses and wages and lost productivity that occurs every time an OS made by Gates crashed. I would wage that sum to be well over a TRILLION dollars. A value reflected back into the price of computer software and equipment.

THink of the BILLIONS that have been stolen because GATES was too (stupid, greedy, unconcerned) to publish an REAL OS, web server and browser than the imitation swiss cheese he calls software.

Go troll someplace else. Your memory is too short to be useful at /.

Re:Major achievement

[ikickass]

hmmm..... I wonder who's doing accounting audit for MSFT. Recently they were caught red handed trying to rig an on-line poll in UK. I wonder if they try to rig something else.... World's largest s/w vendor and no dividend? I guess they don't want any regulation or govmint oversight. Am I the only one smelling rat here????

Re:Major achievement

[mojo-raisin]

Microsoft doesn't pay dividends on stock you own. Hence many critics complaints about their shifting of money to avoid paying any taxes at all.

huh? How would paying dividends cause MS to pay more in taxes?

Re:Major achievement

[Grishnakh]

I shouldn't feed a troll, but you're a total moron. I knew the article was about South Korea, since Hancom is a South Korean company (which I knew about long before I saw this article). Reread my post and you'll notice I never made any references to communist countries at all. Duh...

The other enlightened governments I was referring to are France, Germany, and Argentina, which have been considering adopting Linux for their government computing systems as well.

Idiot. Guess that's why you post anonymously.

Re:Major achievement

[WolfWithoutAClause]

Actually I believe the issue is the executors that run MSFT (e.g. Bill) have large numbers of shares. Therefore if they start receiving dividends, they would be liable for tax. Presumably they are only liable for tax right now when they sell shares. (Roughly speaking- IANAA); and the money that the company is making gets siphoned off as much as possible to the board; and little of it is 'wasted' ending up as taxes.

Re:Major achievement

[Anonymous Coward]

Flash forward to 2043 when the last
US expeditionary force suffers a
major cyber defeat(resulting in a
real defeat) when it's
MSmainbattle coordinator is totally
outclassed by the COAS's(confederation of
asian states) state of the art
Unix based BattleAI. Historians later
point to US's misguided clinging to a single
company's business concerns(MS) as
causing the sun to set on American
technical and military leadership.

guns against cavalry
phalanx against throng
iron against bronze
bronze against stone
The drama continues.

Re:Major achievement

[WolfWithoutAClause]

Dunno; I'm guessing, but it sounds plausible. They probably give themselves share bonuses or whatever is most tax efficient at the time.

Re:Major achievement

[Grishnakh]

Whoops, sorry about that. I see reikk's comment now. Why does /. make it look like your reply was to my comment when I don't have -1 and 0 rated messages visible?

Re:Major achievement

[innocent_white_lamb]

Capital gains (income from sale of shares) is also taxed at a much lower rate than dividend income.

Re:Major achievement

[spectecjr]

Actually I believe the issue is the executors that run MSFT (e.g. Bill) have large numbers of shares. Therefore if they start receiving dividends, they would be liable for tax. Presumably they are only liable for tax right now when they sell shares. (Roughly speaking- IANAA); and the money that the company is making gets siphoned off as much as possible to the board; and little of it is 'wasted' ending up as taxes.

Hmmm... sounds odd to me:

1. You get taxed when you sell the shares based on the delta in their price (your profit or loss).

2. You get taxed on the dividends.

These are two mutually exclusive concepts. No dividends doesn't automatically mean that they pay less taxes on their profits -- it means that they get LESS profits, and as a result, pay LESS taxes because they made LESS money.

Si

Re:Major achievement

[Overgrown1]

imprimis, I think you are on the money when you comapre the monolithic economic approach to pouring money at the M$ security issues. I am constantly amazed at the insidious and invidious drain on the US treasury for M$ support, products, etc. When I consider the costs of running the military in a non-war economy, and the use of computers to every aspect of government, I must ask myself this: Why do the powers that be not finance the development of a GPL OS, POSIX based, GUI'd, etc? It would be much cheaper, much more reliable, and infinitely more secure. In terms of the Big Brother Is Watching You Crowd, maybe they should leave M$ to the open market after all. That way they can sneak into your systems at night and search your hardware for criminal activity and traitorous evidence.

Re:Major achievement

[blonde rser]

The loophole deal is that the investor ends up with more money in the end because, although he still pays tax on the profit eventually, he gets the profit on the tax money in the mean time.

Business Perspective Investing explains it like this: an entrepreneur comes to you saying if you pay to start up his company at the end of the year you will still own the company and you will get the initial investment returned to you. At the end of the year you're ecstatic because this actually happens so you go back to the entrepreneur and tell him to start up another company with the profit money; you will then have two companies returning your initial investment every year- and of course this pattern continues. The only problem is at the end of every year when you get your profit cheque you have to pay taxes and replace that amount out of your own pocket to buy the next company.

But the entrepreneur being crafty has a plan. He suggests that, instead of paying you profit, the company keeps the money and uses it expand itself. This is just like you owning two companies except both companies end up having the same name. So even though this is the exact same situation you are now not paying taxes on your expanding investment. Sure if you decide to go liquid you'll have to pay taxes then but Epsilon taxes paid will be much less. This is the beauty of compound interest (in this case it is working backward but if you plug through the math you can see the concept of compound interest is still at play here.)

Re:Major achievement

[ScumBiker]

Ya know, I've been thinking somewhat along those lines. Scares the hell out of me. Unfortunately, I uspect the spooks and generals will nuke the shit out of COAS before they would allow them to have a real superiority edge on us. All the while, of course, still clinging to the idiotic idea that a proprietary, closed, single source shitbag of an poor excuse for what some people claim to be an operating system.

The worst part? As I write this, I'm install Win98SE into VMWare, just so I can get the binaries for RTCW, Tribes 2, and QuakeIII. FSCKING Winblows. . .

Re:Major achievement

[Melantha_Bacchae]

mooshoo wrote:

> It's because of companies such as Microsoft that the US economy is
> doing as well as it is.

In case you have forgotten recent history, and have no idea of the current shape of the US (and world) economy: we are in a recession. In the summer of 2000, things were great. In the fall of 2000, Apple (who was doing so fantastic that Wall Street people were going to upgrade it from dramatic recovery to outstanding growth) called out a serious earnings warning. The warning was due in part to a blunder or two, and part to Microsoft dumping all their Apple stock on the market, but it was a sign of things to come. The industry laughed and proclaimed the death of Apple. The laughter didn't last long as one by one, the PC makers called out their own earnings warnings, sending the industry into a downward spiral. The dot.com mess certainly didn't help. The conflict and uncertainity of the US Presidential election later in 2000 spread the IT problems to the rest of the economy, as people lost faith in their leadership. By spring of 2001, the recession was here. The terrorist attacks in 9/11 sent things spiraling further downward worldwide.

> So many people hate MS and want them to die out of business but this
> destruction would only harm our economy.

No it wouldn't. Apple, the one desktop computer maker that does not use Windows as its OS, quickly recovered, and was making profits in the millions by the next quarter after their stumble. They have not laid off thousands of workers, they have opened 27 new stores. It's the Windows based PC makers that were and are suffering the most. If Microsoft disappeared tomorrow, the PC makers would simply hunt up another OS, the software makers would port to that OS, and life would go on. The PC makers would be free to better differentiate their products. The absence of Microsoft's much-abused monopoly would bring real competition, which would bring some healthy fresh air to the industry.

After all, the PC industry can't get too much more unhealthy than it is now -- with Microsoft.

OS X: the Apple of Mothra's Aqua eye.

Re:Major achievement

[Eric E. Coe]

I agreee. The computer software industry (except for the OSS corner) is nearly dead compared to 10, 15 years ago. The M$ monopoly (and monotony) has completely stifled the lively innovation of those times.

This will ultimately stifle competition and create an inefficient economy.

It already has. This is one of the reasons for the rise of OSS software. Mind that the people that complain the OSS is no good because it is cheap or free ($) confuse market value (price) with use value. OSS has high use value.

Re:Major achievement

[serbanp]

Only if it's a Long-Term-Capital-Gain; then it is taxed at a fixed 20% rate. Otherwise it's taxed as regular income.

Serban

Excellent, excellent news

[whereiswaldo]

What a great success story. I'm good to see someone using their head and making smart decisions.
For one, I'm touting Linux to all my friends when the subject of computers comes up, just so they know it's not just another operating system: It's Freedom from the Dark Empire.

Re:Excellent, excellent news

[FFalcon]

I'm touting Linux to all my friends when the subject of computers comes up, just so they know it's not just another operating system: It's Freedom from the Dark Empire.

Instinctively, I agree with you on this. I am a (very) new user of Linux, and I'm trying to explain to family and friends why it's worth the trouble. We're all capable of learning to use the new environment and tools, but I have trouble articulating the moral and almost metaphysical imperative that people on slashdot have to not use Microsoft.

Can someone post (or point to) an essay on this subject? i.e. Why it's worth the trouble to not use microsoft. The commentary should be accessible to a competent computer user, not neccessarily programmer.

Re:Excellent, excellent news

[nomadic]

If they're not too far to the right, you can paint linux as being a move away from capitalism, leading us to a less money-driven culture.

Re:Excellent, excellent news

[Anonymous Coward]

Please post an essay on why [i]YOU[/i] are going to the trouble of using Linux? If it's not saving you time, effort, or somehow improving your life (vs. a Microsoft product), why are you bothering? Just to save money? Or, like most of the ubergeeks here, are you doing it just to show your geek prowess?

Competition is a good thing, but many of the zealots here will go waaayyy out of their way to avoid Microsoft products, even if it costs them (and their employer) a significant amount due to wasted time, effort, poor maintainability, and incompatibility with what the rest of the world is doing. As an employer, I'd fire most of the jackasses I hear spouting this quasi-religious Linux crap. Want to use Linux? Do it on your own time. Don't spend the next 3 weeks, on my nickel, trying to figure out how you can avoid using Word and Excel, replacing them with 3rd rate buggy incompatible not-yet-ready-for-primetime facsimiles.

Re:Excellent, excellent news

[nomadic]

jeez...i cant read a single fickn story on slashdot without the commies pushing their agenda... You tried...you lost...get over it

Yes, any suggestion that maybe money shouldn't dominate our culture and lives MUST be a call for Communist rebellion. Give me a break.

Re:Excellent, excellent news

[Jerry]

Do more than 'tout Linux'. Make copies of your favorite distro and give them one!

Re:Excellent, excellent news

[whereiswaldo]

Good point. Most of my friends don't live in town, though... but I could always mail CDs I guess. :)

Re:Excellent, excellent news

[kevinank]

As one of those zealot jackasses whom you would fire, I think I can safely guess that you won't need to bother. Most of us quasi-religious types seek employment more in tune with our ethics. ;)

Seriously though, it reads to me like you have a bit of a chip on your shoulder. Those of us willing to work with a tenth rate OS have at least gotten it to the point of being third rate. Eventually it will get to first rate, just relax, and let us continue developing it.

Re:Excellent, excellent news

[kevinank]

If you really want to know, ask nicely. On the other hand, if you must resort to ad-hominem then you already know you've lost, and I have nothing more to say to you.

I'm not the anomymous coward here.

Re:Excellent, excellent news

[innocent_white_lamb]

Microsoft is a criminal company, and has been proven to be such in a court of law.

Microsoft has some extremely unsavory (to say the least) business practices and some of their actions can be legitimately compared to a type of computer Mafia.

By using their products you are tacitly condoning their actions and doing business with a criminal.

There, how's that for an "ethical" anti-Microsoft stand?

Re:Excellent, excellent news

[Asic Eng]

Well, just because you do something for ethical reasons, doesn't mean that someone not doing that is unethical.

For example I used to help paint public schools in NYC. I don't think that would give me a claim to call you unethical?

Re:Excellent, excellent news

[Asic Eng]

Well, the claim that it's *not* saving me time, effort or improves my life is a tall order. (If I interpret what you write, as making that claim.)

Obviously it might depend on what your application is, but being able to script things, and to use perl/gawk etc helps me a lot at my work.

On the other hand, the periodic virus outbreaks with Windows are rather a drain on productivity. I'm also fed up with Office continually changing it's file formats - documents I created some years ago in Excel, are almost completely unreadable with today's Excel. The embedded graphics have just disappeared onto seperate pages - great job really.

As for features - the only time I run into limitations with StarOffice (like integrating large documents), MS Office doesn't do any better either. If it comes to that I'd be better of using FrameMaker. YMMV of course.

Re:Excellent, excellent news

[cduffy]

I don't think using Microsoft products is unethical -- but I do think that using, supporting and contributing back to open source software is both productive and ethical. Of course, doing it only to be ethical would be unfair to the shareholders -- but in many lines of business it's productive as well. Consider: My employer needs to write an automated package testing system (true example!). We could either (a) buy one, (b) write a proprietary one, or (c) modify an OSS package to do what we need.

