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Japan Considers Moving Away From Windows
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.
I'm just curious, is there something that attracts asian countries to Open Source rather than let's say, North Americans?
I hope they don't say this just to have Bill or Steve come and make a good deal. These days ...
The Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport will set up a panel of experts to study the alternatives and what systems other governments use in the next fiscal year beginning April 1, the newspaper said.
/. editors might be actually right in saying this won't happen for a long time...
For once,
Moderation: +4. Modded 70% Funny and 30% Overrated. 100% Saturated.
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
Linux support for Unicode is/will be a major factor in any progress in the Asian market. Windows supports Unicode but it is (frankly) so painful to make work in applications that decent Linux support would be a major selling point.
Sig for sale or rent. One previous user. Inquire within.
More significant than any possible actual system change is the fact that Japan is actually considering dropping MS. As Linux and open source is taken more and more seriously, maybe people won't fall for the same closed source propaganda anymore. Microsoft may actually have to compete on quality, rather than reliability.
if they dont use windows, how will they see outside?!?
...First, they'll have to figure out the cost of changeover and supporting Linux, FreeBSD, etc. Software may be extremely cheap but supporting it could consume quite a lot of IT man-hours.
Besides, the Japanese are already heavily invested in commercial UNIX systems. I believe many Japanese government ministries are running minicomputers and mainframes built in Japan using UNIX.
Anyway, the Japanese should check with IBM Japan on this. After all, the biggest commercial supporter of Linux is IBM, and IBM definitely has the resources to do Linux installations from department servers all the way up to supercomputers.
I'm interested how much money will that cost MS. $100 millions for AIDS and $400 millions for fighting Linux like they did in India will certainly not be enough here. And may i add that I'm surprised how much an afternoon hobby of some of us cost that company.
Given Japan's rather poor economy nowadays I really have my doubts if they're willing to tackle the conversion in the near future--mostly because of the large number of IT man-hours needed to do the conversion and support the systems after the conversion.
I suppose we shouldn't be surprised at governments decreeing security by fiat (cough*CLipper*cough). Companies have recognised that risk management is key to avoiding many of the problems (e.g. middle office to vet orders/inventory/accounts) yet they consider hiring sysadmins who hold paper certificates as a panacea for electronic security? If you are vitally concerned with information security (e.g. trade secrets), then it is incumbant on cultivating the right culture and habits (logging off away from desk). It might be feasible to leave houses unlocked in small towns where everyone knows everyone else (social sanctions in shunning property violation offenses) but we have deadbolts, invisible IDs and security guards in cities. Similarly security is mainly a systematic process of educating users in using keys (PGP), selecting secureable devices (OpenBSD) or hiring suitable external expertise. Just expecting a single silver bullet of replacing an OS (no matter how good/badly secure it is perceived to be) seems to be on the order of Caute v the tide.
LL
I have always been amazed by how almost every country pays MS tax even if they have both the skills and the industry to make their own software. Migrating to something from your own country would indeed put the money back in your pocket instead of shipping it abroad. Localization isnt just the language, the culture has a significant part of how a computer should interact too. There are big advantages of having your own software industry. The distance from a company in the USA to EU, Japan etc. is big both in culture and in communication. Microsoft develops mainly for the american culture wich shines through the product.
Having the development in your country should atleast in theory give a much better adapted set of applications that if you buy a ironed out fit_all_suit-everything version like Microsofts products.
HTTP/1.1 400
Whoa!
Bringing level headed thinking into
The Editors
Trolling is a art,
According to the article, the original source of the news is Asahi Shimbun...
Mother is the best bet and don't let Satan draw you too fast.
I wonder what Steve and Bill are going to do with all of those frequent flyer miles? They sure have been racking them up lately haven't they?
I heard that Walmart will give you a really neat Microtel PC for a quarter million miles.
