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Japan Subsidizes Linux Development, Considers Switch
TheAB writes "Japan is betting 50 million yen ($450k US) that the next-generation of high-tech products and computer networks will rely on open-source software. The money is to develop an 'operating system for consumer electronics goods'."
Isn't Japan and China and the surround areas notorious for software piracy? I mean...if they are already stealing commercial software and using/selling it, why would they give a crap about open source? Sounds like a big coverup!
...All I can say is that my life is pretty strange...
Japan plans to spend about 1 billion yen (US$8.3 million) funding Asian software developers working on the open-source Linux
This makes it sound like a certain win, but what is this about "betting?"
Tokyo has already budgeted 50 million yen (US$416,000) for next fiscal year to study the possibility of switching government computers to an open-source operating system.
So are they putting that upfront to see if it's worth it, with the $8.3 million conditional? It sounds exciting, but I don't want to hold my breath without clarification.
No I'm not trolling.
According to the article that's 50 million yen for Tokyo alone...for the whole of Japan it's closer a billion yen (8.3 million$).
In either case it's not that big of a sum, but any amount helps!
Reminder: find a new sig
Japan plans to spend about 1 billion yen (US$8.3 million)... working on the open-source Linux operating system for consumer electronics goods...
That might be a useful amount. Separately:
Tokyo has already budgeted 50 million yen (US$416,000) for next fiscal year to study the possibility of switching government computers to an open-source operating system.
So that's $8.3M for working on embedded Linux, and $416K for a study into looking at moving government computers to using Linux. "Government computers" is kind of a broad brush. Anyone know if that's servers, desktops, or really is just a general look?
All of the Emperor's feudal lands? Fifty million yen?! Gomen, gomen- surely they could instead invest in a royal fleet and merely conquer those foreign lands that oppose?!
slashdot: where everyone yells sarcastic metaphors to themselves to understand the issue
I hope they will have only good experiences with it, so they can share their knowledge and experience with other countrys, so that they can adopt open-source too without having to try it out first. You can just look at Japan's results.
" Japan plans to spend about 1 billion yen (US$8.3 million) funding Asian software developers working on the open-source Linux "
:-)
Why do that when you can just pull a Castle and steal it....
me karma am bad
It is the Japaese government that is spending the money, not "Japan". This may seem off-topic, but a country is different from its government. The amount Japan spends on Linux would be all the money all Japanese people and companies spend on Linux and Linux related things, not what the government did there. Governments are just another organisation and for most countries the main source of their problems.
Hmmmm....
At the risk of being obvious...
Linux is a stupendous 'operating system for consumer electronics goods' -- as an engineer who's developed embedded systems, I think that Linux is great for this purpose. For example, Tivo, which is Linux-based, is the greatest consumer electronic item of all time.
But $450k? Gee, what a commitment! That's like 2-3 full time people if you include overhead.
This kind of thing must be extremely worrying to Microsoft. All up all the developers working for governments around the world, and I bet there are about ten times as many as work for Microsoft. It's probably even more than that if you think about it.
Personally, I would love to be able to ssh into my refrigerator and poke around without having to get up and go all the way to the kitchen...
And imagine how cool you'll be with sendmail running on your air conditioner.
When they *finally* get around to getting that Gundam operational, it will run Linux!!!!!
Previous story here is on a company that did that. If Japan's encouraging the use of open source (and presumably GPL), what do they ship if they, for example, do an embedded linux port for a microwave? Do they ship a CD with the code with the microwave?
Geeze, if they did that, half the country would use the thing as the coaster, 49 percent would try and mu-wave the thing, and 1 percent (well, less...go with the idea here) would be left figuring how to do cool hacks on it.
As far as the government computers all they have to worry about is the software that runs on top of the OS, in fact most of the applications they would need access to are already available in one form or another. They can also get around any trouble from Microsoft. Even though they are probably not loosing any sleep over it now.
I can hardly wait! Now not only are we seeing various countries and governments using OSS, now we actually have backing. Okay, so maybe it's a very small amount of money in the grand scheme of things, but consider that this money goes directly (more or less) into the pockets of the people actually doing the work and not into vast amounts of overhead or to expiring license fees or any other such nonsense. An equal-sized fund given to Microsoft to create a project would buy far less... (for that matter, could end in the demise of the investor... don't mess with Microsoft or they'll find a way to cheat you in the end -- remember the cell phone company?)
I agree this is important--very important. And just MAYBE I can get the same level of Japanese lanugage functionality out of Linux that I do out of Microsoft products.
I hope Japan gets more than it paid for inspiring them and others to invest more into Linux in order to make more things happen.
On another note: Gotta love that RMS who has managed to create a way to keep people and companies from abusing free software. BSD gave the world a pretty decent TCP/IP implementation and Microsoft thanks them heartily. I hope it all remains as OSS and benefits the world -- I really *DO* want world peace.
