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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."
Uhhhh, what's wrong with WINE?
Will they have a red screen of death, or blue?
--
They said FUD was bad, so I started spreading DUF.
"Mind, as manifested by the capacity to make choices, is to some extent present in every electron." -Freeman Dyson
this is the most ambitious copyright infringement scheme ever to come out of eastern asia, and that's saying something!
(and by the way, if there were ever a perfect time to use the bill-gates-as-borg icon, it's now.)
go get it
New Scientist is also running a story about this.
If it supports DirectX 8.1a well I might get a copy.
Veteran, Bermuda Triangle Expeditionary Force, 1992-1951
The real question is: Who do you trust more, the chinese government or microsoft?
...curiouser and curiouser.
You know they just wanna play BattleZone legally. *nod*
Everything in the Universe sucks: It's the law!
Maybe they can smell the change in the wind with Palladium and 'secure computing'.
with full compatibility with Office 200 and Word
Gotta watch closely those Chinese knockoffs with their names just *SLIGHTLY* off.
Human nature is the same everywhere; the modes only are different. -- Earl of Chesterfield
I don't know about the rest of the people commenting here, but I think that, if this is true, it's absolutely fantastic. Being a computer technician myself (who is devoted to Win2k when it comes to M$ operating systems), I can't say enough for the power of Windows 98 on low-end client workstations. As the Register article says, give it some halfway-decent memory management and you've got yourself a damn good OS.
I'm interested to see the specifics on this. Will it be free? Will it be horrifyingly illegal? Did they set this seemingly unmeetable goal because a hacker stole Microsoft source code during one of the much-publicized raids on the Super-Secret Code Vaults buried hundreds of miles below the surface of Redmond?
The main reason this interested me so much was what, I believe Bill Gates said about Windows in some interview that I'm too lazy to go look up... Windows isn't about the OS itself, it's about the API... give him the API spec, a handful of programmers and a year and he could recreate it in all it's glory, basically. Looks like someone is actually trying.
"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
Jack William Bell
- -
Are you an SF Fan? Are you a Tru-Fan?
Thats the big question! A GPL WinClone and OfficeClone woudl be cool.
Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo! http://goo.gl/J9bkO
"1.0 version supposedly already released " Obviously it's not going to be a good clone, if it's already out of Beta -- how can it be a good clone if it's worthy of a 1.0? I've never seen Windows software like that!
My other sig is funny!
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...
http://websolr.com — fast, hassle-free search, powered by Apache Solr
Pfffff. Don't you get it? We could make millions.... the real question is going to be if I can take the PRC's version and sell it for $2 per CD here.
Libertarianism is rich wolves and poor sheep playing gambler's ruin for dinner.
That ripping sound you hear is the fabric of space time tearing itself apart. :)
"Mind, as manifested by the capacity to make choices, is to some extent present in every electron." -Freeman Dyson
Why re-invent Win98, when they could contribute to Wine?
Right now, the single biggest thing Wine lacks is Out Of Process COM - that makes many Windows programs fall over and die under Wine.
But with the kind of programmer resources China could throw at the problem, they could probably add OOP COM to Wine in short order.
After all, there's nothing like having a billion-node Beowulf cluster of programmers....
www.eFax.com are spammers
Let me repeat: China is not cloning Win98. All y'all villagers can put those torches and pitchforks away. 'Taint nuthin to see here.
Here's what The People's Daily article had to say (in slightly mangled English):
Now, what is RedFlag, you ask? It appears to be a Chinese distro of Linux. Yup. And CS&S? That's the China National Computer Software and Technology Service Corporation. Rght here. And *who* did they enter into a big agreement with at the end of last year? That'd be Sun, to license StarSuite, as mentioned in this release.
So to sum up:
China: Running StarSuite under Linux.
Register: Jumping the gun.... again.
Slashdot readers: Hates Microsoft.
Whew. Looks like everything's back to normal around here. =)
Chindows!
