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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.
SCO will have you in its sights now!
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.
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
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
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.