(a) wouldn't work out -- there was no commercial product that did exactly what we needed. Even if there were, we would have been stuck on a single vendor for support, upgrades, and improvements, and nailed to their timetable for when these things would get done.

(b) could have happened, but we went with...

(c) -- we modified MandrakeSoft's rpmlint tool and made an internal version with product-specific checks, database logging and lots of other goodness. The nifty thing is that although this was two years ago that all the development was done, merging in an upstream version (to take advantage of the improvements Mandrake and all the other contributors have made) is trivial. Further, if Mandrake goes out of business, no big deal -- we, and/or some other users, can maintain this software without their help.

Now, I gave this example referring to a testing system, but in embedded space (which is where our products are targeted), the same argument tends to apply to operating systems. Embedded OSes frequently require a great deal of customization; license terms (particularly royalties) are critical; and maintaining the OS core when you could (should?) be spending engineering time on your application layer is unacceptable (which is why less folks are doing embedded OSes in-house; see Cyclades for an example of a company that switched to Linux from their own proprietary OS, and is very glad of the change).

Okay, I've covered productive. As for ethical, in such cases where it's of no detriment to me, I take the position that giving any intellectual property for use under liberal terms (the GPL being more liberal than any proprietary license, though admittedly much less liberal than such as the BSD licenses) is an inherently Good Thing to do.

My present employer sees things the same way -- which is part of why I'm so happy to work with them.

120,000 copies?

[Knobby]

Why would anyone buy 120,000 copies of Linux? Does buying 120,000 copies entitle the users of each machine to a year or two of service? If that's the case, then maybe.. If not, then why not simply buy 1 copy and install it the 120,000 machines?..

Re:120,000 copies?

[Peyna]

Go ahead, you buy 1 copy and install on 120,000 machines. I'm sure you have the time for it. Even if they bought 1 copy and burned many cds, it would still take a long time to install it on 120,000 machines.

Re:120,000 copies?

[Anonymous Coward]

If it takes 20 minutes to install Linux, and you're bottlenecked by having a single copy to install from, then it takes 40000 hours to install it 120000 machines.

They probably ran a profiler on the process and found that it was spending all its time talking to that one CD. So they figured, "What if we parallelize it?" And they found out that if you have 120000 copies, you can install it on 120000 machines in 20 minutes.

20 minutes is less time than 40000 hours. Now, here in a America, time means nothing (*cough*), but in Korea perhaps it is valued. Add to that that the copies of Linux are very inexpensive, and it's a good tradeoff.

Re:120,000 copies?

[Libor Vanek]

I think that main issue (technically and financialy) is the user training and support.

Re:120,000 copies?

[JediTrainer]

You haven't heard of imaging?

I mean, besides the many ways you can script the installation process, there's certainly ways that you can image the completed installation and just copy that image to all machines with the same hardware configuration.

And yes, it can be done easily and relatively cheaply. I used to work for a consulting firm that used this process to upgrade about 3000 machines at one company over just a few weekends. Basically identified the different hardware configurations (I think they had about 8), and we ran around with floppies that booted and imaged the machine from a central server (which had a copy made previously from an installation done by hand).

Each floppy was configured to grab a different image from the server (identified by machine model). Each person in our team was responsible for upgrading all machines in one wing of one floor of one of their buildings. When done, a new wing was assigned to be done.

Each machine took about 10-15 minutes to image, but we didn't sit there and wait until they were done. We just identified machine, inserted floppy, move on to next one, then come back later to retrieve the floppy.

All of this was done with Norton Ghost to image a bunch of Windows installations, and it worked wonderfully. I'm sure it can be done just as easily with Linux installations too.

Re:120,000 copies?

[shepd]

>Go ahead, you buy 1 copy and install on 120,000 machines. I'm sure you have the time for it.

Well, the answer to the question you inferred is very simple. Since digital data doesn't lose anything over generations, you can make copies from the copies. So, knowing this, let's see how many burning cycles it would take to make 120,000 CDs:


2^x = 120000
Log 120000 = 17 cycles.
2


With 24x burners this would take under 1 hour (17 * 3.3 minutes). Of course, one could read the entire CD to a massiver server and simply burn 120,000 copies at once in 3.3 minutes, but hey, why would we want to do that?

Don't tell me they don't have that many burners to do the work, either. This is Korea... they make the things by the millions!

Re:120,000 copies?

[shepd]

Well, yeah, if you are sticking with windows and Messy-DOS, then yeah, you do have to pay out the ass.

Now that they are going with a linux solution, they may as well use it throughout the process.

Click Here for a GPL clone of Symantec's Ghost Cloning software. Works wonders with various non-free OSes, too. :)

Re:120,000 copies?

[Jucius Maximus]

"And they found out that if you have 120000 copies, you can install it on 120000 machines in 20 minutes."

You forgot to factor in the time necessary to open 120K software boxes worth of shrink wrap.

Re:120,000 copies?

[Tony-A]

Each user gets a nice looking box.
Each user gets some kind of printed documentation.
Each user gets some nice looking CDs.
Each user gets a phone number with maybe a bit of handholding and support behind it.
The vendor gets some funding.

This is being bought for "users" not "hackers".

Re:120,000 copies?

[aka-ed]

It may not be 120,000 copies for 120,000 stations. Do we know how many PCs the Korean Gov maintains?

US

[damiam]

Now all we need is to get the US government to replace 23% of its machines with Linux boxes...

Stay out of Bill's way

[blindbat]

I wouldn't want to be at the managers meeting on Monday morning! Bill will be on a rampage!

Re:Stay out of Bill's way

[Yuioup]

If I read the press release properly on the Hanscom website, it combines Linux and Windows stuff.

"HancomLinux Deluxe 2.0" is the product that combines the MS compatible office suite and Linux OS. - press release

So I don't know if Bill's going to be that pissed ;)

Yuioup

Re:Stay out of Bill's way

[rking]

"MS compatible office suite" I should think that's like an "IBM compatible PC". Probably Star Office. Doubt Microsoft are getting any money from this.

Re:Stay out of Bill's way

[hattig]

As the Slashdot story, the press release and more said, the Office suite is "Hancom Office", Hancom's Linux office software that supports Korean excellently (apparently, I have not used it).

The Korean government has decided to support a local company, and in the process cut its cost, cut import costs for the country, and set a precedent - maybe other Korean companies will do the same now, and thus cut imports even more whilst boosting the local economy.

Yes, a political choice, but it wouldn't have been made if the software was not up to the task. The only certainty is that Microsoft have most likely lost 120,000 * ~$300 (XP + Office) = $48,000,000 in revenue because of this choice.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

OpenSource Korea

[peripatetic_bum]

Just think about it,
We know that India and China are battling it out to see who is going to be the powerhouse computer programming center and here Korea may have just pulled a coup by declaring openSource to be something that the gov't official supports. I dont know about you, but I would now look towards Korea as a contender for the place to where computer programming is acutaly done. Think of the costs savingd from using opensource

(I know OpenSource still costs money to run, but just think of the savings Korea will experince)

Thanks for reading

Re:OpenSource Korea

[nomadic]

Well the thing is China and India are both developing countries without a comprehensive technical infrastructure; they're trying to become programming powerhouses because they have very few options. South Korea's a fully modernized country with a diverse economy; they don't have the same impetus to do so. Plus, their higher standard of living would make them unable to offer the dirt-cheap contracting that India and China can offer.

Re:OpenSource Korea

[JamieF]

Population is something strongly in China's favor. For example, for a university that will take 1000 CS students a year, if you get to pick 1000 from 1,000,000 applicants, those 1000 will probably be smarter (and more motivated) than if you get to pick from 10,000 applicants. Also, if you have 1000 Chinese firms competing for a US project, that would tend to give the US company more leverage to go cheap or go for the best firm out of 1000, than 100.

That's the theory, anyway. Still, managing offshore development is tough, to say the least.

Re:OpenSource Korea

[nomadic]

Not really; China only just edges out India population-wise. The former has about 1.27 billion, the latter about 1.02 billion. Plus India has a better higher education system, and slightly better technical resources.

Re:OpenSource Korea

[metlin]

I'm sorry, but I'll have to disagree with you. There is one important point which you miss out -- India already has an existing user/customer base of Linux which is ever growing, except that it is not very well known.

For example, some people from our own local LUG (http://www.chennailug.org) convinced the electricity board of some states here to use Linux.

(Incidentally, the other developer besides Miguel working on Mono, Ravi Pratap, is from our LUG)

The LUGs also take it upon themselves to spread Linux to colleges and schools. Lots of LUGs around the country have convinced schools, colleges and offices by conducting local Linux expos to showcase the prowess of Linux. The problem is, India being a relatively big country, you do not hear about these things. And offlate, we are really getting commercial queries to the LUG, and people are beginning to use it as a hiring ground for hunting good talent. Which I'd say, is a very good thing!

Another point is that, there are a lot of LUGs in India which have convinced their respective state/local bodies to switch to Linux. Since it is a bunch of freelancers doing it, it is not known.

But the truth is, India is beginning to see an evergrowing stream of companies switching to Linux. But because of the fact that other things are also going on, these are just not noticed. As an example, the number of people attending our LUG meets has literally tripled in the past couple of months!

My point is this - just because some companies do not do it, and there is no monetary benifit involved does not mean it's not happening. Just that world domination is happening subtly but surely :-)

Re:OpenSource Korea

[bergeron76]

How is 250 million "just edging out" India? I think you need to look at the size of the #3 country put that into it's proper perspective.

Re:OpenSource Korea

[vchoy]

Speaking of China: There's Redflag linux. (English version of the site). Check out this story. It even states: There is additional support in that Jiang Mianheng, the son of Chinese president Jiang Zemin, plays a prominent role in the management of Red Flag.

The story was written a while ago, but the point is that China did support the concept of "open source" a while back (However I do not know about "officially support"). If you think about it make sense:

The source is available (in China, this is the most important aspect - they [government] likes to know whats going on...)

Getting the source is relatively inexpensive

In RedFlag Linux case it has much going for it:
-Developed by China (China Academy of Science),
-Managed by China (Shanghai NewMargin Venture Capital)
-To be used by China....

Re:OpenSource Korea

[luge]

The other relevant factor is English. Having been a former colony, the English of the average technically educated Indian is excellent- slightly odd accent for us Americans to get used to but otherwise it's a native tongue. Not so for non-Hong Kong Asians- there are many who speak excellent English, but for every one of those there are many more whose English is a... work in progress :) That definitely makes a difference when trying to work with American companies and programmers, and it's a big strike against the Koreas when compared to India.

Re:OpenSource Korea

[mlinksva]

English is spoken by just about everyone in Singapore and very widely in Malaysia and the Philippines

Re:OpenSource Korea

[tavon79]

I really wish it was like you say... but reality is Korea will never be a open source computer programming center any time soon...

The fact is South Korea is becoming the Gaming Mecca of the World. With PC Rooms(internet cafe's designed for lan parties and online gaming) on every corner(over 50,000), and Gaming Leagues, and Professional Gamers Leagues... today Computer Games is the most favorite past-time for Young Koreans.

The reality is virtuall all games are developed for MS Windows and the Korean Public has no reason to switch their desktop to Linux... Unless games are ported to Linux, Linux stand no chance in the desktop arena in South Korea.

So, Blizzard... Please port Warcraft 3 to Linux...

Re:OpenSource Korea

[luge]

English is spoken widely just about everywhere in the world that has an educated class. But there is a world of difference between working with native speakers and with working with those who have it as a second language. Ask anyone who grew up in Miami- lots of people speak English that is perfectly passable in everyday life but doesn't fly for constant use in a working, technical environment. My girlfriend calls it a 'tourist' language- you can get by for things like asking directions, ordering meals, and having simple, formalistic interactions, but complex technical discussions are difficult at best. Literally hundreds of millions of Indians speak English as a native tongue, and it shows. [And I say this not just because I'm a big fan of Salman Rushdie ;)]

Re:OpenSource Korea

[luge]

For a much, much shorter period of time than India, and it was never as well integrated into the Empire, particularly with regards to infrastructure- the British built tons and tons of (among other things) schools in India, rightly regarded as the crown jewel of the empire.

Re:OpenSource Korea

[luge]

Doh. :)

Hum...

[The Great Wakka]

Yay! But it is time for other governments to switch. Maybe one industrialized nation will help persuade the rest. But the HancomOffice choice puzzles me. They could use something like StarOffice (Korean Support) or KOffice. Unless, of course, HancomOffice is a clone of those too. And why are they "paying" for Linux? Is some bit propitary?

Re:Hum...

[damiam]

Koffice is not really ready for widespread usage yet. I've never used HancomOffice, but I'm sure it probably compares pretty well to StarOffice (there's no way it could be any slower) and I hear it has great Korean language support, better than even MS Office. And IIRC StarOffice isn't free either, if you want to use it for anything other than personal stuff. I suppose they could use OpenOffice, but that's beta software and there's no real tech support available.