It suggests that it is Linux and open source and wine...
Only 'flamers' flame!
Yang = aflutter
Fan = jib or foresail
Thus, Yangfan = driving sail
Qi = start
Hang = a route, a sail
Thus, QiHang = sailing, or start sailing
The article said both mean 'set sail'...well, figuratively they are.
Listen, China is trying it's hardest to come into the modern age. Let's not insult them by saying they're still in the 200's rather than the 2000's when you say they're going to support Office 200, capice?
To make a pun demonstrates the highest understanding of a language
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 $750M, what are they going to do when they read the licensing agreements on anything they get from M$?
I hardly think the Chinese goverment even acknowledges the US legal system and just disregards it as capitalistic "justice" for the rich, easy punishment for the poor. (Sad thing is they are prolly right with this, too...) :(
Uh. The opinion of freaking China as to whether the US court systems are, comparatively speaking, just and fair.
We'll go with the ol' grain of salt on this one.
All employees must wash hands before seeking equitable relief.
I'm sure they'd also like to plant their own backdoors too... I'm no Microsoft fan, but I'd trust a closed source system from them before one from the Chinese government.
Um, US Courts have no jurisdiction over China. It's a foreign country.
Yes, that's the obvious answer, and yes, the "the US is just big and mean and stupid and thinks it rules the world" opinions expressed in other responses are terribly fashionable. But no, it's not correct, and no, nobody's stupid enough to think that we're going to send the federal marshals to Shanghai.
You can sue foreign governments in United States courts. A cursory search reveals, for example, this case from a few months ago: Stethem v. Islamic Republic of Iran, 201 F.Supp. 2d 78 (D.D.C., 2002).
Put very simply, a party (say, Microsoft, or in the above case a U.S. citizen killed as a result of actions of the defendant nation) can get a judgment, or a court order, against a foreign country.
If it's a monetary judgment, it can be collected from whatever assets the country has in the United States - bank accounts, foreign currency reserves, real estate, whatever. If it's a court order, then, say, Microsoft could get an injunction forbidding the Chinese government (or whatever state-owned enterprise) from distributing "Windows PRC" within the United States.
This happens all the time. It's really not that exciting. Suing China, of course, would be a little pointless - China's not likely to try to undertake any action within the jurisdiction of the US courts - namely, within the United States.
All employees must wash hands before seeking equitable relief.
http://www.redflag-linux.com/upfiles/soft/defaut.g if
:) - note smiley for the humor impared
And some people tried to claim that the GNU movement wasn't about communism.
Windows PC clone.
--
"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
Instead of a mouse, will it use chopsticks?
Could make interactive porno more interesting, I suppose.
Table-ized A.I.
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).
Actually I've been following Wine for a while, and it seems like the biggest thing holding them back was that (until recently) they didn't do any regression testing.
They'd fix one thing only to break like five or ten others.
Interestingly, now that they're moving forward with an exhaustive testing regime, they've started filling in the remaining pieces pretty fast.
And, indeed, most Open Source projects don't do much in the way of testing...
DNA just wants to be free...
There is a reason people don't develop new all-purpose operating systems from scratch today. It's an extraordinarily expensive and time consuming undertaking. We're talking about 10 years of development for talented, well organized groups, with constant feedback, review, testing, and some degree of industry support.
There's no way China developed this from scratch, this fast, with their resources, unless it supports only a tiny insignificant fraction of Microsoft Windows functionality. Cloning Windows 98 of all things doesn't make sense either. Windows 2000 is more stable, extensible, powerful.
It's either Linux + WINE + custom hacks, or they probably got their hands on Windows 98 source code and did some global search and replaces.
I hear their spell-checker auto-corrects "Republic of China" to "Province of Taiwan".
pr0n - keeping monitor glass spotless since 1981.
Think about this:
Microsoft plans Palladium, essentially hardware-locking our boxes and software-locking the code that runs on it. Capitalist company exerting tight control over consumers.
