Slashdot Mirror
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."
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.