Could the adoption of Linux go too quickly and be too widespread?
I know it seems a bit funny now, as it's still not very useful as a desktop environment and is going head-to-head with arguably better server software, but I think there's a menace lurking beneath the surface: companies may soon get to the point where they -expect- software to be produced for free. It's a bit ironic, I think, that the products of our success at programmers are in the position to undermine our ability to survive in our careers.
Already, programming jobs are being exported to places where they can be done almost for free. I'm starting to wonder if Linux and other open source projects are choking off what remains of our software economy. Is it too farfetched to think that some restrictions need to be put into place to protect workers?
Try not. Do or do not, there is no try.
-- Dr. Spock, stardate 2822-3.
Microsoft Buys Japan
Wed Feb 5, 03:53 PM PT
Microsoft plans to spend about 1 billion dollars (120 billion Yen) funding Japan in its entirety, says Bill Gates, Wednesday.
Gates' plans on purchasing the country at the end of fiscal 2004, but he's not sure what to do with it. Industry pundits predict that Japan will go the way of WebTV and many other companies/countries purchased by Microsoft.
"I like Japan", says Gates, "they really are good at science". Later, Gates was seen snickering.
--naked
Very popular slashdot journal for adul
OK, let's think about this a moment. The current generation of networks and servers already hinges largely on Unix and Unix-like things (GNU/Linux). Linux is free, and many point out that Linux is mostly replacing Unix boxen at the moment.
Ipso facto, GNU/Linux will probably be a big part of the "next-generation" platform, whatever the foosh that actually refers to in practice.
But I guess what is interesting here is that they are broadcasting this "truth" and not, oh for example, signing up on some zany M$ initiative-of-the-week.
Someone actually pointed out in an earlier post (since modded into oblivion I can assume) that Asia pirates all their software so la-de-da. Which misses the point that Asia pirating software was always a good thing for the proprietary products. India is so awash in black market copies of Windows that they are practically addicts now, and still M$ gives them buckets of cash "donations" as soon as someone over there mumbles "Linux rulez" in his sleep.
=^..^= all your rodent are belong to us
Or is Japan producing/subsidizing everything that geeks like?
Last time I read a headline about Japan trying to predict the future computer trends, I tossed out my "C" books and wasted 6 months learning PROLOG.
It's only a fleshwound, er, study.
"Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival."
--Dr.W.Edwards Deming
Japan is betting...that the next-generation of high-tech products and computer networks will rely on open-source software.
The next generation?
As far as networks: The Internet is the most important network that I can think of, and what does it run on? Apache is the main Web server; I run a mail server with Qpopper and sendmail, of which the former is open source and the latter is at least free (is it open source? I don't even know); for the FTP part of serving, you can choose from Pure-FTPd, Pro-FTPd, wu-ftpd, or whatever else. "High-tech computer networks" of this generation already run on OSS.
As for products: There's a little more room for improvement here, but my PowerMac G4 is pretty damned high-tech, and while the GUI is closed, the core OS, Darwin, is open-source. And unlike Linux nerds who will say they have such-and-such a high tech system that's running OSS, mine came like this--right out of the box--and is a product targeted at, and sold mainly to, non-nerd consumers.
It used to be that I used very little software I paid for because I pirated everything; now I use very little software I paid for because it's free anyway, and for a substantial part of that software the source is available if I want it. Open source isn't a bet pertaining to the next generation, it's here already.
I found the meaning of life the other day, but I had write-only access.
If I read it right, that's the amount for a study about moving Japanese gov't computers to Linux. They're just going to reassign some suits. (Still, it's probably a bargain by U.S. standards!)
One man's -1 Flamebait is another man's +5 Funny.
Dear Diary,
.. wait what's that? No! No! I........
I awoke today to see that all the systems in the world were running open source. M$'s beastly OS was finally outdone. I threw off my robe and danced on my front lawn, much to the surprise of my neighbors, a little happy dance. Much to my surprise, I came back inside to hear about M$ marketing a new technology that had nothing to do with computers, and sure enough, it was taking hold.
So in conclusion, dear Diary, I think M$ will be around for a long time in many of our daily lives. If it's not that pesky 0S it's going to be something. I have a 50' length of rope in the garage and a little chair to stand on, I think
I'm sure you'll be modded down, but you're obviously making light of the odder themes in Japan's themed bar scene. Some of the other bars that are less well-known here in the States are the sekkenriksu (hat bar) where everybody wears black top hats and the rinjinriksu (kangaroo bar) where they only serve Aussie beer and you carry it around in pouches. Great fun, that.
For some reason I'm getting this picture of something like a classic Voltron episode, where they need to try a different configuration, but have to halt the battle to recompile the kernel...
well $450k is big enough to show that they're serious about the open source movement... dont think about how big or small they're betting on.. it's the thought that counts
Microsoft Exec: We're a bit worried that you guys are moving away from Windows.