Chinese government has invested in Linux and open source - even if they won't embrace the GPL. If they keep to standard hardware, then we'll be assured of a cheap source of Linux boxen. Communist government producing "free" (as in freedom) boxen, leaving control in the hands of consumers.
Even if their distro is rife with spyware (who thinks it isn't?) you can simply bleem the box and start fresh.
It would be ironic, no?
Well, actually it wouldn't be the first time. (See Boxer Rebellion.)
That's scarry shit for Americans like myself living in China because the local "boxing clubs" wiped out the foreigners big time and it wasn't all that long ago.
I've got a plot for a video game about the Boxer Rebellion where this one foriegn dude puts up resistance, but if you read the facts it was total slaughter, hence the US troops.
Let's pray that's all ancient history. Unfortunately, I feel things are getting a little tense on the streets with the US and Japanese financial troubles. When the money runs dry people tend to get ugly and the xenophobia runs high. At least that's what I recall from living in SoCal in the early 80s.
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.
Rich
While the newly started two programs would make updates on this basis to improve the software to a level of Win98 and compatible with Office2000 and Word.
Your post: China: Running StarSuite under Linux
The article didn't say they were runnign StarSuite. I'd have thought the article was talkign about China makign something like Crossover Office. It doesn't matter what kernel, APIs, and windowing system it uses. If it runs MS Office, for many people, its a Windows clone (it obviously has many of the same APIs).
So yes. Something to see here.
If they'd managed that, we probably wouldn't be here having this discussion.
If MS made decent quality software, Linux would be a mere curiosity. The growing enthusiasm for Open Source is based on millions of people seeing hundreds of millions of BSODs.
Tech Public Policy stuff
I think this post should be at +10 Insightfull. And by the way, it also obsoletes most of the other posts here. If China mandated the adoption of Linux, well, that may put linux user at an advantage and in some years, there'll be more Linuxes arround the world than Windows boxes.
:-)"
I 'd love to see some "Man, your word processor is really crappy. Can't it read OpenOffice 3 files? (Openoffice 3.0 implementing some kind of GPLed decoder which can only have a single implementation
unfinished: (adj.)
Unix and Unix like OS have had protected memory for yonks, NT has it for years (and now W2K), Apple has moved to this more stable design by embracing BSD, so what do the Chinese do?
Choose to copy one of the most unstable OS' that the World has ever been burdened with!?!?
I think there is a *MUCH* simpler solution. Embrace a free Unix with an excellent stability and hardware support history (FreeBSD) and then standardize on something like OpenOffice.
Any huge efforts like recreating a crap OS could have been put into improving OpenOffice and perhaps writing some decent groupware.
Crazy crazy stuff.
War crimes, torture, lies, illegal spying... Would someone give Bush a blowjob, already, so he can be impeached?
Beijing municipal government bought software equivalent to Win 95 from Chinese companies such as CS&S and RedFlag. (Read Linux) While the newly started two programs would make updates on this basis to improve the software to a level of Win98 and compatible with Office2000 and Word. (Read Linux)
Get a free ipod.
Of course any such effort will be based on Linux. No company is going to start from scratch when Linux/Wine/OpenOffice already provides most of their requirements of 'compatability with Office'.
Microsoft will not need to sue anyone. What is more likely is that any government-sponsored package based on open source software will end-up breaking the GPL.
Will the US government, through the WTO, oblige China to respect the GPL? Imagine the lobbying... this is going to be hilarious.
My blog
A Windows 98 'workalike'? Windows 98 doesn't really 'work' per say, so to workalike seems to be a apardox...
But Seriously, why name a 9x system as a goal rather than an NT based one as a goal, 9x's core is very flawed, and since they would be starting from scratch anyway...
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
Red Flag is a Chinese Linux distro and something MSOffice compatible within a year doesn't leave many options other than Open/Star Office.
