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

Re:Supporting Chinese characters

[Anonymous Coward]

It's a lot more complicated than that.

Unicode is a step in the right direction, but there are still different ways of encapsulating Unicode.

I mean, transferring an 'A', (ASCII code 65), in unicode is generally NOT done like this:

0 0 0 0 65

that's wasteful.

There are encodings that 'escape' from a one or two byte encoding in to the higher-order ones. You really need to read the full spec to understand it properly.

Also, a lot of people don't really properly understand the way Eastern languages such as Chinese work. For example, some of the same *characters* might be used in Chinese and Japanese, but if you write Chinese in a Japanese *font*, it will look very unusual to a Chinese national. Compare it to writing English using Greek characters, and you will get some idea of what I mean. To foreign students of Eastern languages, the differences might look very minimal, but these are all important issues.

Also, I am not sure about Chinese, but in Japanese, you certainly need to include ruby text, (small characters alongside or underneath the main writing, usually to indicate pronunciation - you will have seen it on the lyrics to Anime theme music).

Yet another thing, you have to address vertical/horizontal writing.

Input methods, as well, there are so many ways to input Eastern languages. What about if somebody needs to mix in Korean in the same document, for example. Very, very, complicated issues.

Incidently, for anybody wanting to do all this - the latest version of EMACS is about the best thing to use, in my opinion, with LEIM installed - you can mix scripts, and use sensible input methods, it's great. Not ideal for word processing, but it gets the job done.

Any other questions about Eastern word processing, just ask.

Time for new linux slogan

[af_robot]

Choise Linux - a billion Chinese can't be wrong

This is great for China

[Zemran]

I really do think this is great for China BUT I cannot see this effecting me. I do not think I am going to rush out and get a copy to play with... I think any tools etc. that they develop will be specific to thier needs and unlikely to be of use to me. Good luck to them and I wish them well.

Re:Supporting Chinese characters

[Yokaze]

First, when speaking of Linux, one usually speaks of a whole bunch of software and not all software might support unicode.

Second, Unicode is just an encoding (or a set of encodings).

All the messages have to be translated, the applications have to be checked whether the display is correct or not.
The layout may be incorrect. Not to mention that the application might rely on some assumptions, which are correct for latin1, but not for other character-sets.

Not to mention that several applications aren't prepared to be localised.

Is there any chinese slashdotters?

[t0qer]

That could provide a cultural insight as to why china would be so open to open source?

As an american slashdotter, i'd like to point out why the US doesn't more readily adopt linux.

1. Microsoft lobbyist
2. Microsoft license sweeps
3. Microsoft Strongarm tactics
4. [insert your own M$ reason]

Technically from what I know of Bill Gates (throwing a fit at ppl pirating his altair basic) and what I know of chinese copyright laws (nearly non-existant) I guess the only conclusion is it's quality that is winning out in china.

I have heard about the open markets in china where you can purchase bootlegs of any software for near the cost of the CD. If the choice is between M$ at .5 dollars and Linux at .5 dollars linux wins.

Sorry, I was just kinda scrapin for some insightfullness there.

Re:Is there any chinese slashdotters?

[mirko]

A lot of tax ?
Read this :
"Microsoft enjoyed more than $12 billion in total tax breaks over the past five years. Microsoft, in fact, actually paid no tax at all in 1999, despite $12.3 billion in reported U.S. profits. Microsoft's tax rate for the past two years was only 1.8 percent on $21.9 billion in pre-tax U.S. profits."

Never underestimate GwB's close friends.

Re:Is there any chinese slashdotters?

[Jason Earl]

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.

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

Heh...

[autopr0n]

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".

I do.

[autopr0n]

Windows 2k supports Chinese (and japanese/korean) for things like filenames and anything else you might want to do out of the box, as long as the apps support it.

I was also able to get Chinese characters in word 2000 with windows 98 after a free download from Microsoft.

Premtive Joke suppression. Plz no "Rinux" jokes.

[autopr0n]

The Chinese people have no problem pronouncing "L"s, it's the Japanese who make that mistake.

Thanks in advance.

There aren't a billion people there...

[RedBear]

but they are also doing this in the Philippines. The Advanced Science and Technology Institute has put together a somewhat simplified single-cd distro on which they've included such things as OpenOffice. They've been showing it off to the public and getting great response to it. It seems to be targetted toward home users and educational environments. According to the FAQ it's based on Red Hat 7.2. Anyone interested in trying it out can download an ISO here. A snippet from the website (the distro is named Bayanihan Linux):

BAYANIHAN is a Filipino tradition where people in a community help their neighbor in physically moving their house to a different place.

