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China Upgrades from Microsoft Office

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the save-a-buck-or-two dept.

Badgerman writes "According to this Forbes article, fifteen Chinese ministries have started using a homegrown office software suite instead of Microsoft Office. The article also notes the Chinese government's encouragment of homegrown software and of a national Linux standard."

8 of 385 comments (clear)

  1. Chinese Distros by spoonist · · Score: 4, Informative

    Here are some example Chinese distros:

    Red Flag

    Cosix

    Magic Linux

    XTeam

  2. Screenshots here by illtud · · Score: 5, Informative

    Courtesy of Google (loads of hits on WPS Office):

    http://www.pconline.com.cn/pcedu/soft/office/wps/1 0307/199035.html

  3. Re:Reinventing the wheel? by Daniel+Phillips · · Score: 5, Informative

    But why are they writing their own, rather than taking the already very good OpenOffice.org, and working on that?

    Perhaps because the office suite they're talking about has been around since 1988?

    --
    Have you got your LWN subscription yet?
  4. In Beijing Linux is everywhere by clueless123 · · Score: 5, Informative

    I happen to be in Beijing right now (just visiting). This week I've gone to a lot of shopping malls and computer stores looking arround, and I can say there is a *whole* lot of Linux out here. I Guess that M$softs antipiracy efforts here have backfired bigtime, now PHB's (at least in the corporate environment I am working at) are thinking twice before using pirated copies of MS. Considering that a copy of Windoze cost as much as 1/2 a months salary for a full-time programer, it is now very appealing to move to linux.

  5. Phear my leet googling skillz... by benjamindees · · Score: 5, Informative


    Wikipedia Definition of WPS Office

    Article about Kingsoft

    --
    "I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
  6. reading comprehension: not a switch from MS Office by dangermouse · · Score: 4, Informative
    The article does not say that the government upgraded from Microsoft Office. It says that they upgraded from an earlier version of the same software:
    The Ministry of Commerce, the Foreign Ministry and the National Security Bureau and other governmwent departments had upgraded to WPS Office2003 from an earlier version developed by domestic software maker Kingsoft Co, the People's Daily newspaper reported.
    The big story seems to be that "it was the first large-scale software upgrade in government offices," which is really just not very interesting.
  7. Drivers by mcgroarty · · Score: 4, Informative

    Outside of China, there's an excellent benefit from China swarming all over Linux: This means there will be Linux support out of the gate for those strange, cheap, no-name peripherals you see in plain little boxes all over the computer stores. This means less reverse-engineering Windows drivers, and less hair pulling at trying to get specs from engineers all the way across the globe.

  8. Re:Chinese office by Beowabbit · · Score: 5, Informative
    Their system of language is based on ideograms where one ideogram represents a word or part of a word. It's the same with
    • Korean
      Nope. Korean used to be written in Chinese characters, but now all writing in North Korea and almost all writing in South Korea is alphabetic. (Chinese characters are occasionally scattered into highbrow writing in South Korea, but it's still mostly alphabetic.) Korean writing arranges the letters into syllables in such a way that the syllables sort of look like Chinese characters, though -- quite pretty. (Link with examples)
    • Japanese
      Japanese writing is a mix of phonetic and ideographic writing (with the ideograms borrowed from Chinese; they're called kanji, which is just Japanese-borrowed-from-Chinese for "Chinese characters").
    • Mayan
      Unless there's recent news I've missed, Mayan hieroglyphs haven't been deciphered yet. (I guess people could still have an idea whether they're likely to be phonetic or likely to be ideographic based on the variety and distribution of symbols, though -- I don't know much about them.)
    • Egyptian
      Egyptian is a fascinating mix of ideographic and phonetic writing. There are symbols that are used only for their sound, and symbols that are used only for their meaning, and lots of symbols that can be used rebus-like for either. I found a neat page about it at http://www.friesian.com/egypt.htm .
    (The main point I wanted to make is that modern Korean isn't ideographic, and Japanese and Egyptian are only partly so.)