Japanese president: There is nothing to worry about! We in Japan are all in awe of your large penis!
Microsoft Exec: What?!
Japanese president: You see, Japanese penis is so small!
Japanese vice-president: So small!
Japanese president: You Americans have such humungous-bungus penis!
Microsoft Execs: Well... that's true!
Japanese vice-president: Oh, such, a nice, big penis, American!
Japanese president: What can we possibly do with such small penis? We cannot take over your operating system with programmers of such masterdonic penis!
Microsoft Execs: Well, you've got a point there! That settles that! We're sorry for taking your time, gentlemen!
Japanese president: Oh, no! Thank you! Another chance to be in same room with big American penis!
Microsoft Execs (leaving): Nice guys!
TV announcer: And now, for a special announcement from the President of the United States.
George Bush: My fellow Americans, I wish to address the concerns many of us have over the growing number of Japanese Linux distributions in America's IT sector. The new Japanese Emperor Linus Hirohito has made our own children into programmers who will soon launch a DDOS attack against American military networks at Pearl Harbour. However, I spoke with Mr. Hirohito this morning and he assured me that I have a very large penis! He said it was dinosauric, and absolutely dwarfed his penis which he assured me was nearly microscopic in size. My penis, he said, was most likely one of the biggest on the planet. I applaud Mr. Hirohito in his honest. Thank you.
as I'm writing this from my zanussi-debian refridgerator.
<B>note to self:</B> <I>post as html</I>
It says right in the article (did you read it?) that "Japan plans to spend about 1 billion yen (US$8.3 million) funding Asian software developers working on the open-source Linux operating system for consumer electronics goods, an official said Wednesday." That is a sizable commitment.
The $450k figure in the article comes from this: " Tokyo has already budgeted 50 million yen (US$416,000) for next fiscal year to study the possibility of switching government computers to an open-source operating system." Note, that's the city of Tokyo, not the Japanese government.
Read the article.
Read the article.
Japan plans to spend about 1 billion yen (US$8.3 million) funding Asian software developers working on the open-source Linux.
People buy the CD because maybe they don't have the bandwidth to download 1+ gigs. Maybe they can't afford a CD burner. Maybe they don't have an operating system to begin with.
It's not that they thing they're getting a better deal.
--
the strongest word is still the word "free"
Tiny island nation embraces Linux. News at 11. Whoopty-freaking-doo.
Who's heard of this Japan place anyway? They probably still use oxcarts.
billg
When you read "open source Linux software" just remember all that stuff will be trivial to port to FreeBSD as well (assuming it doesn't run using the Linux ABI emulation layer).
A winning combination!
A winning comibination!
The reason they are so large is because they have so few of them. 18 major ones I think. The US has thousands.
Are you kidding? That will buy two or three full sized multi-story development campuses full of engineers in India!
It's so nice of Japan to donate this code to us.
--
CEO,
Castle Technology UK
Malike Bamiyi wanted my assistance.
I'm all out of mod points you see, but I'm laughing out loud.
My Blog
in Japan And China Have much piracy,So why would invest in softwares OpenSource?What you think about???best regards. Blueice88
Compared to the investment IBM made (they claim ~1B$), or even Redhat (50M$), this most likely won't have a real impact (except for PR, of course)
The Raven
The fact that Japans spending on closed source software is orders of magnitudes greater than this piddling sum would be suggest they're betting on the other side.
Wow. Who has ever heard of running linux on consumer technology? Certainly not Slashdot.
I've gotten something like five replies to my (logged-in) comment and only one of them actually shows up. I'm sure using the production server as a test environment to cut costs by 50% seemed like a good idea at the meeting, but...
Ohmygosh! rotflmao!. That's the coolest thing I've seen in, like, a month!
Yo, I had no idea that there was anybody building wacked out stuff like that... What's up with that control seat?! It looks like a fricking back-hoe operators seat! =)
They totally need to get a copy of the code to MechWarrior and rewrite the device drivers! If anybody want's to work on a Gundam-mech port of Mechwarrior, count me in! (I'm totally serious... I'd open up a site on sourceforge, and recode the entire fricken game, if it meant getting to fly back and forth from the US to Japan to write Mech code!!!)
LOL... Yo, mod the parent up!!! That's the coolest link on this thread! =)
Presumably though as it is a feasability study they will source a consultancy group to execute it. I'm sure Gartner and their ilk will quite happily pocket 450K for a study of this nature and produce a nicely formatted 10 page document at its conclusion.
Even if they do perform the study in house its still a reasonable upfront investment for a feasability study.
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
LOL... rotflmao! That's the coolest link I've seen in, like, a month!
Yo, I had no idea that folks were building wacked out stuff like that over there! What's up with the control seat?! It looks like a freakin back-hoe operator's chair! LOL.