BAYANIHAN embodies the spirit of the Open Source movement. BAYANIHAN connotes people joining in and helping those in need. It also implies a movement from one place to a hopefully better place.

LINUX was added to the final name since the software's basic framework is LINUX. It was built on top of a Red Hat Linux operating system.

Re:So, was Steve Ballmer right?

[FooBarWidget]

China is only communist by name. Their economy is, in fact, a mix between communism and capitalism. There are lots of capitalist companies in China. When you walk over the street, you'll be flooded with ads.

Actually, the US' economy is also a mix between capitalism and socialism, no matter how much people deny it. Think Social Security and that kind of things.

Inputing Chinese characters

[ukryule]

One *big* problem that I've found trying to use Linux with Chinese is in inputting chinese characters. There is software available (e.g. 'xcin'), but it's not anywhere near as easy to use and smooth as in Windows.

This is a difficult problem to solve - there are a large number of different methods to input Chinese which all have to be supported. Then this input method has to be easy to use across all potential applications (i.e. if you change from your Abiword window to a shell to an emacs window you still want to be able to use the same input method).

It's still at the 'doable-but-painful' stage in Linux (heh! What's new there?), but something as fundamental as entering text needs to be really simple for Linux to be useable natively in Chinese.

At the moment Windows beats Linux hands-down on this front ... so any progress in this area is very welcome.

Re:Traditional vs simplifed chinese

[wenzi]

It is a little bit more complicated than that.

Taiwan = Traditional
China = Simplified
Hong Kong = Traditional
Singapore = Both ( But most kids learn Smiplified )
Overseas Chinese = Traditional

Traditional encoding uses Big5, but simplified uses HZ and GB2312.

http://www.artsiv.net

Open Source vs Revolution

[Lord Bitman]

Here: "We are allowed to change our government, why not our software?"
There: "We are allowed to change our software, why not our government?"

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

KDE 3.0 is your friend ...

[ukryule]

KDE3 has greatly improved international support - all the Unicode/il8n stuff support is built in.
This means that at the GUI level it's just(!) a question of all the apps supporting and translating this - take a look at this table for information on the translation status for (Traditional) Chinese.

If you've got a full (with international support/fonts) installation of KDE you should be able to try it out fairly easily - just change the language via the GUI configuration tool.

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'"

I am, for one. (Re: Are there any Chinese slash..)

[DigitalHammer]

Is there any Chinese Slashdotters...that can provide a cultural insight as to why china would be so open to open source?

First of all I would like to state that I am of pure Chinese descent.

To answer your question, I believe there are 3 factors that make China very open to open source: Confucianism, the WTO, and Microsoft licensing.

The centuries-old mentality of being extremly frugal with one's money or possesions. Though this idea is ancient, the Communist government began to encourage the use of this virtue in times of famine and hardship. This article from Time Magazine titled "Overeating Dying in China" further explains:

"In the early 1980s when some nouveau rich squandered their money on restaurants delicacies and government officials took advantage of their jobs to attend luxurious feasts, a distorted concept was built up in most Chinese's minds: the wealthier one is, the more fatty foods are on your dinning table.

The grumbles about upstarts' arrogance and the government officials' corruption turned into general disapproval. People began to look favorably at the ancient Chinese maxim which praises abstinence in consumption....Considering the 30 million destitute Chinese struggling in remote mountainous areas and those laid-off work who are living a hard life, traditional virtues like fighting one's way up and building the country through hardship and thrift are still highly encouraged by the Chinese government. "

This "frugal ideal", reinvigorated in the minds of mainland Chinese, compounded with ancient Confucian values of filial piety encourage the development and acceptance of open source software over propeitery ones in China. The bit about filial piety applies to the corporate environment of Chinese businesses. Filial piety in Chinese families enforce the younger family members' respect of older ones. This encourages the younger members' to set priorities that value the importance of the older family member (typically the father, mother, and grandparents). Chinese children, raised under this mentality, carry these priorities over to their workplace where they place their upmost importance upon the boss and senior officials (formerly occupied by older family members).

In most, if not all jobs in China involving internal technology, the IT manager must find software that will create a stable infrastructure while saving as much money as possible. This is where the "frugal mentality" and the rigid set of priorities converge to brighten the appeal of open source software. Because China is attempting to gain full membership within the WTO, which requires its adherance to strict IP rules, the country began an enormous crackdown on the "pirated" software industry. Using pirated (MS) software no longer was an option, as it used to be 10 years ago. Another path would be to purchase MS software licenses. However, the thought of accepting the dinosauric financial demands of Microsoft licensing contracts clashed with the frugal mentality prolific with Chinese tech companies, and the set of priorities spawned by Confucian filial piety led them to consider the amount of funds that could be saved and allocated for other departments by not buying licenses. In turn, Chinese techs were left with another option: Open source software, more specifically Linuix. The legal and cost-free nature of the penguin OS became an appealing option to the Chinese techs, and in turn took the opportunity to develop and integrate it in to their corporate infrastructure.

