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2003: Year of Linux in Asia?
Anonymous Coward writes "The Register has a story
about traveling to a magical country where seeing Linux laptops displayed in stores is perfectly normal. The author then goes on to predict that this year will see much more desktop action coming not from Red Hat or Euro-Distros, but from China and India. Makes sense to me."
2003: the year of Asian Linux
By Robin Miller, NewsForge.com
Posted: 27/12/2002 at 10:56 GMT
As most regular NewsForge readers know, I recently traveled to Arabeyes Project, was a small, independent computer store located in a back alley in one of Amman's many modest commercial districts.
There is a sameness to this kind of store the world over. I shop at one much like it in Sarasota, Florida, and another similar one in Greenbelt, Maryland.
The reason we were in this store was to find and buy a Linux-compatible PCMCIA modem. The salespeople in this store were just as clueless as the salespeople in equivalent U.S. stores, and there were the same know-it-all geek customers hanging around who offered us advice ranging from smart to useless. But there was one difference. When we wanted to test a modem for Linux compatibility, we found -- courtesy of one of the geek hangers-on -- a laptop running Linux on display, right up front.
As it turned out, we didn't need the physical test, and the modem ran just fine in the Red Hat-loaded laptop where it was destined to live, but the note that stuck with me was the fact that there was a laptop on display in a computer store, right up front, proudly running Linux, and people treated it as something normal, not as an oddity.
It wasn't Red Hat, either, but ThizLinux, a distribution from Hong Kong, which is appropriate since the laptop was a Hong Kong brand I've never seen in the U.S. before.
To top it off, the office suite CDs on display next to the laptop weren't from Microsoft or StarOffice or WordPerfect, but Hancom Office, out of South Korea. And it was an Arabic version, too, something neither StarOffice nor OpenOffice quite have ready.
Hancom makes major promo hay out of their support for many languages in their $59.95 (boxed edition) office suite. Their Web page says, "Chinese (simplified and traditional), Japanese, Arabic, Korean editions and Unicode support mean that Hancom Office is the best solution for companies with offices on multiple continents."
Asia is the next Linux hotbed
Linux, as we know it today, is an essentially European phenomenon. It started in Finland. KDE is centered in Germany and has close ties to Norwegian TrollTech. Mandrake is French, SuSE is German, and European governments have moved toward and supported Linux -- and Open Source in general -- faster than most governments elsewhere. The U.S. is the center of commercial Linux activity primarily because Red Hat and several other major distributions are based here, but most surveys show a higher percentage of European than U.S. developers writing Open Source software.
But a growing number of "next generation" Linux development is taking place in Asian countries, ranging from South Korea at one end of the continent to India diagonally across the continent's map, with China rising hugely -- in the Linux sense -- right in the middle of it all.
Africa and the Middle East are discovering Linux in a big way, but don't have nearly as much computer/IT infrastructure or as much computer-oriented education available as (some parts of) China or India -- or South Korea or Vietnam or Malaysia. Or Japan, where it looks like Linux will soon be adopted as a preload operating system by computer manufacturers on all kinds of gear, not just on the server and workstation levels as we see 99% of the time in the U.S. and Europe.
I see an increasing amount of Linux development and related Open Source activity coming out of Asia, almost all of it in Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and other Asian languages.
I also see an increasing amount of Linux activity coming out of India, most of which is in English rather than in one of the many local Indian languages.
2003: the year of Asian Linux
I rarely make predictions. Heck, I am not all that sure I'll wake up tomorrow morning, let alone that the sun will come out from behind the clouds, assuming we have a cloudy sky tomorrow. But once in a while I let myself go and prognosticate. And this is my one and only NewsForge prognostication about Linux and Open Source in 2003: That some of the biggest advances we're going to see in the next year will come from Asia, not Europe or North America.
Whether we'll recognize how important these advances are (whatever they turn out to be) is another matter entirely. Maybe we will, maybe we won't. But that's a column I need to write at the end of 2003, not today.
well....there is some nice work being done out here in India....Elxlinux being one...all of the beta testing was done in our college lab in JNTU, hyderabad... and a lot of the guys in our college....have started using and coding for Linux..."inspired" by this......so 2003 may well turn out to be the year of the Lnux...
That is so totally a geek thing.
:) The sad fact is, the professional print market is too much of a niche for a lot of interest in the Free software community to get hopping on. I'm not saying it won't happen, it's just not as high a priority as a functional office suite was. Adobe is the one company that could turn the tide here.
My personal experience with non-geek types has been just the opposite. In fact, I believe it's actually easier for folks to grasp multiple desktops than the whole minimize thing. Well, from what I've seen of users anyway. YMMV.
Um. Im not sure what that means exactly.
What I mean by server class networking is that it doesn't come brain damaged by default. Every workstation class OS from MS (9x, NTWS, XP, 2kPro) will refuse any more than 10 connections. Many network services are not possible to install at all without a server version. Linux and the BSD's come with no such restrictions to their capabilities.
Here's the challenge part. Show me front line Linux applications that rival...
Let's see what I can do with your list here.
QuarkXpress: As I recall there was a project that was attempting to address this. Heck, I bet OSX users would love to have Quark going too!
Macromedia Director: Proprietary editor for a proprietary file format that utilizes a proprietary plug-in. I wouldn't hold my breath on this one.
Painter: Gimp is more than a match for this one. Maybe if you were talking Photoshop 7.0 a better argument could be made.
Quickbooks: There are a number of accounting packages up on Freshmeat, as well as professional packages built for Unix. I would agree that none of these really address the core market that Quickbooks is hitting. I highly suspect that financial software is going to be a very high focus in the next year or so.
Chief Architect: There's a stack of CAD apps for Unix. So far as any that do the bulk of the work for you, not too many out there. Probably the most notable of the free CAD apps is QCad.
Dragon Dictate: Never seen this work right in Windows. It sortta works, so long as you don't start into a conversational tone of voice. Voice recognition has a long way to go on every platform.
Hallmark Greeting Card Maker: You won't see fun little grandma made a XMas card kinda things for a while yet I suspect. Like with Windows, the corporate desktop needs to be won over first.
Streets and Trips & Encarta: Of course you won't see this hitting the Free software arena. The information gathering and subsequent publishing involves bucks. Both of these kinds of apps can be got on the web, either for free or via a subscription. Encarta is available to you now if you wish to subscribe.
AfterFX: Film Gimp. Used at the professional level today. Heck, developed by studio folks!
Learn to Speak Spanish: KDE has been working on a KDE Education package now for a little while. Today it includes a fair stack of items, such as a typing tutor, star chart, a French spelling helper, as well as other stuff. It doesn't yet include any foriegn language tutorials, but there is work moving in that direction.
Personally, I haven't really ever had a need for any of the applications mentioned on your list. At the office, only Quark is used, and it's run on Macs.
The one app that really needs to get addressed this year is Quickbooks though. This is a critical one for small businesses, which should be a target desktop market for Linux at this point. There's a LOT of folks who put this to use to keep track of their business.
If we see an effort put forth like what was generated for Mozilla or OpenOffice on this, I believe a lot of the rest of your list starts to fall in place. We have to have market share before vendors will start porting!
The line must be drawn here. This far. No further.