Um, we need some details before

[twilight30]

... breaking out the champagne. It is good news, but the devil's in the details. Over what time period will Hancom introduce these machines? Which departments are to use them? Are they moving over all previously-MS documentation to Linux as well? Are any of the MS-machines to be retained for doco reading?

Sorry to be such a poopy-pants. (Has anyone heard any more about Mexico's initiatives?)

and for redhat?

[digitalsushi]

i wonder if, when a redhat employee reads that, if they feel like they should get a piece of that pie.. or if they all genuinely think "yay, good for them!" i mean 120,000 copies is quite a shot in the arm. open source rules but this must make some people jealous. maybe its just commercialism's power of me :-D

Re:and for redhat?

[haesu]

well ya know, Linux is GNU OS. so even if redhat employees get jealous, too bad for them! :-D hehe

Re:and for redhat?

[_johnnyc]

It's a pie that belongs to everyone and no one, and a victory for every open source developer, user, and company. Hancom have sold a linux support contract in an area of the world where Redhat has no sales presence, but the fact that Hancom linux is using Redhat will raise their profile.

That said, Redhat have done a remarkable job with the distro post 7.0, and choosing Redhat as the base for a tailored package is a good choice for a large scale deployment. Redhat might even gain from this themselves, through a trickle-down effect.

Anyway, this is a great victory for linux and open-source. Very happy to get good news for a change :-)

Re:and for redhat?

[re-geeked]

In O'Reilly's "Open Sources" book, Tiemann says that RedHat decided a while ago that growing the Linux market was more important than growing RedHat's share of the market.

So he's probably fine with it. Now he has 120,000 potential customers he didn't have before.

Re:and for redhat?

[Tony-A]

Assuming that the Koreans have done a good job, it brings a good Asian Font desktop that much closer/better. RedHat 7.2 now has PRC Chinese desktop (from Red Flag Linux?). It's something like the interplay between KDE and Gnome, between Linux and *BSD. One improves, the others will not be far behind. I don't think RedHat wants to compete with the Koreans as to what it means to be Korean. Actually, RedHat is likely to sell more copies because of this.

Domino Theory

[crumbz]

During the US-USSR cold war there was a notion espoused by the US think taks called, "Domino Theory". It postulated that once a country within a geographic region changed to a communist government, it's neighbors would be more likely to do so. Hence the US policy of containment that we have seen since WWII.

Now, does this analogy apply to Free vs. Monopolistic Software ? We have recently seen the Chinese undertake a government program to promote free software over Microsoft. Now Korea. Is India next? Or Japan?

Granted, geography is not necessarily a factor in this "war" but language certainly is. When can we expect this to spread to Europe or (better yet) the US?

Re:Domino Theory

[nomadic]

Irrelevant. Monopolies are defined as dominating a specific market; Korea and the US represent two different markets.

Re:Domino Theory

[Malcontent]

" How can you dare call MS software "monopolistic"?"

IIRC the technical definition of a monopoly is a bit over 70%. I doubt losing a hundred thousand desktops will drop MS share of the desktop market below 70%.

If somebody knows the actual number please post is so that people like danhaskett don't go around thinking that a monopoly is defined as a 100% market share.

Re:Domino Theory

[Rob Kaper]

Do you, the consumer have more or less choice in desktop OS's, applications, and so-called "middleware" (what a stupid term) then you did in 1995, when MS first bundled IE and Windows?

Me the techie does. Me the consumer does not. In 1995, most major dummy computer stores (where regular consumers get their stuff) offered computers with either OS/2 Warp 3 or Windows 95 preinstalled. Now, it's just Windows.

So while Microsoft has no monopoly in the techie market, they do have one in the thousand times larger real consumer market.

Re:Domino Theory

[lalleglad]

However, Judge Jackson's finding of facts did find MS to be a monopoly.

And until I can easily go to a mainstore or main producer of desktops and order a non-Windows based computer at a fair price, ie. without the MS tax, then I'd say myself that MS has a monopoly.

Please explain to me why I am wrong?

Re:Domino Theory

[the eric conspiracy]

Monopoly isn't technically defined as any number. That is a persistent myth

Not correct. There are a number of quantitative measures that are used in various legal arenas to test for the presence anti-competitve market concentrations.

Example:

HERFINDAHL-HIRSCHMAN INDEX (HHI)--A measure of market concentration that's used primarily in merger cases. See the Justice/FTC Horizontal Merger Guidelines of 1992, 1.5 (Antitrust Law & Economics Review, Vol. 23:2, at 68, 73, n. 17.) This concentration measure is calculated by summing the squares of the individual market shares of all competing firms there. Thus a market consisting of only 4 firms with shares of 30%, 30%, 20%, and 20% has an HHI of 2600 (30 x 30 + 30 x 30 + 20 x 20 + 20 x 20 = 900 + 900 + 400 + 400 = 2600). The HHI ranges from a high of 10,000 (a single-firm monopolist) to a number approaching zero (an atomistic market with, say, hundreds of very small firms). "Moderate" concentration is said to begin with an HHI of 1000 and "high" concentration at 1800. Id., pp. 69-70. The latter is roughly approximated by a top-4-firm share of around 50%.

Thus Microsoft's 95% desktop market share gives an HHI index greater than 9025, which is WAY above the high market concentration expected to lead to constrained competition.

Re:Domino Theory

[LinuxGeek]

Excellent explanation, thanks for pointing us to reference information too.

Even with this mathmatical expression of a monopoly, I can imagine instances where a defined monopoly could co-exist with their competitors. If said monopoly dosen't use their market leverage to squash or to create artificial barriers to market entry then they are allowing competition and would most probably be relying on the strengths of their products to maintain market share.

If you are Gulliver, then you must take care not to squash the Lilliputians. But if a dozen Lilliputians are found flattened in Gullivers footsteps, don't expect people to believe that a gust of wind flattened them. Being a giant comes with tremendous responsibilities that the midgets probably don't even have to consider.

Re:Domino Theory

[Rob Kaper]

There is no market difference between techies and consumers.

Yes there is. Techies buy computer parts or at least computers without preinstalled OSes. Consumers do not. Two different products.

Re:Domino Theory

[fishebulb]

and at that staples, there dont seem to be any linux preloads, and in fact, that is impossible to get at staples, or at any large retailer (where most machines are bought).
so i can get linux, but i have to pay for windows first on that new computer.
and why cant i get it preloaded, because MS has the computer mfg's by the balls

I can get a computer without windows, but it wont be at Best Buy, Compusa, Circut city, etc etc etc.

Re:Domino Theory

[Tony-A]

How can you dare call MS Software "monopolistic"?
Real easy. "MS just lost 120,000 sales of Windows, Office, and other accompyning applications." No monopoly. Not news.

How could a company that has a monopoly in a given market lose sales to a competitor.
If that were so, then any monopoly once established could never be broken. That it can be broken does not disprove a monopoly.

They haven't switched yet. But it looks like they are in the process of switching. :-)

Re:Domino Theory

[kevinank]

First, this is a guideline. Any company with a "high" number is not automatically a monopoly, is it?

Well, presumptively they are. Whether they are in fact a monopoly is what the court decides on the basis of evidence presented. MS contested the presumption, but lost in court, so now it is established as fact that they are a monopoly. (That is what courts do.)

Since Microsoft also thinks that the court made an error in its finding of fact, they contested that conclusion in the court of appeals which upheld the basic conclusion. So as far as I can tell, Microsoft is a monopoly; while they and apologists for them may not wish to admit the truth, an impartial juror has concluded that they are, and has had his conclusion backed by the court of appeals.

Not having followed all of the evidence at trial, I have no opinion on Microsoft market share. Presumably if Microsoft thought that some evidence was in error, they would have provided opposing evidence.

Re:Domino Theory

[Malcontent]

" Second, 95% is incorrect. It was incorrect then, and no. I would suspect worldwide that the actual number of licensed, legal, Windows users is in the range of %60-%70."

Do you have any numbers to back that up? What operating system the other 30 to 40% desktops running?

" Finally, my original statement stands. Even if MS has 100% market share they wouldn't necessarily be a monopoly nor would they necessarily be restraining trade."

This is your opinion. It has nothing to do with the facts or the law. Apparently you think the law is wrong but nevertheless it's the law. MS is a monopoly as defined by the law of the united states. Not only does the law say so but so does a federal court an an appeals court. Not only is MS a monopoly but according to two courts they have abused that monopoly and have harmed the consumers. The trial is in the penalty phase right now. Ms will be punished for harming the consumers it remains to be seen weather that punishment is substantial or a slap on the wrist.

Burying your head in the sand and repeating "ms is not a monopoly" will not change the law, the federal court ruling, nor the appeals court ruling. All of the above state that MS is an abusive monopoly and will punish it for being one.

Re:Domino Theory

[nomadic]

There is no distinction between selling operating systems in Korea, Alaska, Florida, or California.

Of course there is. They're in different languages, they're in different locations, they're being sold on a market that has different dynamics, different laws, a different base of consumers. Monopolies usually are restricted to a single country; besides Microsoft I can't think of any others off the top of my head. Or are you actually saying a company can't be a monopoly unless they totally and unfairly dominate the market for that product in the entire WORLD?

Re:Domino Theory

[edinho]

1. 60-70% Did that number come out of your ass? In any case, if getting a computer without Windows means that I have to build my own, or I have to reduce my choice of vendors drastically, then that points in the direction of MS having a monopoly.

2. How much is Apple's market share? Besides, it is your opinion that Jackson is wrong. I happen to think that Jackson is correct. And since you have been shown to pull number out of your ass, by default I am the better person, and so your opinion is dismissable. How do you like some of your arbitrarily subjective rationalization applied to you?

3. ...stopped doing so because their was no consumer support... Maybe because MS has a monopoly?

I don't think you have any capacity to clear anything up.

Re:Domino Theory

[markj02]

Second, 95% is incorrect. It was incorrect then, and no. I would suspect worldwide that the actual number of licensed, legal, Windows users is in the range of %60-%70.

Oh? What, praytell, makes up the other 30-40% in your opinion? The simple fact is that 95% of all desktop operating systems people buy are Windows. And 95% of all desktop operating systems actually run (which includes unlicensed copies) are likely to be Windows, too.

Finally, my original statement stands. Even if MS has 100% market share they wouldn't necessarily be a monopoly

Economically, they would be a monopoly. Legally, US legislators have their panties in knots whenever it comes to limiting the power of big businesses, hence the US legal system has a rather oddball definition of "monopoly". But that's an issue with available legal remedies, not diagnosing the problem.

Re:Domino Theory

[markj02]

I can imagine instances where a defined monopoly could co-exist with their competitors. If said monopoly dosen't use their market leverage to squash or to create artificial barriers to market entry then they are allowing competition and would most probably be relying on the strengths of their products to maintain market share.

If companies knew how to, and were willing to, price products equitably and correctly in the absence of competition, we wouldn't need a free market for any goods. The fact is that no company knows the correct pricing of their products without competition, and, furthermore, they would be violating their fiduciary duty to their stockholders if they priced them as if there were competition. A market doesn't work efficiently unless it is divided among many comparable players.

Re:Domino Theory

[Malcontent]

"Its very much a question of interpretation. "

And in this case people who know much more about the law and the sherman acts decided that they were a monopoly and an abusive one at that.

Re:Domino Theory

[Kanon]

Bill said to let you know that the cheque is in the mail.

Re:Domino Theory

[Spoing]

... In 1995, most major dummy computer stores (where regular consumers get their stuff) offered computers with either OS/2 Warp 3 or Windows 95 preinstalled. Now, it's just Windows.

No, it was just Windows of Mac back then also.

As an old OS/2 user, I did keep an eye out for pre-installed machines and they just didn't exist. IBM's PC division specifically did not pre-install OS/2 for a variety of reasons.

Finding a Linux pre-install is still just as hard now as an OS/2 pre-install and for most of the same reasons.

For software in general, Linux has a much better position in 'most major dummy computer stores' since you can actually expect to find some software and not be dissapointed. Not much software, but it exists and I've bought it.

Re:Domino Theory

[cduffy]

If Jackson made that statement based on information exposed about that witness during the trial, as opposed to based on some previous impression, and didn't make it within earshot of the jury, I see nothing wrong with it.

Now, I don't know if this is the case -- mind providing some sources?

You're incorrect about there being no barrier to entry in the operating systems market -- if there were, people (and OEMs) could buy whatever OS they thought was technically superior, as opposed to whichever OS runs their apps or (in the latter case) whichever OS their contracts oblige them to buy. Establishing an application base and OEM contracts most certainly does qualify as a barrier to entry, and a high one.

It's not a prohibitively high barrier for a sufficiently determined individual -- I use only free software professionally unless a client purchases something different and my only personal commercial software usage is strictly limited to gaming -- but it's more than enough to keep alternate operating systems out of widespread public usage, and restricting public choice is what monopolies are about.

