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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.
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 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.