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."

Comments

very interesting

[Maserati]

If you must clone a Windows OS, then Win98 is a pretty good target. Microsoft et al will have a serious hissy fit. But what can they really do ? It's entirely possible that they could do a clean room implementation that would hold up in US courts (but they might not). The APIs are pretty well understood by this point, and they aren't even "competing" with Microsoft since '98 is three generations obsolete.

If it supports DirectX 8.1a well I might get a copy.

Interesting but..

[Psx29]

The real question is: Who do you trust more, the chinese government or microsoft?

Vague, vague, vague.

[Stonehand]

"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.

Towards a karmic balance?

[Jack William Bell]

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.

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 /. thinks my own karma is 'excellent', I should win the lottery tomorrow...

Jack William Bell

Hint: CONTROL (was Re:Interesting but..)

[nzadrozny]

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...

Re:kudos to them

[Com2Kid]

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