Re:Domino Theory

[LinuxGeek]

If companies knew how to, and were willing to, price products equitably and correctly in the absence of competition, we wouldn't need a free market for any goods. The fact is that no company knows the correct pricing of their products without competition, and, furthermore, they would be violating their fiduciary duty to their stockholders if they priced them as if there were competition.

Companies know how to set prices based upon their cost to create products or provide services. They then add a reasonable profit and you suddenly have a price. Then that product will either sell or not sell at that price. Your definition seems to imply that a company needs competition to take care of determining the prices the market will tolerate. The consumer is the actual tarket. A company can provide excellent product/service directly to a consumer without any competition at all. The consumer decides if the company has provided a compelling reason to part with their money.

Now, the willingness to do this is usually lacking, but it is indeed possible. During my time in this industry, I have seen MS on both sides of this issue. They have a strong faction at their core that always wants maximum profit/market leverage/power regardless of what may be best or reasonable at any given time. This may make a strong company but consumers will resent the dictator. The mentality cannot endure, they will have to find a balance or spend most of their time strengthening the dictatorship and ignoring or limiting the time needed to make the products and services that will keep the consumer happy and willing to pay them.

MS actually used the free market to their advantage and grew their monopoly by carving it into a dictatorship. The largest consumer of their product are resellers. Dell and Gateway down to the small retail shop buy the MS product and resell it. MS played them against each other to strengthen themselves. The individual actually using the MS product didn't negotiate with MS to get what they wanted. Most of the windows users I have seen have always wanted stability above features. MS has had the ability to provide stability, but that would have limited the compulsion to upgrade once windows met the users computing needs.

Re:Domino Theory

[markj02]

Companies know how to set prices based upon their cost to create products or provide services. They then add a reasonable profit and you suddenly have a price. Then that product will either sell or not sell at that price. Your definition seems to imply that a company needs competition to take care of determining the prices the market will tolerate.

Companies don't know whether the cost at which they are producing a widget is optimal, and therefore, the price they arrive at by adding a "reasonable" profit margin to their cost is not necessarily the correct price (even if they were to use such a silly pricing strategy). In fact, monopolies become famously complacent about their costs in the absence of competition. Bonuses, plush offices, and other perks all become "costs", when they are really just profit that is distributed to employees (who are often also owners).

A company can provide excellent product/service directly to a consumer without any competition at all. The consumer decides if the company has provided a compelling reason to part with their money.

Sorry, but that's incompatible with basic economics. There isn't some fixed price threshold above which people don't buy and below which everybody buys. Demand is elastic, and monopolies hire monopoly economists to set prices for them that optimize their profit. And those prices are usually above what you would pay in a competitive market. Except under unrealistic assumptions, unregulated monopolies don't operate efficiently and don't give you the lowest prices.

And Microsoft, in particular, certainly does not operate efficiently, peddling 20 year old technology at completely inflated prices. You don't even have to look at their products or technology to reach that conclusion--just look at their profits and cash reserves.

Great Win for Linux community...

[Karza]

This is a great win for the Linux community. This does bring up an interesting point. What kind of internationalization packages are available for Linux? The main reason for asking is, with an ever growing intall base in Asia, there will be more and more applications developed and contributions made to open source software with a need to be ported from English to say Korean or Chinese and vise versa. How easy is this to do?

Re:Great Win for Linux community...

[defMan]

Isn't it more likely that we'll need porting from Asian languages to English. They have programmers there as well.

Re:Great Win for Linux community...

[tempfile]

It will be very easy soon, with XFree, KDE2, Gnome2, console (with a few patches) all supporting Unicode and Gtk2's sophisticated text rendering, the "port" from English to a far-east language will merely be translation work, such as ports to Western languages always were.

Re:Great Win for Linux community...

[juhaz]

"Merely" translation work? Well, it may be, that tech problems that totally prevent localizing are worse, but translating computer software is some damn tough job.

I've seen some of the results of "merely translating" to another western language, and the results are sometimes rather horrible.

The rest of the world

[Techi]

Hopefully this, along with the fact that China has recently completely cut Microsoft out of its picture, will help to persuade other governments to follow suit and adopt an open-source solution to their computing needs. If this kind of information begins to reach the right ears consistently, Linux will continue to grow in market share even more rapidly than before. In a way, this is almost better than cutting contracts with hardware manufacturers and OEMs...

Hmmm

[zachusaf]

In a unrelated story, North Korea will still be running MS Windows as dictated by their leader, Kim Dae Gates, or "Bill" as he is affectionatley known by the loving people of his communist country...

Re:Hmmm

[tavon79]

Well, I really wish you wouldn't mix North Korea's FUCKING dictator KIM JUNG IL with South Korea's President KIM DAE JUNG...

What? KIM DAE GATES... heh that's really ignorant and simply wrong...

Re:Hmmm

[zachusaf]

In the grand scheme of things, does it matter? It was a joke, sorry to make you spill your tea and get your panties in a knot.....

Wish I started out on *nix

[Calle Ballz]

When I got my first computer... it was a windows 95 machine (yes, I know, i'm a very late bloomer)... and I learned that thing inside and out to where I just *knew* windows intuitively. When I learned that the entire computer world was not windows... I took my first oppurtunity downloading the slackware disksets. It was more difficult I think, because I was so used to the windows point & click interface. Now I run a combination of BSD/SlackWare/Win2k all intuitively... but I would have rather been introduced to any of the unices as my primary introduction to computers.

As for these Koreans, I think this is a major step in computer education for those new to computers. Those who are not familiar with computers whatsoever will have no problem adapting to Linux, since they know nothing else. When learning any non windows operating system... you get so much of a better feel on how computers actually work. I think it's a great tool to learn, and even as just a user... I've noticed RedHat is great for that purpose.

Re:Wish I started out on *nix

[zoftie]

Go korea go!

on second note, I think using windows/macintosh as a first OS is GOOD thing. Simply because you build yourself to be more versatile IT person. If you are to use windows second, you would be rather tortured while using it, as so few of my friends who were hacking BSD early days, found Windows unworkable and quite counterproductive. It is brain damaged, but by me using it first, I can still use it if I have to. I am feel not attached to any particular platform, as each has its own very cool things about it. Unix is rather unfriendly to average joe, just like chainsaw is.
Windows like a house fridge has more 'known' interface, and one that was thought over by many people. Notwithstanding freezer catching fire most are more friendly to casual user then chainsaw is.

And no you don't get to know how computers really work, as I know few windows coders that have really good grip on architecture of PC as compared to many linux coders.

Linux is wonderful, because it is build on top of so many abstract ideas, so few of them are related to hardware... that does not mean many linux coders are familiar with ix86 arch, because they are linux coders...

thats all IMO.

Re:Wish I started out on *nix

[wadetemp]

you get so much of a better feel on how computers actually work

I'm willing to be that 95% of people who are using computers don't care to get a better feel of how they work. I don't care how my DVD player works... it just works. If my DVD player had a command prompt rather than a remote, but the precense of a command prompt would allow me to monitor the bitrate and CPU usage on the DVD player, I would probably take return it and get one with a remote.

Support

[crow]

Most likely, what they are really buying is some form of support contract for 120,000 linux installations (and possibly that many sets of CDs and manuals). The level of support provided would depend on the price paid.

On the other hand, it is possible that some of the Korean-language stuff is proprietary, so they must buy per-seat licenses.

Or it could be that the Korean beurocracy is in the habit of buying one copy per machine, even if they don't have to.

Figures

[Yokaze]

Not quite, you have to get the US goverment to adopt linux on 23% of the newly bought systems.

>are equavalent to 23% of annual Windows based PC procurement

Does anyone else has a problem with the figures in the little section called "About HancomLinux, Inc."

>The company now has more than 90 employees and 4 locations worldwide.

Let's assume that the 90 employees are located in the Republic of Korea and the "more than" are located in the other 3 locations worldwide.

How will they take care for those 120k desktop computers?
(Assuming, they aren't all tech-support, technicians and have other customers...
The spelling at least suggest they have no secretary and spell checker (look who's talking :) ) )

I smell a job-opportunity :)

Re:Figures

[johnnyb]

Getting Linux does not mean getting rid of your IT department, so I don't know why you think that Hancom will be taking care of all 120k computers.

Re:Figures

[spamkabuki]

I smell a job opportunity

Jobs at Hancom in English And these are only the current US listings. Korea anybody? The food is awesome!

Re:Figures

[crivens]

Outsourcing?

Re:Figures

[tftp]

How will they take care for those 120k desktop computers?

They always can outsource some of the tech support. That should not be a big deal.

Re:Figures

[MasterBlaster]

(Assuming, they aren't all tech-support, technicians and have other customers... The spelling at least suggest they have no secretary and spell checker (look who's talking :) ) ) Have you ever been to South Korea? Someone could have a full time job just correcting the English spellings on street signs. I don't think the English translation means much as an evaluation of the company.

Bill has nothing to lose

[js3]

Those licenses have already been paid for. Now that they have switched, they'll have to buy new licenses when they decide to come crawling back. Then bill will have his revenge

Good for Self-Sufficiency

[Tadster]

It doesn't really matter what the incoming OS is, as long as it is open enough for the national IT infrastructure to develop self-sufficiency.

Globally, IT dependence on Windows has been a blight on the evolution and advancement of computing tech by homogenizing platforms and marginalizing new, innovative, and/or different domestic manufacturers (eg Sharp's X68000, the NEC PC-980x platform).

Good to see Korea join Mexico & China start working on self-sufficiency rather than the pernicious co-dependence of taking the easy route of being a MS shop.

90 employees

[jas79]

the press release says that they got more than 90 employees. how are the going to support 120000 computers?

Re: 90 employees

[tekniklr]

Hopefully not eveyone has a problem at the same time. :)

Maybe they ship helpful reference cards with enough information to help you get on the internet and get to a FAQ page...

Re: 90 employees

[BorgDrone]

maybe by hiring and training new employees ?

Re: 90 employees

[Anonymous Coward]

Hancom is one of the first PC software companies in Korea. Before Microsoft Word, there was virtually one option; Hangul word processor. The first version supported Apple II. As PC became popular, they supported MS-DOS and Windows family. Then they supported Mac OS and Unix (X-Window).

Almost any computer users in Korea have used their software at least once. They may not need any tech support cause they are too familiar with Hancom's software.

Re: 90 employees

[hidden]

I can only imagine that a contract of this size would involve enough money they can probably hire some more people if they need to...

And another damn thing

[sparkyz]

I wonder if this will slow down or speed up all the script kiddies (xcuse me e733t h4x0rz) taking pot shots at (fortunately non-running) rpc services via compromised Korean machines.And will they please please please ship the damn things without telnet.

120 000 copies

[CatherineCornelius]

...and Michael Tiemann says the desktop market is dead...

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Why 120,00 Copies?

[puppy0341]

Why not buy only one copy and copy it?
It's copyleft isn't it ?

Re:Why 120,00 Copies?

[ArsonPerBuilding]

Hmmm I see 2 scernario's here.

1)Govt. official goes and buys one copy. Makes the required hundreds of copies(there is a huge chunk of time) and then team of people installs hundreds of copies, another huge chunk of time. Now who wants to be the company doing support for these 120000 suddenly gained users?

2)Govt. buys contract for software/manuals/training/support.

Which option is gonna be a pain in the neck, and which option won't?

Re:Why 120,00 Copies?

[Ig0r]

Hancom Office isn't free, so I don't think that Hancom would appriciate the Korean government only buying one copy for 120000 systems.

Great!

[BlackGriffen]

If Linux and other Unices can continue to win big government contracts like this, it may be enough to wake up the corporate world, and even encourage adoption in order to be compatible with government systems...

This is the best news I've heard all day.

BlackGriffen

Re:what's MS gonna do?

[nomadic]

Well, maybe (and I say this as an American) other countries would start standing up to the US government on trade matters that would be prevented...

China != Beijing

[denespal]

...China has recently completely cut Microsoft out of its picture...

What are you talking about?! I only heard about the Beijing municipal government not selecting Microsoft's bid. Or did I miss something...?

Linux distros are not free

[nusuth]

Most distro producers give away download editions but that does not mean that all distributions are free. On the contrary, it is IP of the producer and cannot be reproduced without their approval (for download or free editions, this approval exists.) GPL, LGPL, BSD and other licences found in a typical linux distro does not forbid commercial activity.

Re:Linux distros are not free

[re-geeked]

I believe some clarification is needed:

All Linux distros contain Free Software (i.e. at least the Linux kernel), which licenses by definition do not allow the distributor to restrict the rights of users to make and even distribute as many copies of the Free Software in the distro as they wish.

So the distro can charge for media, can forbid distribution of non-free portions of the distribution and can even arrange pricing on a per-seat basis (although I think this must imply support or implementation services -- they cannot forbid their customers from making copies or performing multiple installations), but every user of every distro can freely copy and redistribute all the GPL, LGPL, BSD, and other Free Software contained in it.

