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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."
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...
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.
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.
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
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.