Bear in mind that linux has a strong tradition of unveiling every security risk found no matter how small. Most holes found recently have been found by audits, not by intrusions in linux boxens. The more holes found and fixed the better. We have no idea of just how many holes there are in windows because we cant quip about it if we buy access to the code. An independant audit of windows is impossible. In linux whoever has the time and care can do an audit. Security should be discussed, bashed and nagged about constantly.
If you look at how many holes that have been found in the core of linux and GNU tools the numbers are in favour for linux by far. Its mostly addons and applications that have holes in them.
Dont forget that a serious admin can choose secure parts for his server and thus build an pretty much idiot proof server if he has the knowledge relatively easy. In windows thats impossible because "this is what you get, live with it".
The existence of theese linux boxens with different ftpd, httpd, sshd etc etc gives a diversified net, just like in nature. If you find a hole in an application there is less chance of someone else having the axact same config.
That said there are a lot to be done in linux security but i still think its a better choice for a server since you have the power yourself and you dont have to wait for someone else to do the job. If its important you can do it yourself and that is worth more than money if your data is sensitive.
HTTP/1.1 400
There is something (ok, better there was at least two years ago) called UniCon and UniKey. Which had support for japanese/korean/china simplified/china traditional characters. I'm not sure who developed this little piece of code, it might be that someone from TurboLinux, not sure tho, but it worked like a charm (for someone that doesn't know anything about this writings... ;> )
:))
You simply booted kernel in frambuffer, modprobed unicon and you had the ability to display the double-byte characters on your screen. Then for keyboard input you loaded unikey module and there was status line on the bottom where you could by pressing shift-space or ctrl-space or something like that, enter all syllables and the thing also checked if they are valid. You couldn't just write some nonsense...
So the support looked pretty much ok.. At least for me...
The Sig, the sig
http://www.asahi.com/business/update/1116/005.html
Doesn't bother me either way. Think it through. If they are looking for the payola that means M$ will be paying every country on the planet in just another year or two. Who would want to be left off the gravy train if all you have to do is say "We might migrate" and millions of dollars flow out of Redmond And they can do it again in a year or two. Bribes only work when you are trying to prevent the appearance of a 'showcase' installation and they are a stopgap measure at best.
Eventually we will get a few governments converting simply because M$ has succeeded too well at getting the US Govt to lean on poor countries on the 'piracy' issue. Since they CAN'T pay they only really have two choices, get M$ to donate licenses or migrate.
Longterm M$ needs a better answer than paying their customers to use their product. These tactics are just to buy time to come up with a real strategy. That will be the time for fear. They are now clear of the Justice Dept and are free to act. Expect them to act as soon as Bill G and Monkey Boy come up with a plan they like.
Democrat delenda est
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.
Is Linux being used by goverments and large clients as a "bargaining chip" to gain consessions
from M$?
> 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
Would it make any difference for an illiterate like you?
From the article, the first paragraph:
The Japanese government is reviewing the possibility of no longer using Microsoft Corp's Windows operating system as part of its plans to boost computer security within the government, the Asahi Shimbun newspaper reported Saturday.
There's 1945 kanji known as Joyu (sp?) that are the bare minimum needed for literacy - those are the ones you learn through high school and the ones that they pretty much stick to in newspapers and official documents. Plus in Manga, of course, where they have a larger percentage of 'semi-literate' and younger readers. Believe it or not, Japanese literature actually does get a bit deeper than this - they have books and magazines that use lots of difficult characters that must be supported in the fonts and character sets.
After the initial 1945, there's another 18,000 or so that, while less common, are certainly not 'falling into disuse' - some percentage are only used for names and such nowadays, buy that pretty much makes them a requirement. After all, how do you sell someone a computer incapable of displaying his name or the name of a polititian? Sure, you could spell it out in katakana, but that's just lame.
It gets trickier, because there are several encodings in common usage, such as JIS, Shift-JIS and EUC, all which must be supported in any viable operating system. As far as I know, Unicode is a latecomer and not really an important player yet in Japan. It does show promise, though. Until then, systems will have to transparently guess which encoding to use. One of the first words you learn in Japanese when dealing with DBCS information systems is Mojibake - garbage rendering of text.
