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Japan, China, S Korea Agree To Standardize Linux
Ooi writes "Japan Today News reports: 'The governments of Japan, China and South Korea have agreed to work together to come up with an alternative computer operating system to reduce reliance on Microsoft's Windows, the Yomiuri and Nihon Keizai newspapers reported Sunday.
According to the reports, the three countries will help their private sectors develop Linux, an open-source OS that can be copied and modified freely. The agreement was signed in Beijing on Saturday by senior government officials from the three countries.'
Australian IT has an article on the issue prior to the meeting." A few weeks ago, I spoke at the Asia OSS meeting in Hanoi of which the three gov'ts above are also members. There's a very serious commitment to OSS especially among the governments represented there.
so here are 3 countries which have tradionally been 'not too friendly' with each other that can agree to standardise on a single installation of Linux...
This is cool, but the $24,000 dollar question is - will they go with KDE or Gnome as the default ??
Surely this should be a slashdot poll!
Asian distro defaults...
(o) Vi and Gnome
(o) Vi and KDE
(o) Emacs and Gnome
(o) Emacs and KDE
(o) Cowboy Neal is my interface and text editor, you insensitive clod!
You can't expect to wield supreme executive power, just because some watery tart threw a sword at you
It's all well and good these countries developing Linux, but will it remain open source?
Can open source be inforced with these governmental development?
So how much can we expect Linux and OSS to be exploited for oppression and control of the population? China already takes a lot of measures to control the internet (students get arrested just for entering key phrases like "taiwan", "human rights" and "democracy" into google), if they can control the OS too what is to stop them from using that to further control (and while the GPL forces it to be open source, they can easily make it a political crime to use any clean/lite version of their distro)
It has been clear for some years that most countries are very unhappy with the existing OS monopoly. Given how critical IT has become, it is simply unacceptable to rely on a single, foreign vendor like Microsoft. Linux (in some evolved or forked form) will be the standard OS everywhere, at least outside the US. Other open source projects, like FreeBSD, may also conquer quite a few markets. Paradoxically, the only solution is an free, open source Windows, but I doubt Microsoft is so brave!
I'm just hoping Christmas Island joins in too.
Why ?
These 3 countries are out to save a buck and at the same time try to get a bit of traditional American IT industry, OS making.
I think Americans in generally should be less worried over telemarketing jobs going to India, this is the real threat, the risk that high tech IT jobs moves east, far east.
SCO will have you in its sights now!
(1.2 billion Linux users) x ($699) =
PROFIT!
Geez. With this, Darl might approach the riches of the head of Ikea, who recently bumped Gates off the "richest dude" list.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
Its a free open source operating system that is a clone of Windows NT. Reactos website
I have a fetish for traffic cones
This is horrible news! With Sweden claiming the world's richest business man owning IKEA here , Bill Gates needs all the support he can get to jump back on top. If we all work together and pledge to purchase a copy of Windows XP Pro and Office 2003 Pro we can make the dream happen... we can put Bill back on top and win one for America!! Down with crappy swedish furniture manufacturers and up with global monopolistic software giants! USA! USA! USA! USA! USA!
Wasn't that the Idea with Red Flag Linux (or whatever it is called... Slashdot's search feature rarely returns anything that has my search terms)? Will South Korea and Japan go for Red Flag or will they start a-fresh?
At least China already has some experience in this market. Kudos for supporting OSS and maybe (if that actually write any code) helping Linux improve even faster.
So in the near future, will we see SCO/RIAA file 1.3 billion lawsuits , 1 for each person in China, Japan and Korea? That would be a fabulous waste of money. They can just issue 1.3 billion trial delays, and SCO can take a rest for 30 thousand years!
stuff |
For example, the apt-get software is a key tool in the system administrator's arsenel. It has a relatively simple command line syntax, but it is obviously in English, and therefore would pose a problem for Japanese, Chinese or Korean administrators wanting to come rapidly up to speed. What would people think about tools like apt-get being re-engineered to include a language abstraction layer, so locales could be exchanged like plugins, to customise the tool for new countries? In fact, this type of localisation need not be limited merely to language changes. Entire cultural paradigms could be replicated via a plug-in system. For example, in Chinese markets the apt-get package management model could be described as a yum-cha cart, bringing tasty morsels of .deb packages to each table, or system. The package database would be the little card the attendant checks when you receive each plate, or in this case, .deb package
I look forward to the community's response!
