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Linux Continues March On China
"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.
I am often quick to critcise Microsoft, and infact use Linux exclusively, but I must say that I have not heard many complaints about their support of Eastern languages *** IN THAT LOCALISED VERSION OF WINDOWS***.
What I do think is an issue of the upmost concern is their lack of support for Eastern languages in the non-specific localised version of Windows.
How do people who use Windows do things like mixed Chinese/Japanese/Korean/Vietnamese/English word processing!?!?!? I have never been able to work that out. What do all the translation companies use???
Of course, the difference is, digital information can be copied infinitely, while labor can't.
I wonder, if we had replicator technology today would it create a star-trek style utopia, or would manufacturing companies rush to try to protect their 'intellectual property'?
Btw, the Chinese government no longer considers itself to be "Communist".
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
The population of china is huge, if they wanted to they could easly mobalise a workforce the same saze as the UK who only work on linux. After a coupld of months a few thousand man years of work will have been done.
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
You're fine as long as you're not a terrorist muslim these days. Who knows what they do to the genitals of Guantanamo Bay prisoners...
Here: "We are allowed to change our government, why not our software?"
There: "We are allowed to change our software, why not our government?"
-- 'The' Lord and Master Bitman On High, Master Of All
Well you could look at it this way.
take 1 Billion(US) Chinese
say 0.1% are exelent coders and 1% are ok coders that gives you.
900,000 coders and 100,000 UBA coders to hand.
when you take into account 'given enough eyes all bugs are shallow'
I'm sure between them they can produce quality code.
The Chinese are well known for there technical exelance.
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
My company is beginning the switch to linux terminal servers for the 90% of the machines at our work. The decision is soly based on that they do not want to pay $500,000 to microsoft so workers can browse the web and write memos. And we are really just a fairly small company - i cannot imagine what a large company or government must pay. Most amusing the top managers really have no idea what linux is, they just refer to them as the penguin machines.
Linux is devleoped in a way that requires no profit margin, unlike microsoft. so unless microsoft finds a killer app it seems that companies,governments and any other organization that acts in their own self-interest will naturally swtich to the 'ultimate undercut' : linux.
I find it intriguing that the developing countries are some of the world's largest users of the Linux system. Africa and China are now almost exclusively using Linux and/or unlicensed Microsoft systems, a fact which Bill Gates would no doubt like to set right. But aren't they right?
Why pay for buggy pieces of crap when you can get a decent operating system for free? Not to say Linux is the be all and end all but as operating systems go it is more robust.
I think countries like China who will now be developing more and more applications for Linux could finally get the proverbial show on the road and give companies a very useable option to forking out truck loads of money for Microsoft licences.
One of the major fallbacks of Linux is the lack of applications especially those for development. The day there is an equivalent to Visual Studio in Linux is the day that companies will realistically think more about changing to Linux.
That's my opinion anyway.
`Fraud! ' came the cry! Microsoft overvalues shares.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
I'm not really sure how accurate Slashdot is with the state of Linux, GPL, Open Source and otherwise "free" software in China. Most people don't have high speed connections in China. Try cd downloading the images of Redhat sometime without a fast connection. Most people don't have cd burners in China either. That's kind of a luxury for them. CD-R blanks aren't as common there either. They're usually sold individually and not in spindles of fifty or a hundred like in the US. They are relatively expensive for the locals over there. Downloading large "free" software in China isn't really convenient or economical for the average person in China either. Buying software on cd's is much more convenient way of getting software for them.
While I was there, I bought a copy of Redhat 7.2 with chinese documentation and that was about 100 RMB ($12.50 US). RedFlag was about 68 RMB ($8.50). Compare that with 10 RMB ($1.25 US) a
cd for any pirated Microsoft stuff. This might not seem like a big deal for us but keep in mind that the average salary for a person is much less in China compared to somewhere like the US. I know that they're a lot of anti-Microsoft zealots on Slashdot but if you are an average person in China had the choice of buying 10 cd's of commonly used software which will most likely help you get a job in the future or 1 cd of some obscure software that most people don't even use in China and probably wouldn't help you make any money, which would you choose? I'm probably going to get flamed for this question with responses about "quality versus quantity" and "making Bill Gates richer by supporting the evil empire" but you need to look at the bottom line. Cheap pirated software gives them the ability to do what they need to do and try to get ahead. Bill Gates isn't seeing any of this money because it's all pirated anyway.
