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

The real question on everyone's mind...

[Wraithlyn]

Will they have a red screen of death, or blue?

--
They said FUD was bad, so I started spreading DUF.

Re:The real question on everyone's mind...

[Coke in a Can]

In my opinion, there is only one background for the BSOD that would stop people from getting angry: pornography.

kudos to them

[macsox]

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.)

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

Also in New Scientist

[onby2000]

New Scientist is also running a story about this.

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?

Knockoffs

[DragonMagic]

with full compatibility with Office 200 and Word

Gotta watch closely those Chinese knockoffs with their names just *SLIGHTLY* off.

Amazing

[SpiffyMarc]

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.

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...

Must. Read. Articles. Before. Posting.

[realgone]

China is NOT cloning Win98.

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):

[T]he Beijing municipal government bought software equivalent to Win 95 from Chinese companies such as CS&S and RedFlag. 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.

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. =)

Yes, you can sue China in US courts.

[ArsSineArtificio]

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.