Seriously, though... they need to port Mechwarior, and write device driver's for that thing! Put a couple of LCD moniters in there, a throttle control and joy-stick, maybe some foot pedals... Yo, if anybody want's to open a file on source-forge, and make a port of MechWarrior for Gundam-mech, there, count me in! =)
Mod the parent up! That's the coolest link on this thread!
Basic rule when reading Slashdot: the story will be wrong, you need to follow the link to get the real story. The government is allocating 1 billion yen ($8.3 million) for Linux software developers. In addition, it is spending $450K to study the possibility of switching government computers to Linux. If the study finds that they could switch if problems X, Y, and Z can be solved, they can use the $8.3 million to solve those problems, and then get all that money back, and more, when they kick Microsoft out of a hundred thousand or so government machines.
Yeah, Japan was going to the change the very nature of supercomputing. That didn't work either. Let's just say I'm dubious.
Home electronics is one of those areas where OSS should be really well suited. No end user sees the software itself, so you don't really need to attach a brand name. It also allows companies to work on the software(without footing the bill for all the costs), but still be reasonably sure other companies can't screw them over. Linux developers may actually be able to program their VCR's.
I haven't had the opportunity to run BSD yet, and I'm very happy with Linux, so I'm unlikely to go through the trouble to switch, but I am curious as to why a lot of people seem to think it's better? What in particular is better about it? Security is supposed to be better, but I hardly think about that with my desktop system. Slightly off topic, but I haven't heard of any governments thinking about switching to BSD(start throwing up the links now).
If I ran any large organization that purchased Microsoft products I would send out a press release stating I was considering Linux even if I wasn't. Maybe they can get some discounts.
My Blog
Love it, baby! Linux is the WINNER.
I'm a bit confused here. Someone help me clarify my broken thinking.
Japan, where the corporations are REALLY good at making consumer electronics, may want to sell a Linux based system in the US. How would they overcome some of the little hurdles we have here like:
1) Fleets of RIAA lawyers.
2) The MPAA.
3) The DMCA.
4) Another evil(tm) acronym.
Will they not have a problem balancing the release of source code and the restrictions of the DMCA? How does Tivo do this?
Or will they see their product as a consumer friendly alternative and damn the consequences?
"Giving money and power to governments is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys." - P.J. O'Rourke
Business - AP World Business
Microsoft Buys Japan
Wed Feb 5, 03:53 PM PT
Microsoft plans to spend about 1 billion dollars (120 billion Yen) funding Japan in its entirety, says Bill Gates, Wednesday.
Gates' plans on purchasing the country at the end of fiscal 2004, but he's not sure what to do with it. Industry pundits predict that Japan will go the way of WebTV and many other companies/countries purchased by Microsoft.
"I like Japan", says Gates, "they really are good at science". Later, Gates was seen snickering.
You have that backwards.
50,000,000 yen = $450,000
*NOT*
450,000 yen = $50,000,000
yen dollar
echo 'Header append X-HD-DVD "0x09f911029d74e35bd84156c5635688c0"' >>
That joke was from full metal jacket...a movie about Vietnamese, not Japanese. Parent doesn't even know his slant-eyes.
There are lots of browser choices, but there is no one reasonable default choice that can be made available to users. And many of the browsers have something wrong with them.
Konqueror is great - but it has had showstopping bugs in the last two major versions. 2.2.2 had a horrible bug which caused it to lock up sometimes when selecting any text in an input box. I set up Red Hat boxes for numerous friends and coworkers, and trying to explain why the primary browser locked up so often was quite difficult. I thought 3.0 would save us, but alas - it has an even worse bug whereby forms submit incorrectly about 1 time in 5, causing most functionality-oriented sites (including the TrustCommerce merchant admin site) to be completely unusable. My other major complaint with Konq is its jerky page updates: clicking a link will cause a big white box to suddenly obscure part of the current page - compare to Mozilla which updates the display very cleanly. 3.0 was significantly better on this front, but it's still enough of a problem to hurt the user experience. Finally, it's still slow when you have a lot of browser windows open. The worst is when you middle-click a link to a large PNG image (say, the screenshots on the GNOME site). I minimize the window while the image is loading, but in the meantime my other browser windows become _very_ unresponsive; trying to scroll is jerky and difficult. Very unpleasant.
Mozilla-based browsers are the best. They render most pages correctly and enjoy the support of being the basis for Netscape. However, Mozilla is not integrated with any desktop environment, making tasks such as printing, accessing the file open or save dialogs, and cut-n-paste unpleasant. Galeon is the best browser currently available, to my mind, but the lack of anti-aliased fonts keeps me going back to Konqueror. Opera is good but commercial, and suffers badly from the default fonts being ugly.
