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?"

Comments

Logical for Non-US companies

[Dark Paladin]

One thing that companies outside the US (Germany, China, South Korea, South American nations, etc) is that employing Microsoft is really only good for Microsoft.

But by switching to Open Source for the government, there are several benefits that "trickle down":

1. Programmers within the specified nations are now employed, which keeps money inside the country.

2. The advances that come from Open Source software can be then used in businesses inside the country, which reduces there expenses, and if more development/administration is needed, they can look inside their own country rather than going elsewhere.

3. Exportability. If you have a country with top engineers in Open Source, and another country happens to need those, you are now in a better position to export those services.

I'm not quite with the "governments should make laws forcing Open Source down people's throats", but I am in support of measures that will give them control over their own software destiny.

Granted - as long as they play by the rules of the GPL, BSD, and other licenses.

Blizzard

[lobsterGun]

I would think that this would mean that we will be seeing more games coming out for Linux (at least from Blizzard).