These govts. are known for their thight-handedness and disregard for world law. Once the OS is ready they will ditch GPL and use the OS as they fit. Will SCO sue them? Will Linus Torvalds travel to Beijin to "implement" GPL and "force" them to comply? I seriously doubt it. He "may" have an unfortunate "accident" which leaves him brain-dead. Darl McBride would be declared "enemy of state" and incarcerated and spiked in a Bamboo shoot -:)) I for one think it is dangerous
I wonder how this will fare for Red Flag Linux (English)? Nothing like a government-sponsored monopoly to cut into profits...
$ echo "ceci n'est pas une pipe" | sed -Ee 's/(eci n|pas )//g'
These 3 countries are out to save a buck ...
Nothing wrong with that.
and at the same time try to get a bit of traditional American IT industry, OS making.
Since Linux is not traditional American IT industry software, there is no technological drain happening here. This decision does however have the potential to shrink the market share of a certain technologically stagnated and sloppy American OS vendor but that is only to be expected when this American OS vendor's product sucks bigtime. Another factor is the simple fact that given the USA's obsession with intelligence gathering nobody trusts this American OS vendor not to cave into the pressure to spike its product with backdoors
Only to idiots, are orders laws.
-- Henning von Tresckow
Kind of an interesting analogy. This could be similar to the Big Iron vs PC issues that happened during the 80's. Everyone wants the speed, responsiveness, and immediate feedback of the PC. From a core OS standpoint, Microsoft just doesn't provide this. If you want a change, such as how it handles your system of written communication, you either pay the big bucks and DIY or wait for them to do it for you. Security issues tend to take longer with Microsoft. Etc, etc...
Microsoft won't ever go away. But I fee that they will become less relevant.
The simple truth is that interstellar distances will not fit into the human imagination
- Douglas Adams
Some judges may beg to differ.
y =c net&tag=st.ne.1002.tgif%3fst.ne.fd.gif.b
http://news.com.com/2100-1040-232565.html?legac
At the very least, given the big number of hardware companies in those countries (added those of Taiwan that probably wasn't in the agreement because China doesn't recognize it, but whose interests lie in the same line), this agreement will help improve Linux driver support.
That's good news and no mistake.
Rome taught me patience and assiduous application to detail. Virtues which temper the boldness of great, general views.
The development will be done by the private sector, but will be funded and co-ordinated by representatives from the member states.
I'll believe it when I see Korean websites that are actually usable for people running Linux. In the Korean web, IE6 on Windows is pretty much required to do anything useful at all.
Korean Ebay is IE6 only, Korean banks offer internet banking only to IE6 users, Many Korean government websites don't function properly with anything but IE6, etc. etc.
I've been seeing articles about Korea's "committment to Linux" for a long time, but I've yet to see any evidence that the Korean web is anything other than completely and utterly owned by Microsoft.
True, but even using windows and not paying for it puts the country effectively at the mercy of Microsoft. Should they no longer support local languages or worse, break existing installs during an update/service pack, suddenly you've got a country full of users who are SOL and quite unproductive.
As the old line says, "Don't put all your eggs in one basket"
*looking around my house* Windows 2k, XP, 2k, 98, 2k... yea... I'm screwed.
Help Brendan pay off his student loans
For Japan, the most wanted goodness in Linux is security, which is considered higher than that of MS Windows. Money is not that big issue for Japanese government, as Japanese electronics giants such as Fujitsu which are close to the governemnt are traditionally big for their SPARC servers. Migrating to Linux may be short loss for those companies but killing license fee to MS and Sun will offset it.
For Korea, the most wanted is cheapness of Linux, that will help the country to grow without paying licence fee to the US company.
For China, to kill rampant piracy to meet global standard, Linux is ideal solution, and of course it is free of security backdoor that may be present in software made in the US as GNU/RMS repeats it. You may worry about China use Linux as a tool to suppress free speech, but considering this is a project of 3 countries, such aspect won't be in its contents.
Though 3 countries have different causes, as the initiative of so-called Open Source development is still in the hand of the Western people and internationalization of current OSS is poor, it is no wonder those countries start their own movement.
could this set the precident for the future? think about it, IKEA primarily makes products with "some asemberly required" now is there anything out there that you can think of that might "require some building" that could topple Bill Gates off his perch?
A government should aso not allow it's entire IT infrastructure to be remote controlled from a foreign nation. A state monopoly is good when it achieves something private companies can not handle, or when you talk about critical things with few/no alternatives(e.g. water supply). (Replacing)Windows comes pretty close to both descriptions.