Chinese cultural traditions of filial piety and frugality are further explained in this excerpt of the site "Paul Herbig's Working Papers":

Chinese Network

The Chinese commonwealth is a group of small Chinese companies from all over the world affiliated with each other, protecting and taking care of each others businesses. They are also referred to as 'Greater China', or the 'Chinese Network'.

The survival mentality and the Confucian tradition of patriarchal authority, form the values of a typical Chinese entrepreneur - one who seeks to control his own small dynasty. These so call life raft values are:

l.Thrift ensures survival.
2.A high, even irrational, level of savings is desirable, regardless of immediate needs.
3.Hard work to the point of exhaustion is necessary to ward off the many hazards present in an unpredictable world.
4.The only people you can trust are family-- and a business enterprise is created as a familial life raft.
5.The judgment of an incompetent relative in the family business is more reliable than that of a competent stranger.
6.Obedience to patriarchal authority is essential to maintaining coherence and direction for the enterprise;
7.Investment must be based on kinship or clan affiliations ,not abstract principles.
8.Tangible goods, like real estate ,natural resources, and gold bars are preferable to intangibles like illiquid securities or intellectuals properties.
9.Keep your bags packed at all times,day or night (Kao,p.25).
Unlike the Japanese Keiretsu, the Chinese network is an open system for all Chinese entrepreneurs all over the world. They watch for each others businesses and help those who are in need. These Chinese entrepreneurs have a give - and - take relationship. The network is usually formed by joint ventures, weddings, political opportunities and common cultures. Ownership of the company are usually passed to relatives, regardless of their educational background or competency (the classic example is An Wang's passing of his company, Wang Computers, to his mediocre son instead of professional managers--which ended in failure). Generation after generation, no matter in what culture they were brought up, every Chinese seeks control and security of their businesses.
The first Chinese generation has a survival and Confucius mentality. Every business decision is made for the future of the family. Unlike the old generation, the younger generation are born in other countries outside of mainland China. They do not only carry the Chinese culture, but the one they were born in as well. This generation, especially if born in a western country, has a sense of individualism. Companies like Winbond,a high-tech company in Taiwan, which considers themselves to be a Chinese company , believes that you should respect your family and love ones but you have to set your mind on what is right for the company. D.Y. Yang,owner of Winbond, says, "A Chinese company depends less on data and more on intuition,feelings,and people." But on the other hand, he also mentions, "Of course you have to respect the family business structure, but since this is a high tech company,individual contributions are important (Kao,p31)."
---snip

I have heard about the open markets in china where you can purchase bootlegs of any software for near the cost of the CD. If the choice is between M$ at .5 dollars and Linux at .5 dollars linux wins.

On a side note, frugality, combined with Communist ideals and Confucian values led to the explosive growth of the pirated software and media industry in China, as this essay written by Rutgers Univesity student Sheng Ding explains:

"Confucius's concept of the transmission of culture and Marx's views on the social nature of language and invention arose from very different ideological foundations. Nonetheless, because each school of thought in its own way saw intellectual creation as fundamentally a product of the larger society from which it emerged, neither elaborated a strong rationale for treating it as establishing private ownership interests.[15] Deeply influenced by these two ideologies, China falls behind all developed countries and many developing countries in the field of intellectual property protection. It is also not difficult to understand why most of Chinese did not know what were IPRs in 1980s."

Well, I am confident that this reply answers your question. More information about Chinese philosophies and other ideals that are involved in China's flourishing open source movement can be found below:

Paul Herbig's Working Papers

A Paper on IP Rights in China, by Sheng Ding

The Chinese Way with Money, an article from the Shanghai Star

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.

And that's not all...

[leonbrooks]

`Fraud! ' came the cry! Microsoft overvalues shares.

Re:Linux in china?

[WowTIP]

Communist country?

Check your facts, troll.

Re:I am, for one. (Re: Are there any Chinese slash

[Khalid]

I believe many of the traits (maybe not all) you are depicting are not specific to the Chinese society, but are rather those of traditional societies. Many African and Islamic societies function the same way. I am from Morocco (An Islamic, African, Arabic and Berber country, yes all that in the same time :) ) and this is the way many moroccans do business too.

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. :)