Solution? Browser developers need to focus on removing the remaining impediments to user-friendliness. Konq needs to be faster and smoother in its display, and stop shipping with major bugs that make it nearly unusable. Mozilla needs to get better desktop integration (such as letting you specify your mail client and ditching that lame file dialog for the default GTK dialog) and anti-aliased fonts for rendering. Whichever browser is the first to come to completeness on these points should then be chosen as the default by distributions. It's a tight race, and one that will no doubt be won in the next couple of months. Hopefully it will be a tie - having several 'best' browsers would be awesome!
2. Prompting for a filesystem scan.
If you accidentally cut the power to your desktop at the wrong moment, here's what happens. The system boots, tries to scan the filesystem, can't recover the journal, and panics. You are prompted to enter the root password, and then you're expected to type some cryptic commands like "fsck
Think it's better server-side? No: it's much, much worse. Now when a machine hardlocks (say, due to hardware that is overheating due to heavy load - a common scenario if you're using standard PC hardware and your webserver gets
3. Printing needs to be easier to configure.
For years I struggled with
Printer install should work like this. You run the printer install program, and it gives you two choices: "Set up a printer attached to my computer", and "Set up a printer from the network." The first choice looks in
4. Make it easy for the user to find out how to do things.
Most Linux distributions come with a ton of applications, development tools, and support for all sorts of fancy devices. But none of this is very obvious when you boot into KDE or GNOME for the first time. The menu contains a few apps but they are scattered about and don't have names that reveal what they do. The vast majority of tools on the system aren't even in the menus. We need to make it easy for a new user to find out how to do stuff with their shiny new OS, without having to do a web search to find out.
This is, IMO, Linux's top strength on the desktop. Windows comes with an email client, a crap browser, and Freecell. MacOS has the same, but iTunes in place of Freecell. You really can't do much with a default install of either OS. On the other hand, Linux comes with a wealth of applications and toys that could keep the user busy for years without ever downloading or purchasing any additional software. Let's make this obvious! Here's how.
There should be an "I want to..." dialog (though this can be turned off if you're an advanced user). It should be a large icon on the desktop which is very obvious to any user. Clicking it will open the dialog. At the top is written the text, "I want to..." and below are a long list of things that you can do with your system. These might need to be grouped by expandable categories, as the list could get very long. Here are a few things I suggest:
- Browse the web
- Read email
- Chat (IRC/AOL/Yahoo/Jabber/...)
- Burn a CD
- Install a printer
- Set up a modem
- Set up a DSL or cable modem
- Make my computer serve web pages
- Share my files with others on my local network (NFS)
- Access someone else's shared files (NFS)
- Download pictures from my digital camera (GPhoto)
- Paint a picture or touch up a photograph (Gimp)
ELX is the one distro I have seen that tries something like this, but it suffers from the same problem as the KDE & GNOME menus: it gives you a list of programs you can run, instead of tasks that you can do. People use computers to do things, not to run programs.5. Cleaner redraws.
This has long been a complaint of mine in almost every OS and desktop environment: slow or flickery window updates. I have only ever seen one OS do it right, and that's Mac OS X. This isn't a speed issue, really; it's a how-you-update-the-screen issue. Mac OS X pops a window onto the screen all at once. Presumably it does any drawing that it needs to do on a back buffer and then blits it to the screen when it's all done, just like a video game. Even on a slower system, it still appears very "clean" - the window just takes a little while to appear. But you don't see any ugly drawing artifacts in the meantime. Mac OS X is great.
The latest version of Windows is not bad; mostly I think this is due to the fast speed of modern hardware coupled with the minimal eye candy that the OS offers. Things like the file explorer still don't update all at once, but it's a minor point; they've mostly got it right.
KDE, on the other hand, continues to flicker and pop. Here's a key example: click on the "home" icon in your menu bar. The window pops onscreen, but many of the drawing elements (the files themselves, but many widgets) are temporarily drawn as large white or grey boxes. A split second later the full images appear. Even on a high-end system it looks a little funny; on a slow system it looks terrible.
This is not a functionality issue, so in many ways its not that important. But it is a "user experience" issue; people coming from Mac OS X or even Windows will find their experience a little less pleasant, and that makes them less likely to come back.
6. Die stray processes, die!
In Linux when a process messes up you can exit X, drop to a console, and start running "killall kdeinit", "killall mozilla", etc, but this is lame and for non-technical users it boils down to the same thing. Possible solution: when in X, WM should keep track of processes and the windows they are attached to. When an app has no windows concat(or the main window is not open), the WM should attempt to kill them (first normally, then with -9). This functionality could be configured for debugging whereby instead of killing them, it attaches gdb to the process so that developers could figure out why there are stray processes.
7. Easy way of sharing files.
Ideally a right-click on a directory and chose "share this directory". Be able to pull up a list of all folders you are sharing and change permissions or remove the sharing.
