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Japan Considers Moving Away From Windows

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the like-a-slow-moving-dinosaur-is-the-LDP dept.

dm24_99 writes "According to this article at Japan Today, the Japanese government is considering abandoning Microsft Windows in a plan to boost computer security within the government. The government is very interested in alternatives, especially Linux." Of course, like the bank reform being proposed, who knows when this will actually happen.

6 of 323 comments (clear)

  1. Why asian contries in particular? by Slashdotess · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I'm just curious, is there something that attracts asian countries to Open Source rather than let's say, North Americans?

  2. Seems like a ploy... by vjmurphy · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Sounds like Japan got wind of all the stuff Microsoft and Gates have been handing out to India and want a piece of the action.

    --
    Vincent J. Murphy
    Spandex Justice
  3. Re:Unicode, unicode, unicode... by MtViewGuy · · Score: 5, Interesting

    In theory, if Linux sets up Unicode so it supports the 1,980 kanji characters and the entire hiregana and katakana character sets that every Japanese high school graduate should know (this is the Japanese Ministry of Education requirement) it can be done.

    Didn't TurboLinux work like this?

  4. Asian countries except Japan are Microsoft-centric by rseuhs · · Score: 5, Interesting
    Actually most Asian countries are pretty Microsoft-centric.

    Except Japan, where Microsoft is already dead on servers:

    see here

    I take this announcement much more seriously than all the announcements from China lately. The Japanese are able and willing to abandon Windows completely - unlike the Chinese.

  5. Bargaining chips ?? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Is Linux being used by goverments and large clients as a "bargaining chip" to gain consessions
    from M$?

  6. All in one go? by melonman · · Score: 5, Interesting

    > the Japanese government is considering abandoning Microsft Windows

    I struggle with the idea of a whole country, or even a whole administration, changing OS at midnight one Saturday. Surely this sort of thing is going to happen one department at a time, and, probably, one office at a time in a lot of cases. Most government departments have a significant amount of bespoke software that would need tweaking, if not rewriting. Even if the decision was taken on a nationwide basis, I would expect the changeover to take at least the lifetime of the average corporate PC, ie 2-4 years.

    While Linux might be wonderful for a lot of purposes, I can't see all the government graphic designers being thrilled with the current choice of Linux frame-based DTP packages, for example. So you are going to have Windows (and, probably) Mac ghettos for a long long time.

    And I think we can assume that the security people at least would like to be able to run all the programs the people they are spying on can run...

    --
    Virtually serving coffee