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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?
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,
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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.
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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
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
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.
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