Just remember the simple rule -- if you didn't write the software, you can't impose limits on its distribution. Since Free Software authors expressly remove the limits on copying and distribution, distros can't reimpose those limits.

Re:Linux distros are not free

[nusuth]

but every user of every distro can freely copy and redistribute all the GPL, LGPL, BSD, and other Free Software contained in it.

That only applies to GPL and LGPL because they, as you said, explictly limit imposable limits by their distributers. You can limit distribution of a derivative work of a BSD licenced, X licenced, public domain and perhaps other "free software" licenced software. In any case, many distos contain a lot of code which is not explicity GPLed (like install scripts.) That is enough to make them non-copyable freely.

But this really is not the point, a distro can be made of all free components (but not all GPLed components) and still be copy restricted. Think of it as a novel, none of the words contained in it are commercial, but the novel is a new entity in by its wholeness. The confusion arises from GPL's being free and enforcing derivative work to be avaliable freely; these two things are not interchangeable. Your simple rule is wrong, a collection of things as a whole is not same thing as individual things lumped together.

Gamers

[davechen]

They probably decided to go to Linux to keep government workers from playing Starcraft on the job. They say that 1 in every 45 people in South Korea own a legal copy of it. Who knows how many pirated copies there are.

Re:Gamers

[dzym]

Funny, because Starcraft appears to be one of the games Wine can run well.

What I'm looking forward to...

[SpinyNorman]

Is 120,000 South Koreans sending emails spreading the good word from commrade Stallman to any North Koreans who sends them .doc attachments. It'll probably start a war.

Re:What I'm looking forward to...

[Ezubaric]

North Korea doesn't have computers, let alone MS Word. Heck, they're still probably still using carrier birds.

Given these trends, however, perhaps S. Korea might be miffed that their friends in the North are using pidgeons instead of penguins.

SPAM

[Anonymous Coward]

Does this mean they will use Linux instead of Windows as their mail spamming engine?
I have blocked *.kr and many IP address blocks assigned to Korea long ago. it seems that all that comes out from it is spam and portscanning.

Call the OED

[underwhelm]

A new sense for the word defenestrate.

Re:Call the OED

[spamkabuki]

All those poor gov't worker cast out of windows...

Makes you actually want defenestration.

(chuckle)

why modded down?

[nusuth]

If it is because you really didn't think this deserves 2, OK, go ahead, your call. But if you downmodded this because you think you can freely copy all distros, as long as they are composed of GPL and such licences, just fuck off and gimme my karma back.

With all 100:1 compression ratios and XBox emulators, I wouldn't be surprised if most /.ers don't know how a distro can be a property of someone when individual packets in it are free.

it might not be so good

[vvikram]

think about it this way. if people using this in korea are going to get hassles in daily its a _BIG_ problem.

i can think of two reasons at least:

a) various problems in linux - new devices support, support for other OS features/documents [half the world will be sending word2k or using windows-only stuff....for which M$ will make sure to release half-assed format specs]. believe me i have seen this happen so many times.....i am not saying linux is bad more that its helpless to the vagaries of the M$-controlled market.

b) problems administering, repairing or using linux systems. while the desktops have come a long way i do think average comrade user will need a lot of support still - hope Hancom is upto this. otherwise it will be a mess....

if they get the wrong signals. the repurcussions will be worse than the advantages.

true , the good things have to start somewhere - agreed this is a great win for open source and might start a cycle by which more hardware vendors support linux and then the ball gets rolling.....but lets first hope for a good start.

vv

Re:it might not be so good

[damiam]

Governments and corperations tend to buy machines in bulk and upgrade them in bulk too. I'm sure they'll make sure that the few models of PC's they have are fully supported. If they aren't, I'm sure a userbase of 120000 would convince Hancom to write drivers.

Re:Capitalism will pass

[humpback]

For most Americans Capitalism=Free and Comunism="Very bad thing that i dont really know what it is but have been taught to hate.... OO yes. and they eat little children for breackfast"

You have to take a different approach.

[Colin Smith]

http://www.infrastructures.org/

Actually, it's worth all sysadmins taking a look at that site anyway.

Asian market

[Giant Robot]

It appears that Hancom is going after the whole asian market, not just Korea. Versions of this office is being sold in Taiwan with localized chinese. Maybe because they have used the Qt toolkit, as it uses using unicode internally and provides very easy localization support (using the tr() ) function for those who know Qt).

look here for a screenshot. [Big5 encoding]

Running on a few megs, this might give MS a run for its money. I'm just wondering how it implements its input methods (Input methods in linux is still far behind Windows).

Actually 90 can support thousands.

[Colin Smith]

It's only Windows that requires a support person for every 5 desktops. Other OS's are designed to make good use of a network.

http://www.infrastructures.org/

Re:Actually 90 can support thousands.

[archen]

well that's not entirely true. If the place that I worked suddenly switched to Linux, I'd get a call every 2 minutes asking how to do something.

By contrast most people are already somewhat familiar with windows. When they call me, I tell them to keep rebooting until it works. After about 3 times they figure this out for themselves. Assuming that only one in 10 computers (totaly un-verifiable claim) has a critical problem that means windows can't boot anymore, or the program is corrupted - I can support around 30 desktops. =P

Microsoft press release

[javilon]

I think this is big enough for a PC magazine to be able to call MS and ask what their opinion is.
It will probably end up like... "At press time no MS official was available for comment." That will be enough for now.

But within a year, when the Korean goverment decides to replace windows from ALL of their machines there are chances to see a leaked internal marketing memo or something similar. Just for fun lets imagine how would it start...

"Why did we loose the South Korean market".

I know that this is unlikely to happen, but it is possible and if it happens I will be cracking myself up!

Re:Microsoft press release

[frank_adrian314159]

"Why did we loose the South Korean market".

Developers, developers, developers...

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Ahh, it's probably upgrade time.

[Colin Smith]

I suspect that they are switching because Bill is *already* trying to sting them for NNNmillion dollars in upgrade fees.

i am confused

[BigBir3d]

why is it that when you buy the office suite for that "low" introductory price of $49.95US that you only get their version of Word as a beta release (6.0), yet if you buy the standard version for $24.95US you get both version 5.2 and the beta of 6.0?

shouldn't you only get 5.2 with the standard, and both 5.2 and 6.0 beta with the full version?

Yeah, but what about StarCraft?

[Brendan Byrd]

You know there's going to be some starving Koreans who need their online gaming fix. Linux just doesn't offer that right now. Blizzard better start moving towards Linux support, or there's going to be a lot of bitter Koreans.

Re:Yeah, but what about StarCraft?

[Jaysyn]

Well you _can_ get StarCraft working with WINE at least.

Jaysyn

Re:Yeah, but what about StarCraft?

[jfunk]

You do know that they hired Sam Lantinga, right?

Now, they didn't hire him for Linux development, but if anybody can show how to do cross-platform game development in SDL, he's the guy.

Communists!

[Dexter77]

As M$ has already announced, Linux is a communist operating system. Now Korea is showing a prime example how communism takes over the free markets. Next thing you know everybody is using Linux and you just have to watch how the communist-devil eats all your friends!

Re:Communists!

[metis]

Insofar as communism means "industrialized dictatorship enhanced with crackpot economic theory", linux is not communist. I don't think RMS has a picture of Stalin in his office and I don't think Linus receives coded orders from Fidel Castro.

However, Karl Marx never defined communism as a political system, but as a relation of production in which the producers have control over the tools necessary for production. That is IMHO exactly what free software does. It prevents the accumulation of software as capital (dead labor) thus guaranteeing access to written software to those who need it in order to write new software. Yep, that's communism. What part of it you don't like?

Re:Communists!

[metis]

So far, everyone who tried it (and lots of people honestly tried to make it work) failed miserably.

Nope, first, most dot coms never tried to make a buck by selling any product to consumers. Their real business plan was to sell a two-bucks business plan to shrewed bankers who then went and unloaded it in the 401k plans of idiots. New linux dot coms were part of the bubble. Most of them "failed" like everything else, nothing particular about linux here. If you want to understand how this works, go see "The Producers".

Quite a few succeded to survive, including Red Hat and other linux based shops. Obviously, the company that initiated this thread is doing fine.

Besides, the point of free software is not to empower big capitalist firms but flesh and blood producers, i.e. software writers, consultants, sysadmins, etc. People who use software to produce, not people who sell software other people produce. Just because some business idea failed does nothing to undermine the success of free software.

Got a love it. Next time I go to Paris, I am going to wrap up a nice Debian CD in flowers and put it on old Marx's grave. Ha ha ha!

Re:Communists!

[metis]

If I own a small company, start selling software for linux (closed source I might add), and I start making hundreds of thousands of dollars, would I still be be considered a "flesh and blood producer"?.

I really don't know what you are after. The GPL would prohibits you from certain usages of open source software in your closed source shop. As long as you comply with the GPL, go get rich to your heart's content. I wish you all the best, really.

Re:Communists!

[vb.warrior]

Of course it might be more effective to go to London where he is actually buried
.

Re:Communists!

[heretic9]

Got a love it. Next time I go to Paris, I am going to wrap up a nice Debian CD in flowers and put it on old Marx's grave. Ha ha ha!

Marx is buried in Highgate Cemetery, England. It's the original communist plot.

Re:Communists!

[13Echo]

Communist, like AMD processors?

http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/28/23650.ht ml

Re:Communists!

[anotherCoder]

Karl Marx's grave is in London. Perhaps you were thinking of Jim Morrison? ;-)

Re:Communists!

[metis]

Perhaps you were thinking of Jim Morrison? ;-)

Finally, someone who can read my mind!

Re:Communists!

[Dexter77]

Finally, someone got the point :)

Re:my, what a lot of big words you know lunix luse

[Jennifer Ever]

Oh my. The tiny TV world I live in. Next you'll be quoting Zinn.

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Re:what's MS gonna do?

[ArsSineArtificio]

If more countries start doing this, MS is going to get mad.

They will contact their friends in the American government, who will also get mad.

They will be mad because of an infringement on their "sovereignty." Remember that the government considers its trade and communications channels part of its sovereign territory, even if it's outside the borders of the United States.

The protection of the MS monopoly is definitely our sovereign right, when it's construed that way.

Will there be an invasion of Korea? Not likely, but I could see some OS requirements being put into international trade regimes such as the W.T.O.

This is too clumsy to be a troll, so I'm just going to guess that it's almost unbelievably silly. The federal government of the United States does not have any interest in protecting Microsoft's monopoly. The decision of the South Korean government to purchase a product produced by a South Korean company, instead of by an American company, infringes in no way on anybody's sovereignty, and there is nobody in either the United States government nor in Microsoft who considers it to be so.

The United States government does consider its trade and communications part of its sovereignty. It would probably get upset if South Korea, say, banned the sale of American-made software products, because that is bad for trade. That is nowhere near the case here.

This shows what you get when people who honestly believe that corporations directly run the United States government go off the deep end.

A great test...

[_johnnyc]

..of linux and open-source in a large scale deployment. It's a huge win, but will be a great logistical test. This is a massive deployment and may be used as a model for future large-scale deployments of "linux in the enterprise".

Any way you look at it, Linux and open-source will benefit. It is a massive challenge as well as a great victory.

this is blatant troll

[ljaguar]

This is a troll, he most intentionally called it North Korea. Any body worth his salt would know that North Korea is a communist regime. We are talking about South Korea right now. So this is either a troll or an idiot.

Is this the route Linux distributors should take?

[JonathanF]

I've noticed that it's governments, more than any other institution or demographic, that seem to latch on to Linux the most (witness adoptions in Scandinavian countries, the NSA in the States, China and so on). However, most distributions don't specifically target government at all; they generally either go after the serious Linux user or try to focus on user-friendliess (Corel and Mandrake, as examples).

What if focusing on government demands was the answer? Ask them what they want, or develop with government needs (security, administration, etc.) in mind. If you do it right it shouldn't be hard to convince a government, be it municipal, provincial/state or maybe even national, that it's in their best interest to use a very cheap OS with few security holes and entertainment-based distractions (as much as we love Solitaire).

If you can get government workers to be exposed to Linux every day at work, it would encourage them to use it at home (though some might try to avoid it if the experience is unpleasant). That would then increase the general user base and give more reason for civilians to use it (as their friends would use it).

Remember Mexico

[Charles Dodgeson]

This is great news, but I we need to make sure that it actually succeeds. I don't know how the typical /.-er can do that, but let's keep our eyes open for opportunities has they arise. (answers to questions on newsgroups, providing decent internalization in our projects, etc).

file import correctness

[xtp]

I've tried StarOffice, AbiWord and a few other things. They all barf in one way or another
on some of the Word or PowerPoint docs that I must be able to display and edit. These are mostly IEEE standards documents. IETF is fortunately more enlightended.