I'm not condoning piracy. This is just what I've seen going on while I was there. I think it's kind of misleading to give the impression that everyone in China is on the whole linux bandwagon which just isn't true. What is free ("free" economically and "free" in the RMS sense) for us is not necessarily the same for them. This is not a political comment about China's government or anything. The rules about how software works in China just different.
I am not Chinese, but it would seem the answer is fairly obvious. The primary reason that China is looking at Free Software is that Free Software is less expensive than the alternatives. This sort of thing didn't matter before the WTO started pressing China to stamp out software piracy, but it does now.
The second reason that Free Software is advantageous to the Chinese is that it allows them to bootstrap their own software economy instead being second or third class citizens in an American-led software economy. Their are plenty of bright folks in China who can write software. China would much rather put them to work than to pay software developers from overseas to do the work for them. The fact that Chinese developers are far less expensive than American ones doesn't hurt either.
The third reason has to do with Chinese national security. China has no idea what is in most U.S. written commercial software, but they do know that versions of Excell shipped with a flight simulator, and that before it was GPLed Interbase had a backdoor password for years. It's hard enough trusting commercial software on the very best of days, but trusting commercial software written by foreign nationals is a very sticky subject if you happen to be the Chinese government.
One thing is certain, China is not afraid of Microsoft. Microsoft and the BSA might seem scary to companies in the United States, but China is a sovereign nation (and a powerful one at that). If the BSA got too pushy the Chinese government could run their representatives over with tanks and there would be nothing that the BSA could do about it. China is cleaning up its act as regards to software piracy only because the U.S. has threatened to put sanctions on Chinese trade if they didn't. The U.S. market is important to the Chinese, and so they are trying to comply.
Victor, a friend of my wife's showed up from China over the weekend and asked us about "business opportunities." I asked him about some high-tech stuff in China and about the prevalence of Linux there, especially since China has all these great new distros like Red Flag Linux and Yua--.
/., any Ziff-Davis magazine, News.com and on TechTV; Linux dominates China, Brazil and most of Europe. Not a day goes by that the tech press doesn't tell us that Linux is bringing technology to the masses for free-as-in-beer in every Third World hellhole. How could Victor, a Chinese businessman who owns a Benz/BMW/Hummer service dealership, a trading company, a physical therapy business and personally knows guys that code software for a living in Guangzhou _not_ know about China's own Red Flag Linux or Linux in general? The answer was simple:
/.ers are so fond of noting Micro$oft got so rich because of their initial products being pirated.)
"What's that?" He asked.
"It's the Chinese language version of Linux developed by Chinese open source programmers in an effor to end dependence on fo--."
"No, I mean 'what is Linux'?" Victor asked. "I have never heard of it."
So I spend a good four and a half hours trying to find and download a copy of Chinese language version of Red Flag Linux to install on the spare hard drive my wife uses for her job as a software tester. I finally got an ISO burned and installed it on a P3-800 with an Abit BH6 (440BX chipset), with a Matrox video card, Sound Blaster Live and Linksys NIC. The install choked twice (the "Disk Druid" Linux partitioning software didn't work all that well) and locked up on initialization the every time I tried to run Linux. I had to restart in "Safe Mode" to get the thing to work.
The GUI was a Chinese language KDE and they tried very hard to make all the icons look like they were on a Windows 2000 Pro desktop. The installation had no idea what the Sound Blaster Live was and the three year-old Matrox G400 Max video card was recognized as an ancient "Matrox Millennium" only. Victor asked if he could check his email in Chinese with RF Linux but we almost never found the beta version of Mozilla to get to the Internet. When we did, we had to type in "http://www.yahoo.com" rather than "yahoo" or even "yahoo.com" before it would work.
After a while, he asked to use my Windows XP Professional computer because the Red Flag Linux (although it was in his native language, looked very similar to Windows and was obviously based on the "stable, elegant and bullet-proof" Linux kernel) was "too slow" and "too hard" to use.
I was shocked. If you believe everything you see in PC World, open source shills like
"I use Windows," Victor said matter-of-factly. "Everyone does in China. No one uses Linux."
Victor and the mainstream tech media tell two very different stories about Linux in China. Sounds like someone's lying about Linux in China and since I saw the way a Chinese businessman reacted to Red Flag Linux with my own eyes, I don't think it's Victor...
(Was Victor's copy of Windows legal? Probably not, but as so many