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Japan, China & South Korea May Develop OS
v1x writes "Reuters reports that Japan, South Korea and China are set to agree to jointly develop a new computer operating system as an alternative to Microsoft Corp.'s Windows software. It is said that if the plan matures, the three nations are likely to build upon an open-source operating system, such as Linux, and develop an inexpensive and trustworthy system."
.. an OS with East-Asian language support built in. If it's halfway decent, I can see it being used in cybercafes all over the globe. It'll sure be a lot easier than, as I've some Japanese travellers have to do, log on at a cafe, trying to install Japanese character sets/keyboards . They'll be able to send emails in their native language/character set right off the bat.
Before everyone comes out to commend this as countries embracing open-source software, it needs to be pointed out that the obvious result of the effort would moreover be the creation of a system with the real, ubiquitous support for the unique Asain languages, in which Windows has always been lacking...
A framework for developing the system would be set up during meetings by government ministers in mid-September, followed by committee meetings involving private-sector specialists from each of the three nations in November.
1) An operating system designed by a committee is going to fail.
2) An operating system controlled by a government is eventually going to be oppressive and restrictive.
J'aime mieux les méchants que les imbéciles, parce qu'ils se reposent. -- Alexandre Dumas
A programming language is an interface between the machine and the programmer. If a language makes security holes nearly impossible to avoid, you need a better language.
wow..misreading the word "upon" made me look like a jackass. :-p
"Comedy's a dead art form. Now tragedy, that's funny."
welcome to MS's nightmare all developing nations working together to do linux based OS to not only get users but alos developers...
so when is the Redmond ligths out party?
Don't Tread on OpenSource
Microsoft might lose, what, $20 in revenue? Piracy is so bad in Asia, it's a wonder anyone can sell any legit software there, at all.
A framework for developing the system would be set up during meetings by government ministers in mid- September, followed by committee meetings involving private-sector specialists from each of the three nations in November.
It looks like a good plan, but I hope the execution is not flawed.
To see a world in a grain of sand, and then to step back and see the beach where the sand lies
My guess is 'yes'. Two reasons:
THey'll want business to use it. And businesses will be unwilling to use anything that they suspect has a backdoor. The source'd have to be visible for them to trust it
It's being done by three governments, not one. That makes it a lot harder for any, ahem, idiosyncratic code to make it in, and again, OSS is the best way of ensuring this.
Will they simply steal OSS and release it with few changes without honoring the gpl?
How do you know microsoft isn't doing that right now? I'm not suggesting that they are, but there seems to be a prevalent attitude during this discussion that china=evil, japan/rok=irrelevent, USA=land of free (if not Free). Japan and ROK are both WTO members, and China really wants to be. It's unlikely they're going to contravene those rules without good reason. Besides, if it's open source, the question goes away.
Will it be in other languages and availabe to foreigners?
Who cares? Seriously. If you've got Linux, BSD and Windows, you're more or less covered. Again, if it's open source, etc, etc
These People, etc
I guess we'll have to just hope that they act honorably, just like all American companies do.
1. It is not "design by committee" - it is policy making by committee.
2. It is not "a government", it is multiple governments which don't all always agree on everything.
Establishing *infrastructure* is beneficial for everyone, so cooperation like this should be welcomed. You might see policy development being slow because of government involvement, but that's how it is when large organizations are involved.
If Japan were really planning on doing this, they would do it themselves. China would as well, I believe. I wonder who is really behind this effort?
Why in the world would you possibly think that? There are many, many reasons why they would want to do this together. China has cheap programmers, first. Japan and China have very good computer science people. And yes, there is a purpose for that distinction. The CS people develop the innovative portions of the system, and the programmers write the code that makes it all work.
Just for the language support alone it benefits both Japan and China to work together to try to replace the buggy Chinese/Japanese character input systems available. I'm not too familiar with the Windows end, but the Linux jserver/freewnn line is good but far from perfect or ideal.
How did you get modded interesting? "I wonder who is really behind this effort?" Uhm, Japan, China, and South Korea. Take the tinfoil hat off boy.
Dacels Jewelers can't be trusted.
My company spent a lot of time making a Unicode version of one of our larger web applications, and it does well in the Japanese market. Japan (and I guess Korea and China) are largely excluded from the Western market (as consumers) because of the complexity of supporting their character sets (Katakana, Hirigi, and Kanji in Japan alone).
So Japan, Korea, China share the need for coherent Unicode support in their software at OS and application level. This is something missing from anything one can put together today in the West, either using Windows or Linux.
So this move makes sense, though given the history between these three countries, somewhat unlikely. Perhaps after the successful football world cup, someone has been thinking...
Anyhow, I've said several times that it seems an obvious thing for governments to do, especially ones outside the reach/grip of the US hegemony: invest in local open source, both to encourage the development of local IT and to save money by buying less American junk. China, India, Brazil: these are the countries where the likeliehood of a serious home-grown OSS "industry" is most likely.