Since I only have to work with such things about 10% of the time, Vmware has been the solution for me. Expensive? Absolutely since I purchase both vmware and M$. Expensive hardware too since running two operating systems requires more memory. Vmware sucks up a lot. But it works flawlessly for me.

I'll give Hancom a try.
I can't imagine a government agency standardizing on it if it didn't work well. Even so, I have a queasy feeling about whether the software can readily accept my ieee documents or not. Their webpage cites "Enhanced compatibility with MS office files" - kind of noncomittal. Even so, I'll try this before something that seems overly pretentious and overly hyped like Lindows.

It may be worth mentioning that I would really prefer that Adobe had not backed away from Framemaker on Linux. But that's no longer an option.

g

Why?? MS vs. Linux, yet again...

[dracon32]

So why exactly are they doing that?? What are they going to do with 120,000 copies of Linux?? I mean, of course Linux is better then MS in it's own ways. Do they plan to distrubute the copies around Korea in hopes people will buy, but by common figures, most people are familar with MS's Window basis and will the people actually make use of Linux??

Re:theKompany

[woosoki]

What I've heard is that theKompany have actually made a deal with HanCom, which includes: providing HanCom with licenses of Rekall, Kivio, etc. and promoting and selling HanCom Office in the US.

Re:Slowly but surely...

[alext]

Pardon me, but don't you mean 'all you Linux PDA/phone/settop box lusers' need to embrace Java? That's where x-platform capabilities count, no?

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sloppy journalism

[news_junkie]

The Korean government has just signed...

hey folks, aren't there still two Korea's?

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I'm not convinced

[crivens]

I'm not convinced that Hancom Linux is the best choice here. Personally I'd take a small KDE distribution of some kind, and use StarOffice or OpenOffice. Heck, you could even try KOffice, if you really wanted to. It doesn't support Microsoft documents, but ignoring that, it's fairly usable and quick(ish). Though, kspread does crash often while doing a search.

I briefly tried the beta version of Hancom Office (look on the Arstechnica forums for the link), but I uninstalled it after about 2 minutes as it was shockingly slow and horrible to use. Still it was a beta version, and hopefully in the near future, they'll improve the performance a great deal.

Personally I lean towards Mandrake, as it has vast support for applications through the Mandrake Cooker, and it's simple and swift to install.

Although I'm just about to try the latest versions of Redmond Linux and Elx Linux.

I currently have Mandrake 8.1 running StarOffice 6 beta, using Truetype fonts, and it looks fantastic!

Re:Slowly but surely...

[crivens]

Java? I don't think so! I haven't seen a single Java app that doesn't reduce my P3-700 & 256Mb to a P-120!

Reasons the Korean government adopted Linux

[tavon79]

The REAL reasons that the Korean government is adopting Linux is not because they believe Linux is necessarily a better OS but because Hancom's Office Software, more specifically, Hancom Word runs on Linux.

Since the early 90's, the most widely used word processor in South Korea has been Hancom Word. Before Windows 95, it ran under DOS and when Windows 95 came out, a graphical version appeared. Even today, most universities and all government agencies use Hancom Word because of national pride and preference to software developed within Korea and by Koreans. It was a brillient move to port the software to Linux/Unix(I'm not sure which version of Unix it ran under... i believe the originally the port was targeted for Solaris) and with the sudden interest and popularity of Linux in Southeast Asia, Hancom is reaping the benefits.

100% of the Korean Government is currently already running the Windows version of Hancom's Word so it was a particularly easy decision to choose free/open source operating system over M$ Windows... Meaning, that if 23% of the annual purchase is Linux/Hancom Office, it's because 77% percent is Windows XP but running Hancom's Word Windows version. It simply doesn't matter to the Korean government what OS it runs as long as it runs Hancom Word... It doesn't have to worry that 23% of its documents will be incompatible to the rest. Since every government agency runs Hancom Word, 100% compatibility is guaranteed.

Sadly, this isn't the case outside the government and education system. The majority of the Korean public run Windows because virtually all PC games run only under Windows(In my opinion, S.Korea is becoming the Gaming Mecca of the World, but that's another story). The Korean public will never adopt Linux unless Starcraft and Fortess(a korean online game) are ported to Linux (hehehe). In other words, unless either an exact counter-part or a superior standard base/software doesn't exist... people won't switch.

Anyway, this type of move would not be as easy in other countries/governments because most countries rely on Microsoft Office products. Unlike the rest of the world, the South Korean government standardized it's office suite with a korean Office suite, which wisely ported it's product to Linux. I'm not sure if China's government is using an office suite developed by a Chinese company, but it wouldn't surprise me it it did... if that's the case, it would be extremely easy to switch the OS within the Chinese government to Linux as it was in the South Korean government.

Since it doesn't seem anytime soon MS will port MS Office so I guess we just need to develope a better Office suite.(keep up the good work guys)~

Re:Reasons the Korean government adopted Linux

[SoLoatWork]

The Korean public will never adopt Linux unless Starcraft and Fortess(a korean online game) are ported to Linux (hehehe).

And Lineage... :)

Re:Reasons the Korean government adopted Linux

[Steeplerot]

Don't forget diablo2 there fucking crawling on battle.net
PK GOGOGO!!!!!!!!
SEND POTAL!!!!!!
BABA GIVE ITAM!!!!
^_^ HUK HUK
christ at least they fixed it so we cant see there fucked charset in screwed up ascii when they talked
Too bad no more korean drop hehehe anyone remember when you could drop them by scrolling lines of periods LOL funny shit!

Whooptie. M$ loses nothing

[TheQuantumShift]

I wonder how many of those copies of windows were legally purchased licensed copies? Thought so. Not even our government pays for all it's software. We're going to see alot of this as M$ cracks down on unlicensed copies, and tries to exrtort more and more money from it's customers. More and more businesses at the top level where only one thing counts (the bottom line), are going to go with whatever can even theoretically get the job done as long as it's cheaper. Of course you say "Well why haven't they done it yet? Linux is so ready for prime time." Lets face it, as much as I love it or you love it, it still isn't ready for the masses. But soon, my pretty, soon... or somethin' like that...

This is NOT good news for Open Source

[Ogerman]

From the press release:
January 9th, 2002 in Seoul, Korea - HancomLinux, ... , has announced that they have concluded an agreement with the Central Procurement Office of the Korean Government to supply the 120,000 copies of desktop Linux office packages in this year.

[warning: lots of strong worded opinion ahead (-:]

Piss-poor Slashdot reporting at work again. Read the press release, people. The Korean government is purchasing 120,000 copies of the proprietary, closed source commercial office software, HancomOffice. Linux is free. They're not paying for free software. They're not paying for localization work done by the KDE/Qt people. They're not paying for the RedHat Linux distribution. No.. They're paying for proprietary software (with proprietary file formats) and related support services. This is NOT what Linux needs. The article does not mention the cost, but even at a very conservative estimate of $10 per copy x 120,000, that's $1,200,000 and I would guess that support services are extra. Does the Korean government realize that if they took that same amount of money and paid say.. 15 top Open Source programmers for one year to work full time and perfect KOffice or OpenOffice, that they (and the entire rest of the world) would never have to spend another dime on office software?! But instead, they've just locked themselves into an upgrade cycle, even if it does use Linux and is a much better/cheaper product than Microsoft's. Proprietary software is damned stupid and totally uncalled for. And it makes me sick to think of how much the US government spends of my own tax dollars on proprietary software as they make the same type of mistakes.

Open Source programmers need to wake up, quit their day jobs and realize that the world is in great need of their services. Yes, it will take innovation and initiative. Yes, it will take new business models that are purely service, support, and consulting oriented. But as this article shows, the money is out there.. loads of it. And you can help change the world for the better at the same time. Once software is set free, it's permanent. Obviously small companies (hence with small programming staff) such as Hancom and Gobe have been successful in producing high-quality office suites in a relatively short amount of time. Why? Because it's not that difficult! Here sits Microsoft's cash cow sleeping on a grassy knoll, just waiting to be tipped over. And yet the various Open Source productivity projects are moving at a snail's pace because nobody has taken a strong enough initiative to get the job done and over with once and for all.

As a sidenote, anybody else think Slashdot editors are going a little bit soft on proprietary Linux software these days? *cough*va*cough*

Re:This is NOT good news for Open Source

[Lonath]

It depends on your goal. If you want 100 percent scores on the FSF Purity Test from everyone who encounters or uses any OS/FS, then you're correct.

If your goal is to give as many people as possible a taste and gentle introduction to OS/FS because you reason that "you catch more people with honey than with vinegar", then you should support this move.

I think the second approach will make for more people using OS/FS in the long run, simply because more of them will be exposed to it.

Sure, they're using a proprietary program on top of an OS/FS system, but it's better than a proprietary system on top of a proprietary OS.

The world will be a better place when nongeeks at least know about OS/FS so they can decide if they want to use it or not. Beating someone over the head doesn't work unless that person is already one of the converted.

Re:This is NOT good news for Open Source

[Tyrant Chang]

Even then this is a good deal for Korean government. Instead of paying $XXXX mil to Microsoft, they pay much less to a local company. This will keep money in the country as well as encourage local development in the country. A win-win situation IMO.

Paying 15 top Open Source programmers? Who are these top Open Source programmers - not Koreans. Korean government has responsibility to their citizens so paying their own citizens to help local dev is much preferable to paying non-citizens who will def. not contribute back into tax coffers.

Yes, this sin't what open source needs but this is exactly what the Korean gov and the people needs.

Re:This is NOT good news for Open Source

[vicious_sloth]

hmm but why does th Korean government have to spend its 1.2mil for top programmers so that the rest of the open source community can beneifit. it may be win ,win for them and the open source community. But why should the Korean Government have to absorb the enitre cost? If i were the Korean Governemtn and spent a large sum of money hiring the best programmers out there, i would not simply give it [the software] all away. While the Open source movement is indeed noble, It is not what people are gonna want to do. people are inherently greedy and that is why communism failed. am i comparaing open source to communisim? you decide. all i am trying to say is that i just dont see how you can make real money in open source. espically video games. so then is software a product or a service? if it is a service you could potentially make money, if it is a product, then i doubt you could do as well as MS did developing software. And if great open source software could be achieved simply with large sums of cash, and have a large payoff then why hasn't it happened already? Open source succeeds only becuase there is a group of dedicated individuals who work very hard and concentrate more on quality and then profits, unfortunatly most of the world likes profits more.

Re:This is NOT good news for Open Source

[archen]

This is NOT what Linux needs

Oh? And what does Linux need? Only open source programs that are free? Are you saying that people can't make an honest living programming and selling their closed source software? I agree that it sucks that it uses a closed file format, but that's the way it works sometimes. With any luck maybe that format will be opened some day. Does it matter though? They can't be worse than Microsoft who makes it a point to constantly change their formats mainly just to screw everyone else.

Realistically I think you might be comming at this from the wrong angle (as many of us tend to do). What does Linux need? Who cares? They didn't purchase those licences because they neede Linux, they purchaced it because they needed superior software that did what they wanted it to. If Hancom makes a better product and they sell it, then more power to them. I'd like to see more corporations drop their closed source ways too, but right now that's not going to happen, and unless some of these companies start making things for Linux, Linux will be sitting in obscurity for quite some time. If open source alternatives are going to take over, then they must be better products - and unfortunatly right now Star/K office only get "close but no cigar". Right now open source is only making strides because of those products which truley are better, like Apache. Closed source isn't all that great, but right now Linux could probably use a small crutch like this. I mean really, what's the alternative: use MS Office on Windows like every other goverment...

Re:This is NOT good news for Open Source

[Ogerman]

If your goal is to give as many people as possible a taste and gentle introduction to OS/FS because you reason that "you catch more people with honey than with vinegar", then you should support this move.

My point is that OS/FS programmers should be able to offer a sweeter deal with completely free software instead of half-free/half-proprietary. It's not a matter of vinegar. It's a matter of realizing that non-free doesn't make sense simply because it's more expensive to obtain. If you're going to spend millions on software one way or the other, why would you buy licenses instead of paying somebody to polish existing Open Source software to meet your needs? The only reason why Hancom has a market is because they're the only ones providing ANY solution. If programmer geeks realized that they could contract themselves out to produce free software, proprietary software would die almost overnight.

Re:This is NOT good news for Open Source

[Ogerman]

I'd like to see more corporations drop their closed source ways too, but right now that's not going to happen, and unless some of these companies start making things for Linux, Linux will be sitting in obscurity for quite some time. If open source alternatives are going to take over, then they must be better products - and unfortunatly right now Star/K office only get "close but no cigar". Right now open source is only making strides because of those products which truley are better, like Apache. Closed source isn't all that great, but right now Linux could probably use a small crutch like this.

This is the very mentality that is holding Open Source back from total domination. It is the view that free software can only be produced outside of business because there's no money in it. Therefore, as the thinking goes, proprietary software is ok because it produces solutions that people need right now, while free software must wait for volunteers to make slow, steady progress.