The good news is that Linux does a great job of handling all of the encoding issues. I use it daily for this stuff and it certainly surpasses anything I've seen on Windows, though IMHO, Mac is a bit slicker. (No surprise there.)
As an aside, I was once venting frustration to a friend while studying kanji - "When are the Japanese going to give up this crap and just use roman letters like the rest of the world??"
"Never!" she replied, "Because once you've learned kanji, it's too fscking convenient!"
If you're really interested in this stuff, do a Google for 'Jim Breen', the professor from Monash who is possibly the leading expert in the field - he's also a hell of a nice guy.
-- My Weblog.
Well, in Japan corporate culture, it is a bad thing to be put in a window seat in a company... Rimshot.
There are a huge number of yeast infections in this county. Probably because we're downriver from the bread factory.
For the last couple years I have been depressed about Japan's response to Linux, because I read somewhere that MS had 90% of their webservers . . . your link proves that whatever I read was either FUD, really OLD news, or a stupid misunderstanding. Today is a good day!!!
Sorry, but who cares what the U.S. thinks about Linux and Open Source. Next year I am moving to Japan for good this time and am never looking back!
btw, have you tried Mandrake 9.0!? I just installed it on my main system today and it is EXCELLENT (great Japanese suppor)!
Sdelat' Ameriku velikoy Snova!
You'd think that the guys who came up with the shortest poems in the world would have been all about a smaller character set.
Cool site. Apple has great computers (I'm using one now), and a operating system that is a thing of beauty and a joy forever. It pleases me greatly to see any Apple growth in any market.
That said, Linux gives Japan one thing not even Apple can: a customizable operating system for all that cool Japanese hardware. Sharp has been one of the first Japanese companies to realize this, and go with it, producing the Linux based Zaurus PDA. That very same Japan Today website also contained an article about Sharp and IBM teaming up to provide some kind of wireless, Linux based, services.
Sharp's successes and this decision by the Japanese government might encourage other Japanese computer hardware makers to throw off the Microsoft yoke. Linux would give them more room to innovate (unlike Microsoft who issues yearly hardware specs on what it wants PCs to be that year) while connecting them with open standards to other versions of Linux and other operating systems from around the world.
"At this moment, it has control of systems all over the world.
And...we can't do a damn thing to stop it."
Miyasaka, "Godzilla 2000 Millennium" (Japanese version)
I know this is bad taste, but I wonder if they'll pronounce it "Rinux."
:)
Yes, yes. I'm the insensitive clod of this topic. No offense intended
It's not hard to find exploitable servers of any OS, be it Linux, BSD, Solaris or even Windows in Japan - the Far East's insecurity is legendary.
The point is, you can't expect any OS to be secure if you don't keep up with the latest security patches.
Probably true, but standardizing on Linux has its advantages in the long run. They can build up their own Linux development and support, and thereby tailor the security themselves instead of relying on someone else to do it for them.
They would be better off using the money to train their admins to some degree of competence.
They'll come up to speed... trust me. People laughed at the Japanese doing cars in the 60s and 70s... who's making some of the best cars around nowadays?
Most of the "other" webservers are Roxen server which was open-sourced recently.
Recently? Roxen (and Caudium, which was forked from it a couple of years ago) has always been released under the GPL.
"The Japanese are able and willing to abandon Windows completely - unlike the Chinese."
Do not underestimate the Chinese. Piracy is still rampant in China, and you can still get any M$ product you want for $4 per CD. On the other hand, M$ is getting serious about "product activation", BSA love letters, and other anti-piracy initiatives. The Chinese may have been willing to tolerate the security and stability issues at $4/product, but full sticker price is another matter entirely.
If you don't read Japanese, you can find a summary of interesting results in Why Open Source Software / Free Software (OSS/FS)? Look at the Numbers! ; look for the text starting with "A Japanese survey found".
- David A. Wheeler (see my Secure Programming HOWTO)