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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'."
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) 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
Err... putting Japan and China in the same bag is akin to saying the U.S., Mexico and surrounding areas are all alike.
Besides, if you read the story, the entities mentioned are Ministries and two _very_ big corporations (Sony and Matsushita) - highly unlikely to be pirating software.
--Moo
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!!!!!
According to the Bill Gates Net Worth Page they could hire him for over two hours with that kind of money...
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.
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.
That doesn't mean "linux". Open Source Operating System != Linux, folks. IT could be one of the various BSD's or even something like Plan 9.
Of course, I'm putting my money on "linux", too, but you can never just assume things...
If you were me, you'd be good lookin'. - six string samurai
if they, for example, do an embedded linux port for a microwave? Do they ship a CD with the code with the microwave?
Lots of companies are already shipping products with embedded linux in it. You dont have to ship the code with the microwave. You can to make it available on a website.
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
You've come square up against what I like to call "the one big person" theory of foreign states. Anything that is both very complex and very unfamiliar is treated as one big person: France is a big crybaby. Canada is a wimp. Israel is just one big Holocaust survivor. America is arrogant. On and on. Sure the sterotypes might sometimes contribute some pithy insight, but once they begin to suck up all debate nothing constructive ever gets said again. It is fundamentally impossible to sum up a complex system in this manner. It leads to all sorts of problems. Not that this mode of thinking will ever go away, mind you.
Actually, I think the whole 'complex entity = person" idea is something very human, and applies to all sorts of things beyond foreign countries. Businesses, cultural groups, one's own government, all of them treated like this. Its the human mind's way of dealing I suppose. And to a degree, maybe it even makes sense. The individual human is one of the most complex systems on this planet. Therefore we try to model other complex systems with that model.
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.
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.
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.
Do a Google on Akihabara. Or if you're too lazy to do that, just imagine an entire city of computer stores. I was just there three weeks ago and there is MORE THAN ENOUGH sources for legitimate software, both Japanese, or English versions.
As far as illegal software, there is a great deal of street vendors who pawn that stuff off, but I've seen the same thing in New York. It may be a little bit worse in Japan due to the vast availablilty of high-speed broadband. And no, my use of high-speed and broadband is not redundant. I have a 12MBit ADSL line which usually averages 2.5 MBit, but on sites that can handle it, I've gone as high as 7.5MBit sustained. There are also regions that run 100MBit ethernet straight to your home. I only pay 2800yen (~$25) per month for my ADSL, which makes piracy quite cheap for me if I decided to go down that road to make an illegal yen or two.
Now, I have also been to Hong Kong, where after 5 days I had still not located a store that was actually selling legitimate copies of software. But there were more places than I could count pawning off the illegal copies.
I've dirtied my hands writing poetry, for the sake of seduction; that is, for the sake of a useful cause. --Dostoevsky
And people do the same thing with the concept of "God"... even though the details vary drastically, most cultures have a mythology that posits a source of universal intention: something or someone that controls natural events (weather, harvest, childbirth, astronomical bodies, etc.) and interacts with individual human lives (by providing comfort, discipline, special powers, spirtual growth, second chances, forgiveness, condemation, tests and trials, equalizing opportunities, purpose and meaning, spouse and family, absolute morality, eternal security, etc.). The fact that these things are (or will be) explainable through the lenses of natural and cognitive science hasn't done much to convince people that there's no God mediating their reality. It's as if we have to attribute agency (in the AI sense of the term) to events that are personally significant. All these uncontrolled externals are wrapped up into "God".
But, to reply to the parent post, there are more practical reasons for making the "complex entity"==>"person" simplification. When we say "France opposses war with Iraq", it's pretty accurate, because we get the impression that (1) the official government posture and (2) the general sentiment of the French population do not want to see a war. We have no way of characterizing it in a finer manner than that... we don't have a list of x million French who oppose war and the y million French who endorse it, so we use the label "France" to tag the relevant input (in this case, the relevant input is "political pressure", but if we were watching a news broadcast about organized protest against the rapid expansion of metropolitan Paris, than we might categorize the input as "environmentalist").
I'm sure there are a thousand interesting AI and cogsci theories for explaining or expressing this... the human brain is truly incredible, but it make broad, obvious machine-like mistakes too.
-1, Too Many Layers Of Abstraction