8. Sound support.
OSS was great a few years ago and continues to offer support for modern cards (including professional quality ones such as the Midiman Delta 1010, which is what I have) but it is commercial and it is showing its age. ALSA is a superior solution and has been rolled into the dev kernel. Once it makes its way into the stable kernel and distros start using it uniformly (Mandrake and SuSE have offered it for some time now) along with a good configuration tool, audio on Linux will rock.
9. No common editor which supports "soft wrapping."
By which I mean displaying things wordwrapped, even when it's one long line. This means you can go back and edit the line and the rest of the paragraph will reformat itself automatically. Evolution's message editor does this, but that doesn't help me for composing text files (like this one!). Others I've tried - Kate, GEdit, and even vi - only support "hard wrapping", where it inserts a newline when you get to the end of the line. Then when you insert more words into the paragraph later, the formatting gets all screwy.
10. No easy way to configure X - especially change resolution on the fly.
This varies by distribution, but I the resolution issue is a common one. (The only distro I have seen that does it right was Corel 1.0. You could change your resolution from the KDE control panel. However, I believe this is because they were using the commercial X server Metro-X.) It boggles my mind that, after all these years, the best way to configure X is to run Xconfigurator from the console! This is perhaps the longest running embarrassment of the free software desktop.
450K, to develop a new OS are you kidding??? That's like nothing.
Hmmm.... let's look at the article... whoa, it says $1 billion yen, like 8.6 million dollars. Now that is a little more serious, but still nothing like the $1 billion that IBM is sinking into Linux.
Later in the article $50 million yen to study the possibility of moving government computers to Linux.
Odd though - this article seemss to be rather different than what the Slashdot capsule says. I wonder if Slashdot editors read the articles? Nah, they couldn't possibly just psot this without reading the article.
RMS "Fill my register and pass me another comfort girl there Eric"
Had you asked me, I'd have thought Japan was still all ga-ga over their home-grown TRON operating system.
Ever hear of modules?
Luke-Jr
unicode support is popular
all of plan9 text is unicode, even the c source
it is used in at least one Japanese university
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
There's also another subtlety: many corporations are very, very reluctant to release products using Linux because of its "viral" GPL license. If this was truly done to support the consumer devices industry, the work could have, and indeed should have, been done with FreeBSD or NetBSD, which are arguably more stable, and arguably more free.
http://www.old-computers.com/museum/computer.asp?c =90
In the early 80's, there were a lot of home computers. A Japanese company called ASCII corporation (directed by Kay Nishi) decided to create an industry standard for home computers: MSX was born. MSX means Machines with Software eXchangeability. This is the true and only meaning, stop spreading the word about another explanation please.
The new standard was based on an existing computer: The Spectravideo SV 318 which can be considered as a beta version of MSX1 computers. Microsoft designed then MSX1 computers and the first version of the OS: MSX DOS 1 (which looks like early versions of MS-DOS).
Almost every Japanese and Korean computer companies made their own MSX computers (except maybe NEC). Bill Gates was then very confident about the future of the MSX standard.
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
the rest of your post is just as naive
nice try though
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
If they spend the money directly then it wouldn't be that much. But since they are funding others who are developing open-source software, the effect is much greater.
I would expect that each group that worked on open-source developments would receive about 5-10% of their funding from the government. Or in other words, the funding is affecting development costing $4.5M.
This reduction in costs of 5-10% will give developers a great incentive to switch from other systems to Linux.
Now say that of the total spend, 50% comes from people who just migrated to Linux. So that is $2.2M that was being spent on other systems that is now being spent on Linux.
This $5M isn't being spent by government pen-pushers. It is $5M funding research and development by companies that are trying to be as cost-effective as possible. You can do a lot of programming for that much money.
Commie-Linux, the fastest way to take down the "White Devil" economy.
Hate to break it to you, but although the cultures may seen similar to use "White Devils" China is Communist whereas Japan isn't.
Don't give me that socialist crap either. Socialists charge high taxes, they don't run tanks over student protestors.
You can't judge a book by the way it wears its hair.
We've actually ported Linux internally to the GameCube hardware, and it runs pretty well... but for high performance applications where both speed and memory are critical, such as game consoles, a monolithic kernel will not cut it. Many of the functions of Linux, such as multiprocess management, memory protection and the like are not necessary on a game console. We've done performance metrics, and we feel that a lightweight proprietary OS that is simply a lightweight hardware abstraction layer is still the way to go. Let the middleware companies such as NetImmerse and Intrinsic build on top of that.
-- Samir Gupta, Ph. D. Head, New Technology Research Group, Nintendo Co. Ltd., Kyoto, Japan.
Bill Gates spent almost half that much on a hand-carved statue of two eagles for his house. (No joke--I know a guy who did the work, and it was a $206K job.)
Even though you didn't read the article ... 450K could do wonders if you hire the right people. Imagine two Linus types just aching to make things happens.
