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."

Comments

Destroying Value and US Jobs

[tjstork]

Yet again an Asian country is deciding to use government action to fund an attack on an existing market. Why is our government never going to do anything to respond? Why is it that we have to compete with a culture that lets its people work for 2 cents a day cloning other people's products with government money?

The US should not even trade with these people.

FRAGEMENTING THE OPEN-SOURCE MOVEMENT

[reporter]

The most important issue is that creating yet another open-source operating system defeats one of the key value propositions of Linux. Namely, there is only one dominant open-source operating system: it is Linux. It can run on almost any platform. If you write an application for Linux, you can practically run it anywhere with, at worst, a quick re-compile.

By contrast, UNIX failed to gain significant marketshare against the onslaught of Windows because there were simply too many incompatible operating systems called UNIX.

If this Japan-China-Korea operating system (JCKOS) gains any significant share in Asia, then we will have 2 incompatiable operating systems: JCKOS and Linux. JCKOS will be similar to Linux but incompatible with it.

What could be the motivation for this stupidity? Japanese society, as a whole, is a Western society, and Japan has slowly been moving from a 2nd-rate Western nation to a 1st-rate Western nation like the United States of America (USA). Unfortunately, due to Japan's proximity to Asian countries like the brutal totalitarian regime called China, there has always been a tension between (1) Japanese bureaucrats who lean towards Asia and (2) Japanese bureucrats who lean towards the USA and the rest of the West. The Western Japanese have usually prevailed over the Asian Japanese. A key example is the USA-Japan defense treaty.

Unfortunately, occasionally, the Asian Japanese prevail in certain matters. We, Slashdotters, should send an e-mail to the Japanese embassy in our Western nations and tell them that this idea for an independent JCKOS is hurtful and harmful to the open-source movement. Also, do the Japanese really want to work with a brutal totalitarian regime like the Chinese, who have routinely beat and kill Tibetan nuns? (reference: Amnesty International and Tibet Online).

... from the desk of the reporter