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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.
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.
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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
Sigs are dangerous coy things
Sorry to be such a poopy-pants. (Has anyone heard any more about Mexico's initiatives?)
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Death will come, and will have your eyes
-- Pavese
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
slashdot: where everyone yells sarcastic metaphors to themselves to understand the issue
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?
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
All employees must wash hands before seeking equitable relief.
hey folks, aren't there still two Korea's?
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)~
From the press release: ... , 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.
January 9th, 2002 in Seoul, Korea - HancomLinux,
[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*
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.
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
-- My Weblog.
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?
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.