10 ?"Hello World" life was simple then
This decision does however have the potential to shrink the market share of a certain technologically stagnated and sloppy American OS vendor but that is only to be expected when this American OS vendor's product sucks bigtime.
Aww. Red Hat's not THAT bad...
May I ask why you think that IT infrastructure is a sector that government should not touch? I mean, is there a real reason for believing that the private sector is superior in this area?
Reality is defined by the maddest person in the room
Here is my suggestion for an icon for the head of IKEA, since Gates is no longer Top Borg:
click here
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
are you retarded? yes. here's why: a monopoly isn't about having the most users, it's about control. linux can't be a monopoly because no-one owns it or controls it in the way MS controls Windows. users have the choice, and the idea of this choice is built into the GPL such that it cannot be removed.
monopolies are capable of being very good, for example they can make things standardised and there's no waste caused by repeating what's already been done. monopolies are ONLY bad when they act in such a way to remove a user's choice, otherwise survival of the fittest still applies.
I think you confused "Monopoly" and "Monoculture". The Windows monoculture is bad because it gives control to a single company with their own interests as top priority (just as many other privately owned companies really). Linux, on the other hand, does not seek profit per se, companies making distros do by offering support and added value with their own code on top of it.
Still, no monoculture is good. I don't think it'd be good to see Linux everywhere, I'd like it if there was more than one tool to do the job.
---- Take the Space Quiz!
Unfortunately the OSS conference at Hanoi quickly digressed into an argument on which country would wind up being on the bottom of the tower at the end of 7 moves.
Even those who arrange and design shrubberies are under considerable economic stress at this period in history.
An OS monopoly wouldn't be a too bad thing, really. If true OS, you'd still have the ability to choose from several product because the OS certified licenses aren't allowed to bind you to certain products iirc. Besides, if you really like a certain project but don't agree with things,, you can always fork and take matters into your own hands.
Anyways, the MS monopoly doesn't have to be horrible either. If MS decided to open up ALL win32 APIs, used PURE and UNENCRYPTED XML markup for Office documents, made all components in the OSes optional with an option to not install them in the first place and a few more things I can't think of atm, then the MS monoply would be allot less worse. Of course, this is Slashdot, people around here will always find something about MS to throw a fit at, just like some pro-MS sites will always manage to find something about Linux/OSS to throw a fit about.
Hate me!
Easy enough to negate that. Have some of the Japanese contributors make a manga/anime girl mascot. If they really want the sysadmin to dig in, encode a hentai version of her somewhere in the source code. If you make it so applying a patch will decrypt a new pic for them, you'll also solve most future stability/security issues...
"Common sense will be the death of us all"
It's funny that such anti-Linux comments pop up frequently, yet the posters don't seem to have problems with the US-Army's (and many other governmental organization's) "Microsoft-only" policy.
Just like with cars, cameras, cellphone technology, etc. They won't be satisfied with playing third fiddle to the Japanese and Chinese, they'll make their own distro, just to be different. Of course, like Kia cars are built locally from Mazda/Ford specs, and like Daewoos are built from GM plans, this will be built from a common base (probably Asianux) and touted as an all-Korean project. What interests me, though, is that this is even being considered as an option. Honestly, I haven't met a single Korean in my 114 months here who has even heard of linux, let alone one who'd actually consider using it. This country is completely hooked on windows, internet explorer and ActiveX. Check out a few typical korean websites for more flash, javascript, popups and other assorted evilness than you can probably bear...
L
No, it's not that.
Microsoft are considered to have a monopoly because any new OS is caught in the chicken-and-egg problem: nobody will use the new OS because it doesn't support hardware/software, but nobody will code hardware/software support for it because - since nobody is using it - doing so doesn't gain them any customers.
Microsoft may not have acted to create that monopoly, but that isn't necessary for a monopoly to thrive. The last mile problem is still grounds for monopoly regulation of telecoms even though the telecom firms didn't invent the problem.
how can you be sure their will be 1.2 billion new users???
just becuase the software is made in that country (by the PRIVATE SECTOR, only aided by the gov. like it says in the article) doesn't mean that everyone in the oountry will instantly switch..
I've liked in Japan for two years now, I personaly knew only a handful of people that ran any for of *nix on their home computers, and I have met 0 people in Japan that do. People wont just switch, particularly people in asia were it takes decades to change any laws or ways of thinking...
and if you assume that all 1.2billion ppl in those three countries will be ussing that os becuase it's made in that country, then you'd have to say that EVERYONE in america uses microsoft windows no matter what becuase their are american and it is an unwritten law.. if you said that, i'm pretty sure some people would not be happy.