The reality is that customers will pay for whatever solution is cheapest and does the best job--whether they are paying for licenses or the labor of free software programmers. It is the fault of Open Source developers for not capitalizing on this to provide themselves an income and allow them to work on their pet projects full-time. There's no need for proprietary licenses whatsoever in this model. Consider this scenario:

Business customer needs software solution X, to be rolled out in 6 months.

Seller A will provide X by means of licenses for $2 million, plus extra for priority support services as needed. New versions of X with cost future licenses fees. Customizations will also cost extra.

Seller B will provide X by negotiating a contract for a complete solution: provision of all software, support services, and desired customizations, for $1.5 million. All new versions of X are free. Seller B ensures that customer's needs are met precisely and in time for the rollout date. Customer is treated as a peer in the development cycle, resulting in more personal service and higher quality software.

A is proprietary solution provider, B is Open Source. The choice is obvious, given that geeks will get off their respective arses and bring B into fruitful existance instead of moping around complaining that there's no money in free software blah blah blah.

Linux can flourish where labor is cheap

[RebornData]

Linux is definitely much more of a "do it yourself" system than Windows is. That's viewed as a liability by most corporations in the US, but it's an advantage where skilled labor is cheap.

There's a parallel in the construction industry. In US, labor is more expensive in comparison to construction materials than in, say, Mexico. In the US, construction uses as many prefabricated, pre-assembled components as possible in order to minimize on-site labor. It's cost effective to manufacture, stock and transport a large variety of pre-fab parts to minimize on-site assembly. In contrast, where labor is cheap in comparison to materials, you find that it's more common to bring raw-materials on-site and create what you need from them, since it's cheaper to pay a skilled laborer to do it as-needed rather.

The same thing applies to software. It does suprise me that countries like Korea and China like Linux where having skilled on-site talent is more cost-effective than paying large license fees to MS.

Re:Linux can flourish where labor is cheap

[bstadil]

Interesting point but the Korean labor cost is not so cheap. Here is a list of various countries. Compare the $8.14 hourly rate in Korea with the $2.46 for Mexico.
Your point is well taken though.

Re:Linux can flourish where labor is cheap

[hughk]

I think you are a little unfair there about Linux being a DIY system. Support can be, and that is where the cost saving is. Support for closed sourced software is very expensive and you have no alternative.

This is why I recommend Linux where appropriate for developing countries who might be able to get a licence for, say, Microsoft Back Office on the back of a World Bank loan, but who can not then afford to keep it up to date.

huge irony

[twitter]

Those who argue that Linux is not ready for the desktop must finally face the fact that the cash strapped *desktop* IS ready for Linux.

Incredible. The poorest desktops will then be the first to embrace all the goodness of freedom and be technically superior. So while government cubicles in Korea have ssh, X, compilers of all types, postgress, mySQL, multiple virtual screens, multiple workplaces, multiple and superior image manipulators, multiple and superior file and web browsers, I at a fortune 500 US company will be stuck with an w2k machine with all of it's fundamental and implimentational flaws. No real user accounts, no real file permissions, no encypted remote login, no real GUI export, no real image manipulation, one quirky file and web browser, no real shell, no grep, no find, and no compilers. How much of that do I really need to get my job done? None, but I don't need anything other than a knife and a match to cook dinner. The match is optional really, I could just eat nuts, berries and grass.

Somehow, I don't think this competitive advantage will escape corporate America forever.

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and...

[simpl3x]

can a fiercely market-based economy which relies on the private sector to accomplish everything compete with social-based markets which actively invest in education and technological infrastructure? this perhaps is not a question for today, but it is for the near term.

Re:my, what a lot of big words you know lunix luse

[plastercast]

And the problem with Zinn would be...

The fact of the matter is that he has done more to change the way people look at the history of the United States than all but a few people. A little self analysis doesn't hurt anyone. This of people such as Zinn who find the dust bunnies that government and indusrty sweep under the rug.

Domino Theory only works for slave states

[twitter]

I'm so sick of this Linux is communism bullshit. Marxist economic theory applies to the world of physical goods, not free speech publishing and ideas. The modern notion of copyright is a modern by product of mass produced printed material and now obsolete mechanisms of press. Before such mass production, people who published hoped that their ideas would be coppied and improved on. IT HAD NOTHING TO DO WITH ECONOMIC OR POLITICAL SYSTEMS. Today, the Free Software Foundation and others believe that their code should be free of obsolete notions of copyright and have taken steps to insure that others will benifit from their works. It's called public spirit and co-operation and it's one of the hallmarks of free societies.

The domino theory was that they newly aquired slave states could be put to use spreading the interests of the Soviet slave state. This was seen in Cuba, which supplied the USSR with sugar, and fighting men for troubles in Angloa, as well as subversives for the rest of Central America. The whole country was made into state property controlled by Fidel, who therefore owned it all. Free speech and press were eliminated, those opposed were liquidated, universities, schools and presses all became tools of the party which was ultimatly rulled by people in Moscow. The reward for this slavery is one of the lowest standards of living in the Americas, matched only by slave states in Eastern Europe and Asia. So while these unfortuanate places became horribly inefficient, all of the effort could be directed at conquest. China agreed with this assesment at the time and was rather upset about North Korea and Vietnam, which they viewed as an extention of Soviet power. China had designs of it's own.

In the software world, M$ is the slave state. It is an all embracing company that sees itself getting between you and anything you want to do with computing machinery so that Bill Gates can extract your money. M$ is one of the largest proponents of the inaptly named "Digital Rights Management" movement that will strip you of ownership of your intelectual property. M$ has already written software licenses that forbid use of their software to criticise M$ (see Front Page story Slashdot ran a few months ago for evidence of this blatant corporate censorship). All M$ licensess are written so that M$ may terminate your use of their software at anytime, though they would never dare test it in court. Those who fall victim to M$ software inadvetantly spread it as M$ jurry riggs their file formats to be impossible to impliment on other platforms. All money and efforts spent on M$ software is effort and money furthering the M$ slave state.

Re:Domino Theory only works for slave states

[tsinterface]

> The reward for this slavery is one of the lowest standards of living in the America

what are you smoking? If you've ever been to Cuba (and I have been, because my government allows me to) you would have seen that even if the people there are not rich, there are no beggars or homeless people, all children go to school, there is no unemployment and everybody gets medical treatment for free.

Compare this with e.g. colombia and stop your uninformed trolling about "slave states". there is no free speech, but what means free speech when you starve ?

An btw the percentage of children which die in the first years (don't know the term) is in Cuba less then in any american country (including the US)

Re:Slowly but surely...

[einer]

I really wish this guy wasn't right... But Java on Linux blows greased weasel butt.

No M$ Lobbying in Korea

[javacowboy]

Looks like M$ hasn't bothered hiring lobbyists in Korea yet, like they have in most Western countries....

Linux is great for that ...

[wirefarm]

I work as the only foreigner in a Japanese company and frequently have to work in either language. To switch languages on my Linux box, I simply log out and log back in, selecting the other language when I do. On the NT machine, I have to reboot.
If I want both English and Japanese on the NT box, that means I have to have two seperate licenses and two different installs on the same machine in two different partitions.
I had heard that Win2K lets you choose between languages and related that to a friend who was buying a PC here in Tokyo, but that simply isn't the case. (At least not for J/E.) MS apparently does make such a version, but it is only available to corporate customers, not via retail.
As for software, apps are being made in other languages and sometimes 'ported' to English. Sylpheed (http://sylpheed.good-day.net) is one such package, a really good mail client (MUA).
Other packages have been translated well enough that a non-English speaker may think it's a native program - Webmin comes to mind, as does Sourceforge's website.
There are probably others that are similar, but I haven't realized that I am not seeing it in the developer's native language. (I get a lot of my software from the Japanese Linux magizine CDs' monthly picks, so it's not always clear what the 'original' language of a package is.)
Funny thing is, I've never seen Mandrake in these distro magazines - I hear it's one of the most popular in the US, but have yet to run across a copy here. I've wondered if it's an i18n issue...
IMHO, multi-lingual envronments is one area (critical for me) that Linux outshines its closed-source alternatives. (Want Icelandic Linux? No problem. Windows? No can do.)
Cheers,
Jim in Tokyo

What Loophole?

[Anonymous Coward]

Dude, if you own something it doesn't get taxed unless it is generating dividends and/or interest, which is what he would pay when necessary. It's when you sell it that you get hit with all the cap gains.

Regarding your first point,

[Bake]

I'd say you're a fool thinking that up to 60% of consumers buy components and put them together.

I'd even dare to say that up to 95% of people that DON'T buy from the major OEMs buy a machine pieced together by the retailer and/or other much smaller OEMs that simple. They usually have a volume discount deal with Microsoft regarding exactly that, at least it wouldn't surprise me from a pure business perspective.

It's all a communist plot!

[babbage]

Korea Replacing 120,000 Windows with Linux

My that'll be drafty.

This of course points only to the evil cabal of insulation manufacturers, electricity generators, and natural gas producers, all of whom will clearly benefit by the transition from hermetic glass membranes to the newer & not yet proven cd-rom membrane technology.

Thank god I live in America, where you can pry the Windows from my warm, vibrant home over my dead body!

:)

What??

[zCyl]

That argument makes as much logical sense as saying that a country that purchases 120,000 TV's is going to be the next Hollywood.

Re:What??

[Hard_Code]

Um, no it doesn't, because you can't PRODUCE anything with TVs. Duh. But still, I don't think this will mean much for Korean WRT India and China's software markets.

In other news...

[sunhou]

The maker of the Linux distribution that the Korean government is running this Hancom office suite under has made a $15 profit, as the Korean gov't bought one copy and then proceeded to legally make 119,999 copies of it for the rest of their machines.

Re:what's MS gonna do?

[mother_superius]

...The United States government does consider its trade and communications part of its sovereignty. ... This shows what you get when people who honestly believe that corporations directly run the United States government go off the deep end.

Really? Why, then, did the CIA:
overthrow the Iranian democracy and replace it with the shah when the president proposed to nationalize oil (1953)?
overthrow the Guatamalan democracy when the leader nationalized the United Fruit Company's holdings?
assinate Rafael Trujillo, the previously supported dictator of the Dominican Republic when his business interfered with American business?
kill George Papandreous, who refused to bow down to American companies?
assassinate Salvator Allende, democratically elected, and replace him with Pinochet?
and don't give me that bullshit about defending democracy; most of these countries WERE democracies before the CIA got in there; and those who replaced the old governments were much worse than those they replaced in terms of running a police state.

Why do we endorse the IMF and WTO, which, in exchange for much-needed economic aid, undermine democracy to replace it with wishes of the largest companies and richest people in America?

The Domino Theory was far different, actually

[Y-Crate]

In practice, the Domino Theory had more to do with the beleif that nations who demonstrated independance from Washington's spehere of influence (even if they didn't become Communist or pose a threat to the U.S in any way) were a danger because they would serve as a good example for their neighbors who would be less open to exploitation by foreign governments and businesses. It's detailed in government documents from the Cold War. Noam Chomsky's supremly excellent What Uncle Sam Really Wants examines them in detail.

Most of our covert and not-so-covert operations were directed at those who posed a danger of not submitting. This lead to some of the worst atrocities of the century.

Re:The Domino Theory was far different, actually

[nathanm]

This lead to some of the worst atrocities of the century.

Any atrocities caused directly or indirectly by American operations were small potatoes compared to Stalin, Mao, Hitler (dare I invoke Godwin's Law), Pol Pot, or Milosevic.

Re:The Domino Theory was far different, actually

[deaddrunk]

Tell that to the Vietnamese or the Indonesians, both of whom have suffered greatly thanks to US foreign policy.

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Actually unicode isn't really used in east Asia

[Anonymous Coward]

Unicode doesn't have enough character space for Chinese. However, it tries to cram Chinese, Japanese, and Korean into the same character space. This REALLY doesn't work too well since in many cases they use different forms of a given character. Unicode will arbitrarilly pick one form and use it for ALL 3 languages. As a result it's never pretty, and it's sometimes confusing to read. As such, Japan typically uses shift-JIS, Taiwan and Hong Kong use Big5, and Korea uses UHC or JOHAB. Unicode is pretty much universally disliked here in the orient. That's the problem with westerners trying to "redesign" Chinese scripts.

Re:Actually unicode isn't really used in east Asia

[Giant Robot]

I've actually been using unicode for quite a while in backend applications, while converting unicode back to regular character sets (Big5,GB..) for the user. Sometimes this involves converting from traditional to simplified chinese in unicode first (easier than the "other" way around, since it is a many to one mapping), and then to GB code.