Still, wouldn't you say that $450k is such a ridiculous (small) amount? Besides Tokyo is the most expensive city in the world (http://www.onbusiness.ie/2003/0116/cities.html), so relatively speaking, it's like $300k or less in US. It means that they can hire one or two good consultant to do the work for a year or maybe less. Would you still think that they have the slight idea of what they are getting into?
testing to see if this story really has 70 comments and if /.'s new server config is working correctly.
mod this as offtopic
I think those of us in the community can expect nothing but great things from this leap of faith from the Japanese. Imagine if you will - in Soviet Russia, computer mice may very well play with you!!!
If you RTFA, it turns out that Tokoyo (city?) has budgeted 50M yen to investigating the current viability of switching over, while the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry is going to dole out 1B yen (US$8.3 million) to support asian development of Linux software /. editors didn't bother scanning the web page pointed to before they posted the story.
It seems like the
OS Software is like love: The best way to make it grow is to give it away.
Thank you.
-- Your Refrigerator
You want the truthiness? You can't handle the truthiness!
Japan and China are totally different when it comes to things like software piracy. I'd be willing to bet that software piracy in Japan is an order of magnitude less then it is in the US.
As another poster mentioned, it would be like calling the US and Mexico 'practically the same thing'. Or even the US and Cuba.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
linux is a good kernel
Umm... it means 50 million yen. Where a soda costs 120 yen from a vending machine. No, it really translates to about $450k.
Given what happened with the Virgin WebPlayer (GPL Linux, no code EVER, EULA that said all the code was Virgin property), no one who owns any of the copyrights in the linux kernel will step forward and sue.
If no one sues, the GPL has no teeth.
You just preached to the choir.
Given what happened with the Virgin WebPlayer (GPL Linux, no code EVER, EULA that said all the code was Virgin property), no one who owns any of the copyrights in the linux kernel will step forward and sue.
Go visit this and look for webplayer.
If no one sues, the GPL has no teeth.
At least we can reply to this article...
This is the same gov't that wants people to by stocks -- we to buy stocks
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/2735251.stm
This gov't is quickly losing credibility.
Any body that has worked in government or a large institution will know how much hassle it is to purchase a piece of software. Going with open source makes financial sense, development sense and management sense. If your developers can get to work immediately and not wait for 5 weeks due to purchasing delays, that's 5 very valuable weeks. If you work in the government, where purchasing beakers can take 6 months, it can make/break a project.
Microsoft is it's own worse enemy. They have huge profit margins and it's commonly accepted as truth, so business are pissed their own margins are razor thin. Really, why in the world should company A cut their own margins down to 1-2%, when microsoft's is over 50%. But take the name microsoft out of the picture and say it's just a monopoly company. You can easily replace it with big 5 car manufacturers vs mechanics. Saving money is the primary force driving open source growth.
The money is to develop an 'operating system for consumer electronics goods'.
Hmm... I wonder who invented^H^H^H^H^H^H already owns the patent on this one.
slsash dot forums are brokd!!!!!!!!
,, mean funny, schizeer ... numbnuts.
thats is foooooo sunny, sunnfy
jack in the rax
Nice to see Japan proving for once more deep knowledge in technology.
I don't know what went wrong with them but they used to be a very nature loving country, don't know what got into them and became so tech-oriented.
still, good for them proving they know the score
Here it is, 50 comments or so, and not one damn Godzilla post. Would Bill Gates be the Smog Monster?
Despite this setback, Microsoft stock climbed +12 3/16 in trading Friday.
A rolling stone is worth two in the bush!
Why is this informative? It's bullshit.
...
It's not "like $50 million" in Japanese
They're spending 50 million yen for one year, which is around $420k if they were to spend dollars instead, which would be stupid because they don't use dollars.
Besides, if you were to RTF article yourself you would see that the Japanese have budgeted $8.3 million in total.
As my father lik@(munch munch)...
$ ?? -??
??: No match.
$ ?? -??
??: No match.
$
(shortened to apease the lameness filter)
CAn'T CompreHend SARcaSm?
Ha Ha,
Pretty good... Troll!!!
And people say Linux users are dicks.
Its a potentially brilliant move by the Japanese government. They get screwed by GATT if they subsidize product manufacture for export. Also, roughly 5-10 year ago, they had a really screwed up computer infrastructure (picture 5 types of PCs but all incompatible to each other) which they probably unified by going Microsoft.
Japanese makes major money from appliances and cars. They know that embedded programming to "smarten" up the products is the future. If the gov't gives the money to the keiretsus to invest in this direction, the US sends their lawyers to bitch that the Japanese manufacturers are "dumping" their Japanese gov't subsidized products.
Instead, they put the money into embedded linux development. It ends up being an infrastructure building investment. The car and appliances manufacturers then pluck the finished development and incorporate it into their products. Furthermore, by having a desktop linux, they end up "unifying" their PC products without the decisions being made in Redmond, USA.