Further googling on CS&S finds it's the major Chinese software company, with a lot of products, including Linux and Unix, but tellingly this on Sun's site: "Sun signed agreements with CS&S Network Technology Co., Ltd., Red Flag Software Co., Ltd. and Beijing Co-Create Open Source Software Co., Ltd. (Co-Soft). Under the terms of the agreements, these companies agreed to license and bundle StarSuite software as part of their Linux operating platform, which they OEM to PC vendors and also sell through retail and other channels."
Thus "Chinese Win 98" = Star Office on Red Flag Linux.
And I submitted all this yesterday. Slashdot, thy name is futility.
you, sir, need to go to http://winehq.org/ and read some information. Wine's goal is to have a win32 api on unix. The emulation is just a side effect. when finished you will be able to bring windows code to linux, compile and run native win32 applications on linux. No emulation. This is why it's name is "Wine Is Not an Emulator."
Paying taxes to buy civilization is like paying a hooker to buy love.
What's up with Wine?
Crossover Office is coming along very nicely.
Why not throw a few million dollars at Codeweavers to bring Crossover Office up to Office XP compatibility? That's what I'd do anyway...
(They got $4M in their lawsuit, but not before one of them died)
Free Software: Like love, it grows best when given away.
The US constitution was heavily affected by Iroquois Confederacy and it's democratic style of government. Unfortunately, it was also influenced by the historical European style of aristocratic sstyle of governence. Instead of creating a truly democratic nation the founding fathers tried to create what is, in effect, and elected aristocracy. This is what we inherited, and what we refer to as a 'democracy' today.
On the west coast, the Salish people had what I would describe as a hereditary democracy. Although the men wielded the leadership, they were chosen by a council of women elders, and power passed through the female line. Leadership was seen as a responsibility, not a right. Leaders were taught to consult with the people first. They spoke for their people, as opposed to deciding for them. If a leader was seen as not acting for his people, he could be removed by a simple majority vote.
Leaders who spoke for a tribe or village in area councils were chosen on an ad-hoc basis. The person who was seen as most capable of speaking (and listening) for the will of the people on that specific issue was sent to speak. It was not a permanent assignment.
These native methods of government seem to have evolved over centuries (or even millenia) as a way to be responsible for the possibility of human greed. The European/American method of democracy, on the other hand, was designed based on the aristocratic concept of divine right and the pseudo-religious belief that a leader would always act in the interests of his constituents. I would assign a big 'oops' to the latter proposition.
Free Software: Like love, it grows best when given away.
Software development is difficult to parallelize. Eight-ten years is a good bet given an optimum use of programmer time. See: The Mythical Man-Month by Fred Brooks.
I doubt China gives a damn about violating Microsoft's copyright.
Windows 2000 is a better future base to develop on than Windows 98. Microsoft has been trying to replace Windows 9x with the NT line for the last 8 years now.
Group X cannot complete copying Product 2, Revision 4. Besides, it's foolish for them not to try to mimic Product 3, Edition 4. (sighs). Think about it, dumbass. It suggests that they just got their hands on Windows 98 source code and went with it.
You smell like poo.
Do you suffer from usenet poster's syndrome? You address individual points entirely out of context, completely missing the implications as a whole. But perhaps I'm just not that good a writer. Oh well. I guess I won't feel bad for wasting good writing on an idiot.
But here's one part that did stick out that I can't pass up. Get a mirror and hold next to your monitor while you read this..
The funniest part about this is that the article which you seem to have failed to read explicitly states that it is being built on Linux. Not only are you calling me a dumbass for not assuming your conspiracy theory, but you've failed to do the basic requisite reading to have half a clue what you're talking about. Would you like fries with that?
Niether article mentions anything about Linux, except for the writer of The Register article wondering if it's Linux based. QUICK CHECK THE MIRROR!
See that? That expression that was on your face was one of a fucking dumbass.