Actually, Unicode does have different glyphs for the different forms of the same character, for example:

Traditional:
Simplified:
Japanese:

And without Unicode, you wouldn't be able to see all three characters in one page without doing a lot of messy stuff. Also, most chinese can usually read both sets, and many write simplifed on a daily basis (the difference is just like handwriting/printing, with thousands of variations, not just 52 alphabets :)

In the later versions of Unicode (3.x), almost ALL necessary characters are included, including obscure cantonese swear words... If you are concerned about how the fonts are shown based on the different cultures (like missing a dash here and there), you can use a japanese font instead of a chinese font, and just map to it.

The main problem is that Unicode CJK characters usually take 3 bytes while other character sets like Big5 and GB only takes 2. And also, almost all legacy systems, including many business and especially cargo shipping software in south east asia uses their local character set, not Unicode. This will not change for a long time. However, the trend is to use UTF8 in the data storage layer and converting it to the local set (and just replacing a character not in the local character set with a '?') for the user in the display layer.

Korea is a country of Education oriented consumers

[Anonymous Coward]

After MS tried to bully the Korean Government over the buyout of the bankrupt company that makes the popular "Hangul office suite", going so far as to ask the Hangul Office developers to stop working on the program if MS takes them over, this is a little retribution. The Korean Government is most likely quite annoyed by the transnational American software monoply.
Besides, Linux has a pretty good following in Korea. I installed my first Korean version of Redhat in 1996.
Still the problem is political. Korea has a lot of pirated MS software installed on Government computers-- especially police stations and public/university school computers. Since Korea's government doesn't want this to be an issue for them in trade negotiations or even issue when having to mobilize *raids* on their own agencies at the behest of MS/US, why not just eliminate the problem with Linux. Here is where greedy, inflexible licensing kills itself. Use the alternative to save political headaches not necessarily political ones.

At the heart of it, people are more forward looking in Korea towards technology and always seek ways in which to help their youth to get a decent education--corporate computing looks out for itself, yet public/school computing should be accessible to all students and at a low cost with the backing of smart government agencies. SInce Korea is developing a nationwide fiber network for itself, it will need an OS robust and distributable enough to satisfy needs. Linux is it. Besides, the national "good feelings" from using a Koreanized Linux OS is a lot more patriotic than using a foreign made and costly OS.
I always believed Linux was most suitable in countries where copyright protection/intellectual property was negligble anyway. Linux is just more legal for Korea at the end of the day. That is a fact the MS most face in Asia.

Re:dog eaters should be put in coincentration camp

[jjsoh]

Thanks for the well thought out reply, but here's the truth.

This is off-topic, but I believe it has to be said:

AFAIK, back when Korea was a poor country, meat was scarce, so it was hard for many to afford meat; especially of the bovine variety, which would explain why majority of Korean dishes rely heavily on vegetables. The next best thing was probably pig and unfortunately dog (not sure if it was the domesticated kind or not, but it was dog). Anyway, that was then and they're not as poor as they used to be.

However, now, even though I've been told that it's "against the law" in South Korea to eat dog, I'm sure there are still places where they still do (since it's probably not enforced).

And yes, I'm Korean: born there, but raised here in the States. Never ate canine, never care to. But for others who have.. maybe it's just a part of old culture that can't be shaken? Who knows, but it's probably easier for me to understand (yet still not condone), than for someone who is not from Korea.

Food for thought (no pun intended).

Any comments or criticism is welcome.

Great for the Community

[Swaffs]

Does anyone else see the huge advantage of getting countries like China, India, Korea, etc. involved in Linux? Just think of how many developers would come out of that. Look at the population they have, and just think of what kind of progress could be made with their help. Microsoft can't keep up with that.

Re:Oh really?

[kcurrie]

Who will create them? The standard will be Linux based, not Windows.

Cash Cow?

[Lethyos]

Let's go Cow Tipping. :)

Re:Is this the route Linux distributors should tak

[thirdrock]

I've noticed that it's governments, more than any other institution or demographic, that seem to latch on to Linux the most (witness adoptions in Scandinavian countries, the NSA in the States, China and so on). However, most distributions don't specifically target government at all; they generally either go after the serious Linux user or try to focus on user-friendliess (Corel and Mandrake, as examples).

This is an excellent observation, to which I would add that in my country, and other countries I have visited around the world, governments are not very well funded. And because of this, they often do a very poor job. Making the various levels of government more effecient would be of great benefit in many countries in the world. Unfortunately, many local governments have old PC's and no money for software licenses.

Enter Linux....

Most of the operating system and tools are free, and it can be parred down to run on older equipment. I have worked with small government departments and also volunteer organisations, and the thing that really breaks the bank is per-seat server licensing.

This is where linux really shines. Set up a mail/web/print server using a cheap PC, and you have taken the first step to moving the whole shop over to Linux.

Another thing is that in many of these small organisations, they use their PCs for very a specific purpose, like managing a single database. And so the question of Word, Excel, Access never comes up. Oftentimes, the people I meet in these small organisations have never used these applications, because they couldn't afford to purchase them.

Sometimes there was some 20yr old DOS programme running and they were happily using that to do their day to day work. Port that to ncurses and away you go. No gnashing of teeth about desktops and applications, just cheaper hardware and software so they can remain employed.

What if focusing on government demands was the answer? Ask them what they want, or develop with government needs (security, administration, etc.) in mind. If you do it right it shouldn't be hard to convince a government, be it municipal, provincial/state or maybe even national, that it's in their best interest to use a very cheap OS with few security holes and entertainment-based distractions (as much as we love Solitaire).

I think you are on to something here. I am going to look into it straight away. Local governments here are keen to improve, but are cash strapped. Picking specific applications for use in local government might be a good way to get Linux in.

How about....

[Tom7]

How about paying for 1 copy (or, say, 10) and copying it to all the machines that need it?

The excess money can go to pay for a real service, like to employ free software programmers.

Re:How about....

[nathanm]

How about paying for 1 copy (or, say, 10) and copying it to all the machines that need it?

They can do that with the OS, since it's GPLed, but not the office suite. Hancom Office is propriety, closed-source software.

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South or North Korea

[vortex tzu]

There is no such thing as "Korea". Is it N. or S.?

The next step in world domination

[slashdot_commentator]

StarCraft allegedly runs under Wine. (which means it runs under Linux.)

Get those Korean geeks working on Fortress, and then we will own Korea.

Bahahahahahahahahahahahhaahahahaaaaaaaaaaaaaa...

Re:The next step in world domination

[Corrado]

Wow, this is getting to be a giant, real-life sized game of RISK. :)

Fix the open relays

[stesch]

I hope now they have the right software to fix the open relays. We don't need no further spam from Korea.

Re:This is GREAT news for the open source movement

[nusuth]

We've all said that as soon as there's an office suite that rivals MS Word, then maybe Linux will have a chance at displacing Windows.

You, sir, obviously have never used Hancom office. Staroffice is light years ahead. OpenOffice is only a light year behind Staroffice and closing. Perhaps none of these two can be used by Koreans, because they(especially openoffice) has little support for localization. For the western world, Hancom is not an option, it is confusing, awkard and expensive.

Then where's the distinction?

[cduffy]

If you support him and his sole proprietership getting rich so long as they follow the law, where's the distinction between that and any "big capitalist firm" whose wealth you seem less supportive of?

Re:Then where's the distinction?

[metis]

Ok. Here is an explanation of what I see as a "marxist" (decidededly neo-neo ) take on the GPL. This isn't connected to anything recognizably "communist" in common stereotypes.

Writing software is labor. And hence, written software is the product of labor. It is also a tool that can be used to do other types of labor, such as writing new software or even writing a letter. In that respect software is a mean of production. All tools (means of productions) are the result of prior labor.

Capital is created by the private appropriation of the means of productions (prior labor). The result of capital accumulation is that would be producers (workers) cannot produce on their own. They must contract with an owner of capital. The result of this contract is that the value created by production is shared between labor and capital, in a ratio determined by their relative power.

In communism, Marxs said, the means of productions will be owned collectively by the producers. Thus, they will not need to negotiate with capital owners the right to use them in production. As a result, they will enjoy a better share of the value they produce through they labor.

This is essentially what the GPL does. It creates both directly (to the GPLed work) and indirectly (to derivatives,) a public ownership of prior labor (means of production)

Marx wanted to do away with capitalists altogether. Whether it is possible, or even desirable, is not relevant here (I am rather agnostic). The GPL certainly does not destroy Capitalism. However, in harmony with the model, you can think of the GPL as creating public means of production, that you can use without having to negotiate. That strenghtens the negotiating power of labor vs. capital owners.

Compare two models of a deal.

In the first one, A, who owns rights to software tools, hires B to write, using those tools, a new tool, which A sells to others.

In the second one, A hires B to use public tools to write some new tool (most likely public), with the intention of selling B's labor as consultancy to the future users of the new tool.

You don't have to be a genius to realize that A will have to pay B a larger share of the value produced in the second case, because in the second model, A's contribution is smaller.

Now that is sweet ( if you are living off work, naturally.)

Again, this is not the kind of communism that will make Stalin smile (on the contrary). But it falls within Marx's model nonetheless.

When the producer is working on his own, the whole issue is moot, safe that public software makes it indeed easier for people to work on their own. That is the whole point. There is nothing wrong in making money. The only problem is workers without bargaining power.

I hope that discussion made sense to you.

Oh great ...

[Ryokos_boytoy]

120K new open mail relays ; )

Re:Wish AmigaOS was available on x86.

[vortexau]

Wish granted with...
Amithon! (To some degree)!

Thats a lot of copies..

[josepha48]

Why so many? Are they going to cpoy them then make it available to the public? Use it in various goverment offices and thus distrubute them around?

Looks like they are replacing desktops from the article. I guess this may be a test to see the compatibility and if it works then maybe they'll deploy them everywhere. I think in the long run it may be cheaper than a SUN or Windows solution.

I think the real issues is that this is a Korean software company and the goverment is supporting their own. Why pay money to the US when they can support, monitor, and control an OS in their own country. They have the source and can make it as secure as they choose and add in monitoring software into the system if they choose.

I think we will see more countries adopt Linux for the fact that it can help support their own econemy in their country by having a software company in thier country. Unlike Windows which is in the US. Kind of a way of keeping money in their own country an dkeeping their econemy going. That along with the fact that there are less srtingent licensing issues with RH/Linux.

Re:my, what a lot of big words you know lunix luse

[Jennifer Ever]

Pfft.

Re:what's MS gonna do?

[Eric E. Coe]

Not that I am trying to get into the defence any of the above alleged events/interventions (there is not the time nor the space for all these tired items that are trotted out by leftists when they want to dis the US), but you know, nationalization (i.e. stealing the investments of foreign companies) and the threat of proxy attacks originating from the Soviet Bloc (i.e. communist takeovers via any means during the Cold War) is not the same as changing vendors (a business/public policy decision).

Don't pop the champagne quite yet...

[guntomypenguinhead]

Perhaps the Korean government is enlightened on this particular issue, but if you were over here in Korea, you might be inclined to call them a lot of things, but "enlightened" probably wouln't be one of them...........

Only if Japan goes open source first........

[guntomypenguinhead]

I live in Korea, and I gotta agree with tavon79 with an additional precondition. The Koreans make much of how they hate the Japanese, but they imitate them at every opportunity (especially the not so good stuff): xenophobia, idiotic youth fashions, fiscal obfuscation, inefficient domestic goods distribution, provincialism, etc.... They generally don't adopt any concept from the west unless it arrives in Seoul via Japan. A couple of years back one of those PC rooms opened up as the "Linux PC-bang" Guess I don't have to tell you what they're running now.... Until the japanese port some games to linux, you won't see it on their desktops. As soon as it arrives from Tokyo, they'll claim it as their own idea.................

Yes AC does know something about korean politics

[guntomypenguinhead]

I live in korea and AC is right! One of the niftier features of the korean economy is that the average korean citizen's bank deposit is subject to being transferred at government direction to a chaebol to keep it's (inept) management afloat and partying. Sweet deal, huh!? Koreans in general, have no tolerance of anybody saying anything negative about them, they further lack the ability of self examination, preferring to blame ALL their problems on foreigners (which can bring on some interesting mental acrobatics at times) I'm standing by for the oppa gangsters, now.....

okay, Korean movies suck in general, too....

[guntomypenguinhead]

Here in korea, logical sense doesn't have much to do with anything. Koreans will continue to pirate M$ windoze for their desktops because: a. They've been doing it for years. b. Starcraft runs on it. c. Windoze was written by foreigners, and koreans have nothing but contempt for foreigners and their intellectual rights. Just don't say anything bad about them or their stuff, though.....

Re:my, what a lot of big words you know lunix luse

[Jennifer Ever]

Physical threats in an imaginary universe will get you nowhere.

Re:what's MS gonna do?

[mother_superius]

threat of proxy attacks originating from the Soviet Bloc

Just to clarify, most of those were not in contact with Moscow.

Gadzooks!

[jo42]

Imagine if all of these machines got root'd. Either you will get top spot in SETI@Home or a huge server farm for here.