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Sun Announces Linux Deal With Chinese Government
Infonaut writes "Scott McNealy announced today at Comdex that Sun Microsystems has made a deal with China for a million desktop Linux deployments under the new $50/seat licensing plan for Sun's desktop software, which includes its Star Office 7.0 productivity program. Whether this will translate into renewed profits for Sun remains to be seen, but according to McNealy, it represents 'the No. 1 Linux desktop play on the planet'."
According to InternetNews.com (http://www.internetnews.com/fina-news/article.php /3110131)
it's going to be Java based...
"Sun said the China Standard Software Co(CSSC) will use Sun's Java Desktop System as the foundation for standard desktop development and deployment in the People's Republic of China".
Where does Linux fit into that? (Not being a smart-ass, just genuinely curious).
I am a leaf on the wind
Sun says Linux isn't the future, yet they have no qualm of selling a million of them to China :)
Microsoft is pricing itself right out of the developing world. Newsflash: 90% of the world can't afford to fork over $500 for office.
That sound you hear is bricks hitting the ground in Redmond.
From the article:
100% of 1.3 BILLION PEOPLE. That's some hella marketshare right there. Ballmer must be scratching his big hairless monkey-head.
...that narrow-minded politicians or lobbyists don't use a large deployment in a communist country as propaganda against open source.
Of course, taking a cue from the '50s (and from Dr. Strangelove):
"Mr. President! We cannot allow an open-source gap!"
With apologies to Stanley Kubrick...
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
The China Standard Software Co., a consortium of government-funded companies, selected Sun as its preferred technology partner to deploy Linux-based desktops. The deal is part of China's deliberate policy to diversify away from Microsoft.
Hopefully there's more to it than just diversification. Don't get me wrong, heterogeneous computing is a wonderful thing, but I'd also hate to see governments, corporations, or anyone else making decisions based on computing philosophy instead of technical need and justification. (Some might argue that the first is the second, of course.)
The article doesn't mention other reasons why the Chinese government felt Linux was ready to deploy Linux on desktops, why the available software such as StarOffice was adequate, or why Sun was chosen as the "preferred technology partner." I'm very interested to know exactly what it is about the overall computing infrastructure of the Chinese government that made it choose all of the above. What technical differences exist between their situation and, say, that of the U.S.?
The coolest voice ever.
so they switched from their American Windows based overlords to the new American Java based overlords. good move
did you forget to take your meds?
1. Make one million Linux desktops with a secret backdoor.
2. Have US military pay you for software to invade backdoor.
3. Have China secretly pay you to patch the backdoor.
4. ???
5. Profit!
The deal is for one license. McNealy was initially puzzled at how a single license could possibly be enough for the Chinese population, but when your stock is trading at $3/share, $50 is $50.
In the meantime, the quiet hum of CD duplicators echoes across the middle kingdom...
You must mean BeOS?
Pretty Pictures!
Mandrake is quasi-commerical and they've always favoured KDE over GNOME as well.
" the KDE Project, which is entirely aimed at pleasing the slashdot peanut gallery with pointless eye-candy. KDE features are thrown into the mix with little or no regard for usability, or even good taste. The end result is disasterous, as can be seen by anyone unforunate enough to be forced into using it."
I have no idea where you came up with this. There is no pointless eye-candy, and I don't have any of it enabled if it does in fact exist...and I find KDE to be extremely functional in all respects. GNOME on the other hand never seems to work for me, and as far as usability goes, whey the hell do they have that second menubar on the top of the screen and another on the bottom? Getting GNOME set up the way one would like out of the box is a nightmare.
I can see it now...:
Pssst, hey, you wanna buy a cracked version of Linux for only $2.88
I just knew that some idiot would start trolling about KDE vs Gnome.
The reason Gnome has commercial support is purely and simply due to there being a company producing a commercial version of Gnome back when Sun and HP etc were looking at Linux Desktops.
Yada Yada Trolltech, QPL/GPL, C++, yada yada.
Don't worry about what anyone says. The reason Gnome was chosen was because of Helixcode, pure and simple. Sun and the rest are businesses and as we all ought to know, business deals with business. If Trolltech were producing a commercial KDE, you would have seen something very different happening.
As for Ximian being the future of SuSE and KDE being "legacy" - be afraid, be very afraid. Novells only interest in Ximian was MONO, which happens to fit their new Linux story very well.
Go over to go-mono.org and read Miguels report on the recent Microsoft Professional Developer Conference. Look for references to XAML and other plans Microsoft have for Longhorn. Check Miguels assessment of what this means for non-Microsoft desktop Operating Systems. Then check his "solution" to this.
Once you've done that, come back here and tell me with a straight face that Ximian gnome as the standard Linux desktop is a Good Thing.
Someone tell Sun there is an easier way to make $50M than having to work this hard. Simply tell Microsoft you'd be willing to sue a major Linux distributor and the checks will start coming your way. Act irrational and scream something incoherent about source code and intellectual property and you might get $100M.
I guess this qualifies as a 1,2,3 Profit!
This is good news for Sun and all, I'm sure. But I think it's more of a marketing win for them then a financial win. $50/license x 1,000,000 licenses is 50 million dollars. That's nothing to sneeze at but to put it in perspective, a little while ago Sun was hemorrhaging One *Billion* Dollars (finger in side of mouth) per *quarter*. So I don't think this deal by it's self is going to make a big impact on Sun's finances. But it's a good start, and certainly lends credibility to part of their business model.
I made $80 selling Knoppix CDs "on the street" in Vancouver, BC, Canada last saturday ($5 each). And I told them it was free and they could download it themselves if they wanted, and that to install Linux they'd need to download a complete distribution. People seemed to like the Idea.
1. First they ignore you.
2. Then they laugh at you.
3. Then they say it's a toy OS.
4. Then they say it's great.
5. Then they change their minds again.
6. Then they write it off as crap somemore.
7. Then they realise their market share is going down harder and faster than New Zealand in a World Cup semi final.
8. Then they team up with an unethical has been company in an attempt damage you.
9. Then they bite the bullet and rip off somebody elses distro.
10. Then they proclaim they are the shining light of the OS and all should follow them.
Nerd: Derogatory term typically directed at anybody with a lower Slashdot ID than you.
Remember software != normal products. Just like MS can afford to cut the price of windows for certain countries when people hear about linux, Sun can afford this. It is for them either 50million dollars they get, or they don't get. The investment has already been made.
Of course if this is going to work in the long run is anyones guess. Can you continue development when you only get $50 a seat? MS says no and charges more then tenfold. I hope sun is right. For 50 bucks an OS noone is going to bother with piracy in the west.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
This is good for everyone. It's good for Sun, who will hopefully continue to stay afloat now that they seem to be scoring some new big customers. They also will be more strongly motivated to stick with the Linux game in earnest this time around instead of being schizophrenic about it. It's good for Linux, with yet another big name player now firmly in the open source camp. And it's good for all of us, who depend on OpenOffice in order for our Linux desktops to remain viable and interoperable in an office suite dominated world.
The only party for whom this is a bad thing is Microsoft. And that's exactly how it should be. While it is certainly way too early to declare the Great Satan of Redmond defeated, we can call this one more important step on that journey. I applaud Sun for this and hope they score more Linux wins.
Tired of FB/Google censorship? Visit UNCENSORED!
They want one...million...desktops.
Nobody in China buys software.
And its now official...Linux is for commies.