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China to Develop Windows Clone
jimmu writes "According to both The Register and The People's Daily
China is set to develop a windows workalike equivalent to Win 98, with full compatibility with Office 200 and Word. Apparently, 18 companies and universities have been working on the 2 initiatives, with a 1.0 version supposedly already released to certain government offices."
honestly, why? Considering the amount of piracy in China, why develop a windows clone when they can just buy a copy for $2?
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
If it supports DirectX 8.1a well I might get a copy.
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Prehaps the fact that it doesn't run anuthing except 5 year old programs maybe.
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it's amazing how much effort is being reduplicated in the OS world. they should put their efforts into WINE or just go with running openoffice on linux.
to make a truly API compatible clone of windows that is even semi-stable is an enormous amount of work. and of course future versions of ms office will doubtless use new features of future versions of win that will lead to a never-ending catch up game.
imagine on the other hand, if they put all this effort into openoffice itself. now that would be great.
The real question is: Who do you trust more, the chinese government or microsoft?
"Equivalent functionality" --
A minimalist view would be to merely assemble, say, a general-purpose operating system distribution based on anything free, and then make sure there's a suite of office software (e.g. StarOffice) on it with suitable import and export filters for compatibility with what's coming out from Redmond.
If they're concerned about the dominance of MS Office, then the above makes far more sense than the far more ambitious task of re-implementing Win9X to the point of software (application-level, not just data import/export) compatibility w/ the very product that's bothering them.
Only the dead have seen the end of war.
Considering the rather cavalier Chinese attitude towards intellecual property, it wouldn't surprise me to find that this 'workalike' actually contains plenty of Microsoft code in one form or another. Alternatively they could be using Linux + Wine with extensions and having no plans of complying with the GPL. Or both.
/. thinks my own karma is 'excellent', I should win the lottery tomorrow...
But even if no I.P. violations are happing at all this is still kind of a 'good for the goose, good for the gander' situation eh? The thought of China 'embracing and extending' Windows?
The really funny thing about this is that Micrsoft has been making nicey-nice with the Peoples Republic lately because all those billions of people ready to buy computers look like such a wonderful market. And besides they were hoping to get China to crack down on all the mainland pirating operations and figured you attract more flies with honey, etc. Either way it tickles me that China has been getting ready to stab Bill Gates in the back all along.
Maybe there really is something to that karmic balance stuff after all. Now, considering that
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This thread's parent raises an interesting question of who you trust more.
My immediate first impression was that the Chinese government is undertaking the creation of a new operating system in order to exert more direct control over the spread of information. They already have quite a track record in that department...
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this is the most ambitious copyright infringement scheme ever to come out of eastern asia, and that's saying something!
Only infringement under overzealous laws. Making something compatible is hardly against the law.
(and by the way, if there were ever a perfect time to use the bill-gates-as-borg icon, it's now.)
Err, wouldn't this be kind of like Borg VS Borg or something? Or Dominion VS Borg? Hmmm
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Just a few weeks ago, Microsoft announced that they are putting $750M into the tech sector in China. I wonder how they are feeling about that decision now? Whether it's a re-implementation of Windows, or a Linux solution (as it seems to be), the bottom line is that this is a hard slap in the face for Microsoft. If the Chinese are willing to do this after Microsoft gives them $750M, what are they going to do when they read the licensing agreements on anything they get from M$?
It's quite strange that they set out to build a full-functional OS just to run Office 2000 and Word on it. Anyone with the least common sense would prefer to go Top-Down , i.e. , write its own Word Processor before go to OS, not to mention there are many OS available.
KOS-MOS
And besides they were hoping to get China to crack down on all the mainland pirating operations and figured you attract more flies with honey, etc. Either way it tickles me that China has been getting ready to stab Bill Gates in the back all along.
I'd like to expand on that. A popular Chinese business mentality is "get the best deal out of the guy before he can get the best one out of you". It is this mentality that has driven the fast-paced financial world of Hong Kong and Shanghai. Those who can't keep up with the tricks and cunning bartering techniques of Chinese businesspeople and merchants get financially burned in the Chinese markets. "Foreigners" investing in the China that do not know business etiquette also get burned. For example, when Microsoft brought legal action against 3 of the most respected and prosperous computer companies in China (one of them being Legend), public outrage ensued. The public was also angered at Microsoft's pricing policy of setting a standard price for their software worldwide rather than setting the cost according to the local average income of the country which it was selling its products in. Microsoft, in addition to its ruthless pricing policies, happened to be based in Redmond. Seeing Microsoft's "reign of terror" in their computer and software industry, and knowing Microsoft's outsider origins, the Chinese were more than eager to despise Microsoft. They view the corporate juggernaut as a foreign oppressor attempting to humiliate and exploit their population for its "high potential of profits", mirroring the situation of the Opium Wars. For reasons which are rooted in its 5,000 year-old past, many Chinese hate being humiliated by non-Chinese more than being humiliated by their own. The Chinese belief of "keeping one's face" (preventing humiliation of one's pride or paying retribution to the humiliator) combined with MS's business tactics further worsened it's reputation in China. As a result, most Chinese wouldn't care for potential legal problems that may be involved in the creation of their MS-Software-compatible OS, even as their country tries to enter the WTO.
If Cyborg Bill doesn't move fast enough, he'll get burned by a kind of Boxer Rebellion of the digital age--China's push against a foreign company's domination of it's software market utilizing (legal) cost-free alternatives. (A la RedFlagLinuix and development of an MS-Software-compatible OS).
God knows there aren't innocents on death row in the US, nor people being detained without indictment or rights to an attorney or for something they simply might do, or for belonging to the wrong group in the US, or unequal justice meted out to the disenfranchised and absolution for the powerful, or people put into prison for 24 years for being in the same car as someone who was carrying drugs while the head of state got a pass for drunk driving and god know what else ... oh, wait a minute, never mind.
Come on, how are they going to control spread of the source developed by 18 universities? It's far more likely that they just don't want billions of dollars to flow out of the country and into the hands of Microsoft. Or make warez an offical policy. I bet students will mostly do the work for free and anyway they'll start on top of Linux and don't have to pay developers even a fraction of US salaries. It's a good idea for any country, even US. I doubt that the number of jobs Microsoft creates justifies all the cash they pocket away.