Here's the kicker: their investment may not be poached by foreign competitors. Sure its GPL, and everyone has access to it. But perhaps they hope that Microsoft will supress adoption of Linux throughout the market. The investment is for the taking, but the Microsoft dominated markets can't use it. Its saves the Japanese industry all that software money that would be going to Microsoft for development infrastructure. It also results in cheaper products, because it doesn't have the Microsoft tax for each item. USG can't point to a gov't subsidy to support their claims of "dumping".
Too bad for the Japanese that their government is too corrupt to clean up their banking problem.
There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM and AT&T and DuPont, Dow, General Electric, and Exxon
And they'll spend the year copying and pasting code snippets from other people's projects, gluing it all together, and commenting it in Engrish, without any understanding of how their creation fully works. Then they'll write "analysis" in Engrish and conclude that open source is indeed the "goodest to it way is."
Actually, its not really news that the Japanese government is doing this. They've been doing this for years - trying to get a globally accepted embedded device-control operating system widely adopted among the industry.
There used to be a project, headed up by one of Japans most respected computer scientists, called TRON.
This was pre-Hollywood "TRON" movie, which actually had some basis in its script and 'ideology' on the Japanese ideals put forth by the TRON project; which were, simply, to create a global networked computer 'system', accessible throughout the world, out of the embedded OS in consumer devices. In other words, put chips *everywhere* and have them all function as part of a global computer system.
I guess the end result would be so that the phrase "imagine a Beowulf of that!" could be applied to *anything*, in actual fact there would be nothing *but* Beowulf clusters of everything, and its name would be "TRON".
TRON was a project to try and define this OS and how these devices would communicate with each other - in 1978!!
(It may also be referred to as the "E-TRON" project, I seem to remember there being some move to change the name at one point...)
Anyway, just wanted to point out that the move of the Japanese government to promote OSS is probably based on an even older ethos among the Japanese techno/industrial zaibatsu's...
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
I believe the use of the word "Tokyo" is ambiguous.
The capital city of a country is often used in media to refer to the goverment, e.g. Washington made a decision, blah blah, or Brussels voted for this or that, etc.
I think more information is needed, but all I can find it the same AP announcement.
TIVO is BSD-based, not Linux-based.
OpenBeOS would seem to be a very good alternative to Linux in the consumer eletronic market. Hopefully when it's ready(in a year time maybe) it will versatile enough to be able to re-create a OpenBeIA which would be ideally for these kind of job. And I don't have to start on why BeOS was/is amazing...10scs boot up time, journaling file system, beautifully simple interface, virtually crash proof, etc, etc...
That many yen doesn;t go all that far in japan. I'm pretty sure Lineo spent more than that on rent alone in their japan linux operation, and where did it get them?
This is just like television, only you can see much further.
Someone runs Linux somewhere!
I wish people would stop moderating line-noise like the parent (and first posts, penis birds, Soviet Russia jokes etc.) as Trolls. There's a perfectly good Offtopic category for mere irrelevant crap. Trolls are inflamatory or intentionally stupid posts designed to get a response. The parent isn't.
Naturally software in heavy use today will become devalued and obsolete. People will pay for the genius required to develop better technologies such as
- automation of more business activities
- Currently a lot of small businesses automate away the secretaries. Many small businesses can conglomerate and still have just one secretary/receptionist. There are a lot of people with skills that have not been automated away in small businesses yet. It's happening slowly as managers buy better tools and reduce the number of steps.
- virtual reality
- robots
- automation of personal activities
What we need with the new technology are loftier goals.
- simulation and modeling of nature
- businesses venturing into space
- colony of robots on the moon
- artificial intelligence
Many skilled people will find that menial mundane jobs are done by machines. So what? Who wants that work anyways? There will be work to be done.
It isn't a problem. People who own assets will find that competition will drive them to risk what they have on new ideas. Capitalists didn't get where they were by spinning their wheels. They must seek growth. Technology enables this.
A very quick way for capitalists to understand the potential of technology is to work with them. I am developing some new software for some small businesses. The software started small and served the core business needs but when the business owners saw the software they immediately wanted more features. They can't get enough.
Big businesses have software everywhere. In a big business programmers have to work on new software for new business angles. Leave the simple minded programming for old business divisions to the cheapest programmers. In the new business ventures it's genius that makes the difference between fast or slow success.
Know your pads. One time pad: good for cryptography. Two timing pad: where to take your mistress.
They will run linux on this laptop!! Gundam notebook
Japan is betting...that the next-generation of high-tech products and computer networks will rely on open-source software.
This reminds me of the Japanese project of "Fifth Generation Computing" in the 80s. AIs, Prolog everywhere,... What resulted of all that?
__
Men with no respect for life must never be allowed to control the ultimate instruments of death.
GW Bu
I really don't understand how the RIAA, MPAA and DMCA are related to this at all. Why and how would the DMCA restrict open source? I don't see it... not in this instance, anyway...