Linux Continues March On China

elucidus writes: "A government-sponsored software development group in China unveiled a version of the Linux operating system it has developed that it said will eventually replace Windows and Unix on all of its government PCs and servers. Called Yangfan Linux, which means 'raise the sail' in Chinese, the open source operating system is being pieced together by the Beijing Software Industry Productivity Center, a group established by the government to organize Linux development in China." Update: 08/14 22:34 GMT by T : Note that the story from which this text is drawn originally appeared in InfoWorld; thanks to writer Matt Berger for pointing this out. Read on below for a bit more, and some interesting links.

"The source code for Yangfan was made available last week under the GNU General Public License. The group is now collecting feedback and will continue improving the operating system.

The group has also done significant work localizing the operating system to support Chinese-language characters, which will be contributed back into the Linux community, according to Jon 'Maddog' Hall, director of Linux International.

Yangfan is based on two distributions of the Linux operating system. One is the distribution developed by Chinese Linux vendor Red Flag Software. The second is a version of the operating system called Cosix Linux, developed by China Computer Software Corp."

Reader kchris59 points to these articles at The Screen Savers and at chinadaily.com.cn which provide some more insight on what's going on behind that firewall.

Comments

So, was Steve Ballmer right?

[richie2000]

Is Open Source Communism? Discuss among yourselves. :-)

Time for new linux slogan

[af_robot]

Choise Linux - a billion Chinese can't be wrong

linux, communism, humor

[bani]

Whenever I hear "linux" and "chinese" in the same sentence, I always get this image of Microsoft waging a 1950s-mccarthy propaganda war:

"When you use Linux,
you're using COMMUNISM"

I guess I've been tainted by http://www.modernhumorist.com/mh/0004/propaganda/m p3.jpg

Re:Heh...

[den_erpel]

Word documents? Not anymore for our Chinese friends ;-)

:0 Bf
* Content-Type: application/msword;
| formail -b -f -A "$MSHEADER evil-word"

# reply rule
-snip-

:0 H
* $ ^$MSHEADER
trash

(or /dev/null, as you prefer)

Steganography

[tlambert]

So how long before there are stegonographic comments in Linux source coming out of China to get around the gvernment censorship of the media, but not of source code?

"Take the first letter of each fortune in the fortune file, and then..."

-- Terry

propaganda forgot 'cooking the books'

[oliverthered]

Heard from ENRON just before they collapsed.

"When I said burn all the books I meant , 'put them on the fire', not 'copy them onto CD'"

Re:Supporting Chinese characters

[Yarn]

Heh, I remember at school when we got our first Windows 3 machines, some guy was certain you could translate to greek by typing in English then setting the 'Symbol' font.

Laurence Brice, are you still out there. heh.

Old /. news - Not Again

[jsse]

After 302 posts, no one caught this guy repeating old /. story.

I think he's just testing /. editors' ability to recognize old news. I think he got the answer. :)