Before the "destroying value and US jobs" mob get here, I'll just add my voice saying it's a good thing and all success to them.
Ceci n'est pas une signature
They do not share common fonts. China in the old days was the dominant force in the region, and Korea and Japan had to study Chinese just like they are studying English now as their second language. Few Chinese characters that Korea and Japan incorporate into their publications have different pronunciations in each country, and are completely unintelligible to each other. Average Koreans and Japanese will recognize enough Chinese characters to play video games, but I assume they'll have to still rely on the Unicode standard if they want to get anywhere with the OS.
1) An operating system designed by a committee is going to fail
Why is it going to fail? Has a committee never worked? Isn't this what happens more or less in large companies, ones that build large software systems? For every Linus, there is probably hundreds of incredibly complex pieces of code designed by committees of programmers and managers.
2) An operating system controlled by a government is eventually going to be oppressive and restrictive.
WHY?! Please, take off your tinfoil for a while and go out for some air. not everyone is out to get you. Maybe they just want to offer their citizens, and especially the companies in their country a compelling alternative to American made products with poor support for their languages.
Besides all the comments that say it won't happen there is the possibility that some interesting things might come of such a project.
They are allowed to do such a thing, or at least try.
It is possible that they start from scratch but can avoid all the hard lessons learned by others. And they don't seem to have political constraints to deal with as TinyOS did.
The Japanese are well known for their technical abilities and expertise and long term perspectives. China is known for their numbers of people that can follow direction. And South Korea is known for their ability to imitate product look and feel.
Is it possible that such mindsets can produce a rock solid OS that is easy to use and safe from attack?
Probably! So lets how they are open source, so we all can learn from them.
Maybe I am just cynical, but how can China really be embracing OSS when they are the ones with the infamouse 'great firewall'?
In my opinion, they would simply make it so that they (the govt.) are the only ones who handle security etc, so no outside info can get in.
The only OS mentioned is Minix and he refers to it that if you are tired of everything just running under Minix you might give his kernel a try. Hardly a rousing sales pitch except to geeks.
That is btw Microsofts biggest problem with linux. Where MS got to meet growth targets and keep market share. Linux is free of all that. If one person still enjoys tinkering with it it has met 100% of its goals.
Remember that it is companies like Redhat and Suse that can fail. Linux cannot fail. Neat isn't it.
Disclaimer I am talking about the kernel here. The GNU part has of course always had higher ambitions according to its founders.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
I think Apple could provide a poweful BSD base for the new OS along with good Unicode and Graphics support. If they could convince these 3 countries to start with MacOS X or Darwin they would take a big step forward for market share. Of course there is the issue of hardware costs along with the OS being proprietary or not. I am sure one goal of this new asian-based OS is that they will not be reliant on the US for software. In the very least they could work closely with the development efforts of this new OS to ensure it is MacOS X compatible so they would have an existing set of applications ready to use from day one.
Also for Linux, it is somewhat dated already and I sincerely believe that. But I mean this more in a sense of desktop Linux vs server Linux. The X Windows system is lacking in many areas and other efforts like the open source Berlin or Apple's Quartz is a big step forward. The constant duality of KDE vs Gnome is always an issue. Sure it is nice to have options, but it can also be difficult to understand for new users. When MacOS X came out I was a little upset that there was no theme support, but I quickly accepted it and realized that I should be using the applications instead of making the display look different every other day. And changing the look and feel only serves to confuse users and make tech support more difficult.
Apple was bold enough to scrap OS 9 and move forward with OS X (based on NextStep) because they knew it was a better starting point. I hope China, Japan and South Korea decide they want something better than what Linux and X11 provides.
Brennan Stehling - http://brennan.offwhite.net/blog/
That is the whole point. Windows and Linux have hundreds if not thousands of people who have viewed every line of C code and these bugs are still there.
If their first priority was security then they would use Ada.
SCO is a small U.S. company fighting a large U.S. company in a battle they can't win. China is a world super power with over one billion people and nuclear weapons. Do you really think China cares?
Saying the X-Window System is "lacking in many areas" without identifying the areas you think are lacking is baseless criticism. Berlin is unfinished and has a tiny selection of applications compared to the X Window System. Apple Quartz is proprietary; nowadays we should prefer open-source.
A reasonable first step, and one suited for such a consortium, would be to go through all major open-source software and convert it to 100% Unicode-enabled, put all the text into resources, and provide resource files for each of the national languages. Then check all the code back into the major open-source projects.
Please understand that I do use windows and think it to be a wonderful OS, for certain tasks. As a game machine it is without equal. Sure games crash but then they push the system to its limits and lets face it game producers are hardly know to produce bug free code itself.
For every other task I have gotten fed up with microsoft. I am now running a 2003 machine and it is just as crash prone as xp as 98 as 95 as 3.11 and as dos was. My linux desktop has not had single crash. Oh opera crashes all the time but I do a "killall opera; opera" and it is back exactly where it crashed. Try that with IE or for that matter with Mozilla.
