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South Korea Jumps To Open Source Software
mormop writes "Following on from the news that a far-eastern Linux distro is on the way, silicon.com is carrying news that South Korea is switching $300,000,000 worth of PCs to Open Source Software.
The only question now is will Steve Ballmer be capable of covering the sort of distance needed to pull back all these switching governments before collapsing with exhaustion, or is he en route for the Air Miles record?"
OTOH you need to buy service instead.
If you're saying that you have to spend on service for OSS what the price of commercial software would be PLUS their service, fine. That also indicates a shitty product if service costs that much. Assuming it's equally as easy to install and maintain as the off the shelf software, then there's a net loss in the development jobs.
I'm not advocating anything, I just think that it is important to remember that jobs are lost due to OSS as well as foreign outsourcing. On /., we focus on losses due to outsourcing, but ignore the OSS losses (because this community, including me, tends to be pro-OSS and anti-offshore). In some cases, those losses are the same, when OSS work is done in foreign countries. If you want to be protectionist by making it harder to off-shore work, shouldn't you also be trying to limit OSS?
You start with agreeable arguments (People doing things for free in their spare time means less jobs in the field), and yet reach a very weird (and dangerous?) conclusion: We should limit what people do in their spare time for free.
This is rediculous, capitalism should encourage resources that come for free. Jobs that are created by artficial limitations and would otherwise not be required are not really good for the economy as they may seem.
Might as well pay these people that same money to do anything that's really required, while getting the original service for free.
Maybe the oxygen producing factories are not making enough money now? Jobs are being lost. We should cut down trees and limit their ability to create oxygen because those trees are hurting the ability of oxygen creation factories to make a living. I see this as equivalent.
Not everyone is in IT I would agree. But just imagine if MS went away tomorrow, where would you be? Even non-IT people can benefit from learning other tools besides MS.
I'd be in more trouble if the sun suddenly exploded tomorrow, which is about as likely. What IS more likely is using an obscure OSS package, then the kid who wrote it, say, gets kicked out of college, and doesn't have broadband at his parent's house, so he can't support it any more. Or, the OSS company that wrote it goes belly up. Call me nuts, but I feel a bit more secure with one of the largest companies in the world backing up my software than some college kids working out of their dorms.
The Korean decision to move to open source was likely motivated by last week's surprise decision by NTT to migrate its server setup from Solaris to Linux and to aggressively develop Linux. NTT joined the Open Source Development Laboratory to improve Linux code, according to "NTT Mulls Joining Global Consortium For Linux Development".
Despite all the racist Korean hatred against the Japanese, the Koreans habitually emulate the Japanese. For example, all the Korean chaebols like Samsung are duplicates of the conglomerates that operated in pre-WWII Japan. Samsung emulates most of the technological trends of its Japanese competitors. Further, NTT commands wide respect in Korea itself, and its decision to support Linux certainly spurred the Koreans to follow suit.
The only losers in this whole affair are Microsoft and, of course, Sun Microsystems. As a company, Sun Microsystems may not survive past 2005, given that it is now expected to lose about $1 billion in FY2004. (reference: "Sun warns of hefty loss")
On a side note, the Koreans supporting Linux is good news for democracy in Korea. Korea has been a totalitarian dictatorship up until about 10 years ago; Korea still has the largest and best equipped military force in Asia. Since Linux is open-source, it would be impossible for the Korean government (or any other government, for that matter) to arbitrarily stick a piece of spy software into Linux to monitor its citizens.
Hopefully, the Koreans will abandon that conspiratory project with the Chinese to develop an independent operating system (OS) that is incompatible with Linux. (reference: "Asian trio to replace Windows") Such an OS would be a convenient place for the Chinese (including the Taiwanese and Hong Kongers) to stick a piece of spy software to monitor its citizens.
Asian nations never pay for software anyway. Most of there Windows software is pirate - its free now so why bother changing?
Asia is filled with people who administer computers poorly. They may have poor English ability and thus don't understand the standards, they may just be apathetic, they may just be inexperienced with computers, etc. Whatever the reason, it doesn't take more than a glimpse at your logfiles to realize that a disproportional number of worm probes, virus emails, spam, etc. come from Asian IPs. (And then you realize it must be even higher, because most worms have algorithms that favor probing "local" IPs.) In the past, these people have been running Microsoft products poorly. Now they will be running Linux products poorly. This means Linux is likely to move up a lot in any list of most r00t3d systems, both by absolute numbers and by proportions.
If you're optimistic, you might hope that Linux's open source culture teaches them something about running machines properly, writing documentation in their native languages, etc. Then these attacks would decrease. But I'm not optimistic. I've never gotten a decent response back from Asia when reporting these sorts of things to ISPs, and I do from elsewhere in the world. I have a very low opinion of their technical competence, and I don't think a switch to Linux will fix that.