No.
...then (s)he must understand English regardless of your nationality.
I use Debian and I can see messages like below
"Package list wo yomikondeimasu"
"Ika no tokubetu package ga install saremasu"
"26 upgraded, 41 newly installed, sakujo: 146 ko horyuu: 12 ko"
mostly Japanese message.
But,IMHO,apt-get localization is rather irrelevant;One can't administer system if one don't have enough intelligence to understand relatively simple apt-get messages.
In these internet days , language localization for administrative tools are nonessential and unimportant...every administrator should learn some level of English.
Someday sysad may get a mail from foregin Mailer-Daemon
So is a Linux monopoly better than a Microsoft monopoly all of a sudden? Some may say yes, but no monopoly is good.
I hate to break the blindingly obvious to you but:
No one has a monopoly on Linux!
They can't! It's free software. I can sell Linux, you can sell Linux, we all can sell Linux. And we can all have our own versions too.
You're worrying about a problem that does not exist.
Some may say this is a good thing, but to me this is government intereferance in a sector they should not touch.
And why shouldn't they touch it? So they can keep sending money off to a foreign country for something that could be handled domestically?
God forbid the g'ovt step forward and support something which benfits everyone, and only gets BETTER the more people use it.
The g'ovt has no business getting people to come together and help each other find a solution to a common problem at little or no cost?
It might destroy someone's profits and as we all know, once you make a profit with your business, the gov't is supposed to do anything in their power to continue that profit, even if your business model is totally outmoded.
Life is too short to proofread.
For a moment we'll assume that they are actually going to succeed in cloning a version of windows before that one is several versions obsolete and used by almost nobody. And we'll assume that they implement enough of Win32 to make it a good server OS (DirectX can wait), and implement all the server infrastructure that so many servers for NT/2k use, and that they reverse-engineer any cruft they come across that's undocumented but used by some important program, and get copies of all those API calls implemented properly, and all the other crap thy have to get done. (Again, they have to hit a moving target while they do all this.)
Assuming all that, what happens when they get a cease-and-desist letter from Microsoft owing to the fact that their entire GUI is an almost exact rip-off of Windows NT, including bundled apps like the text editor, and that they all use the same name as the stuff in Windows. What's the use of an OS that's no longer being developed owing to the fact that its core team has just been shipped off to a Gulag camp somewhere in Antarctica? It's not going to keep up with Microsoft very long under those conditions.
You can get "-w mode" also by putting a set nowrap line in either /etc/nanorc or ~/.nanorc, depending on whether you want to make it the system default or your personal default. That should do it.
----
Open mind, insert foot.
Unfortunately, the meeting has not invited developers nor comapnies publicly and especially to comapnies that are not located in Beijing. The organizer of the event seems to have ignored the fact that this is an OSS event.
An interesting observation from participants was the question about continuous effort and follow-up actions. Instead of hosting workshop to discuss future co-operation, visits to local companies was arranged.
During the meeting, Redfalg CEO has claimed they have build a new distribution "ASIANUX" as the foundation of all Asia Linux distributions.
The question is that do we yet need another standard given LSB has been publicly accepted and who is RF to claim such statement...
Being virtually freely copyable, software is coming close to fitting economists' definition of a public good - something that can't be provided to one person without providing it to everyone.
Government action is the only sustainable way to fund public goods, because of the free rider problem. This announcement was only a matter of time - and it's only the beginning.
Andrew Klaassen
I am happy to see the wider use of Linux and unhappy to see some of the xenophobic reactions every time that an Asian country announces support for open source.
Some have gone as far as calling this unamerican, thereby furthering the hollow arguments put forth by C. Mundie and co. just a few years ago.
There is a lot to be happy about:
*More bug fixes and more features
*Wider and larger hardware support
*Better internationalizaton support
And for those of us that also care about free software, I think the OS will have a slow ripple effect throughout the respective societies of Korea, China and Japan.
Eventually, it will take time, students will be empowered to start their own businesses by having the right tools at their disposal; those in Civil Society will also have an easier time finding likeminded individuals and building issue communities that use the power of open source software to coordinate their activities. All of this will take time, but it is possible.
I think FLOSS, if nothing else, opens a window into altruism and the opportunity to build a more open tomorrow. Those ideas will be the seed of change over a few generations.
Pragmatism as an ideology is not particularly pragmatic in the long term. Keep it in mind when you dismiss Free Software
Apart from the Chinese limitation on the number of child processes that can be forked... this sounds like a reasonable proposal.