I don't want to see MS fail or driven into the ground. I want market forces to force them to stop adding eye candy and now fix the bloody core itself. Has anyone else noticed that 2003 wich supposdly should have new buffer overflow protection has so far been affected the same as all the other NT's out there?
Perhaps you can compare it to the american car industry wich kept making its cars flashier with more and more chrome attached while they became less reliable and ever greater gass guslers. Enter the japanese with tiny boring cars that worked and they forced the americans to finally change.
So the east to the rescue again. I will belief it when I see it, they haven't even gotten a logo yet everyone knows opensource needs a cute logo, but for now I prefer to be positive.
mmm What about the penguin from Evangelion, Pen Pen as the logo? Pen Pen
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
1) An operating system designed by a committee is going to fail.
2) An operating system controlled by a government is eventually going to be oppressive and restrictive.
Of course if this were true then TCP/IP (yes I do not it is not an OS) would be obsolete and the Internet would have long since been abandoned.
Right wing libertarians need to do better than spout this "government is evil" tripe. It's a sort of trotskyism in reverse, and it's just as boring and stupid.
They could write it in Ada or Modula-3. I can't think of a reason why you couldn't write 99.9% of an operating system in Ada. Compiler and computer technology has advanced quite a bit since the days of UNIX V7 and the Portable C Compiler.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
The US might not allow it own citizens
to work in such conditions, but it certainly
knows how to profit from doing it to citizens
from other countries.
Stop reading the NY Times and watching CNN
and go read "Open Veins of Latin America" by
Eduardo Galeano.
ViewSonic is a California-based company headed by a Taiwanese native, James Chu. They have only one office in Japan, but two in China and three in Taiwan. Daimler-Chrysler is a European company, which owns Mercedes-Benz and Maybach. It has "strategic partners" [partially owns] Fuso, Mitsubishi, and Hyundai. They build vehicles in 37 coutries, including Mexico, China, India, and Indonesia. Ford owns Mazda, Volvo, Jaguar, Land Rover, and Aston Martin. They own assembly plants in Thailand, the Phillippines and Malaysia. Many Ford engines are Mazda-built in Japan. GM owns Isuzu, Suzuki, Fuji/Subaru, Fiat, Holden, Saab, Opel, and Vauxhall. I cannot begin to count the number of GM-owned plants in the Asia-Pacific region, as well as South Africa (HUGE human rights problems there). Most "import" vehicles from Honda (Odyssey, Accord, Pilot, Civic), Nissan (Altima, Quest), and Toyota (Echo, Camry) are assembled in Canada and the US anyway. Most current "American cars" are partially manufactured off-continent, as much as the "imports". Although not all of the places I mentioned are places where people "work for 2 cents/day", it clearly shows that anyone who buys an "American car" in order to support American employment is ignorant beyond help. The vast majority of assets and employees of Chrysler, Ford, and GM are offshore. How does reality manage to escape you?
filed under the 'one more group trying to reinvent the wheel' I cannot see why they simply do not use a flavor of Linux. They can easily modify the source to fit their specific security needs, and they will not have to waste years catching up with the rest of us.
-Cnik
programming in c or c++ is not going to make sofware less secure if you KNOW WHAT THE "F" YOU ARE DOING.
So, apparently it is your contention that, over time, none of the programmers working on the Linux kernel, NFS, NIS, RPC, Apache, Sendmail, emacs, Xwindows, samba, ftpd, Windows NT, IIS, etc., etc., etc., have actually known what they are doing since all of them have produced all manner of security problems?
this is like saying people jump higher wearing nike's than they do in reeboks.
No, its not. Its more akin to saying that you are safer in a car that has seatbelts, airbags, antilock breaks, and a proximity warning system than in an old beater without any of the above. C is the beater, it provides few safeguards against all manner of programming problems.
Process only gets you so far. If all that mattered in the real world was process and all-knowing programmers, we would still all be writing almost all software in FORTRAN and produce it defect free. Last time I looked, most software was written in C/C++ and bug ridden. ( BTW - Don't kid yourself, people have done a heck of a lot of system programming in FORTRAN over the years.) If you can't identify the weaknesses of the C/C++ languages, particularly when writing large software systems, you don't know what you are talking about.
I find it ironic that you think that the "design paradigm" of programs needs to be looked at, but apparently not the "design paradigm" of programming languages, or the effect that their use has when used to produce programs, especially large software systems. Apparently you believe that there are no practical differences that result from using FORTRAN, B, BCPL, C, COBOL, ML, Basic, Pascal, Module 2, Occam, Ada, forth, Prolog, or Lisp since they all produce machine code. Right.
Before you spout off again, try spending some time perusing the material at the Carnegie Mellon Software Engineering Institute. You might learn something.