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."
It seems like if they want the most bank for the buck they should just work on Linux and create their own distribution. Something like Redflag Software Co., however I doubt countries such as China would be interested in something so open as Linux. Unless they had other motives such as installing filtering code deep in the kernel or something to block access to content they don't want you to see.
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?
The three nations are likely to build upon an open-source operating system, such as Linux, and develop an inexpensive and trustworthy system.
Aka: They are going to take Linux or BSD Sources, change some strings and compile them into their own kernel.
-- Put crudely, the world is an extremely large problem instance. (Russel/Norvig Artificial Intelligence)
Instead of corporate lethargy and resistance to change...
We'll have government beaurocracy and spy agencies trying to include sneaky backdoors!
Seriously, though, this doesn't excite me very much. Kinda like China's CPU... and DoD's Linux... although they may make interesting contributions and suggest different approaches to security. And I haven't read the article, so I'm wondering whether it'll be a joint effort with separate translations, or if they'll just go with English.
"The Tree of Liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of Patriots and Tyrants." --Thomas Jefferson
.. 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.
This is a ripe time to force some huge donations from the behemoth!
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
Will it be open source?
Will it be an os designed to screw people over? (as in, drm, tcpa, etc)
Will they simply steal OSS and release it with few changes without honoring the gpl?
Will it be in other languages and availabe to foreigners?
These people are notorious for stealing ideas, and in most cases, modifying them into something better then claiming them as their own. I don't trust foreign companies and goverments any more, and in some cases, less, than I trust my own(US). What is the community to do if they steal it and start selling it stateside?
Candy-Coated Knowledge
an OS to compete with Windows will be made in Finland.
Pull the other one.
KFG
It'll probably end up being a Windows clone so that license fees will not have to be payed to Microsoft. However, Microsoft itself being a behemoth takes years to make new versions. Remember how long it took them to create the NT line that lead up to Windows 2000 and XP? I can't imagine these three countries being any more efficient. Though I will give them credit for their workaholic culture.
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
What's a little monopoly to do, you ask? Why, steal all the money and flip over the game board of course! Hotels scattered as far as the iron can see.
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.
They will probably write it in Engrish
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
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
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.
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.
I think the OSS movement should get nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize - getting China to cooperate with Japan is not easy.
I spent some frustrating months trying to swap files back and forth with a Japanese company. If we had been able to convince our respective corporate IT departments to use Linux, it would have been a lot easier.
Whatever happened to China's Red Flag Linux? They have Server and Desktop flavors available.
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.
christ...this is like saying people jump higher wearing nike's than they do in reeboks.
their design paradigms need to be re-evaluated...every language you program has the SAME end result...machine code. programming in c or c++ is not going to make sofware less secure if you KNOW WHAT THE "F" YOU ARE DOING.
bottom line, c and c++ provide the flexability for system programmers to control every aspcet of thier code...if a routine call is flawed...then write a new one that isnt...or learn to program better...dont blame it on the damn language.
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.
Funny, my wife has no problems using Windows 2000 to read and type Chinese on her computer. Previous versions certainly sucked (I have first hand experience on this having lived in Taiwan for 5 years and had to set up both Linux and Windows computers. And until a few years ago getting it working under Linux was no walk in the park) but the support for the very large variety of input methods for Chinese is pretty impressive.
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/
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.
This is my sig.
To control their destiny? To not have their infrastucture held hostage to foreign export controls? (Can we say PS2/PGP/Supercomputer/Clinton/USA? There, I knew we could.) And since when did American hardware/software (less than 1/20th the world's population) define 'standards'? Standards should be in the data, implementation is still free and open. That's why we have Macs, Suns, StrongArm and PCs. Right?
A 1995 Mac is still a viable platform? Slowly backs away, smiling and nodding, making no sudden moves.....
Unagi isn't served raw.. it's deliciously braised.
I know it, my brain skipped a beat. Does that sometimes, it's a software problem.
Thank you for pointing it out.
Ceci n'est pas une signature
Asia is heavily divided, and there is lots of mistrust going on between those countries. I know in my MBA program students from Japan, South Korea and China barely even talk to each other due to historic tensions and conflicts. I am wondering what level of cooperation will there be between those countries in developing this product? Will they be able to cooperate sufficiently to make anything meaningful?
28FEB2003 ZDNet: "Microsoft signs pact with Chinese government allowing them to view Window's source code." 31AUG2003 Reuters: "China, Japan, Korea to develop Window's replacement." 31AUG2003 Bill Gates: "Doh!"
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.
Use the HURD, microkernels are the way of the future :)
Joking aside, I hope they don't use Linux - it would be good to see this scale of effort into something new, hell maybe even a microkernel based OS.
Linux is doing fine without them, and maybe they could increase the competition...
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.
First off, chinese is not phonetic, its a bunch of pictographs so the pronounciation is irrelavent (well almost, but I'll ignore that). Fact is it's unintelligible between different regions of China. It doesn't matter if the Koreans say it differently from the Cantonese, the character almost always has the same meaning.
Second, in South Korea you're basically illiterate if if you can't read chinese. By the time you reach college text, nearly 60% of words are in chinese characters. That doesn't count chinese words written in Hangul (native korean characters). From what I understand this is also true in Japan.
It makes sense for Japan and Korea to want to work on this considering that their languages incorporate large amounts of chinese.
On another note.
Though english is important for recent additions to the languages, it's phonetic. Most english words are changed quite a bit and are not written in english characters (except when going for style points). Basically they're no longer english words, but rather words derived from english. A bit different from the chinese which is often unaltered. (some chinese words are converted to native words)
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
Less than 20% of the population of Japan was even BORN at the time of WWII. And, I suspect, neither were you. And OF that 20% that were alive during WWII, the bulk of them were toddlers at the time, and had nothing to do, whatsoever, with the war.
Mention "Nanking" to the average Japanese person of my generation, and he/she'll probably just think it's just some new Pokemon. These are not the same warmongering types as their distant ancestors. I *DO* have a handful of Japanese friends my age; some born here in the US, some immigrants. And they are the nicest, most non-violent, people you could imagine; and have sort of an innocence of the evils of the world about them. Certianly, they are far more virtuous than YOU, as your own post proves.
And the country as a whole has have made an astoundingly admirable transition from wartime imperialists to exporters of Pokemon, Hello Kitty, and Dance Dance Revolution; and cars end electronics superior to those you'll find anywhere else. Truely a much better example of "swords to plowshares" than you'll find anywhere else.
cya,
john
Imagine all the people...
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?
31AUG2003 Reuters: "China, Japan, Korea to develop Window's replacement."
31AUG2003 Bill Gates: "Doh!"
....it won't be inexpensive.
...it won't be trustworthy.
I have been living and working here in Osaka for ten years and throughout that time have yet to find a government group that does anything "cheap". Everything is done as a "marunage" which means jacking up the price by hiring a company which hires a company which hires a company to do the work. Most likely most of the work for this will happen in China. I worked at a company that sold the equivalent of an 80 dollar US
because the government will make sure there are all kinds of neat little "secret" ways to get access. That is to say the committee in charge of security will most likely have lots of LDP party members who have never touched a computer involved and they will be saying things like "now, its gonna be used by the government workers and the public be so we gotta be able to have remote root access!"
Sound familiar to anybody?
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