Intel Helping Asia to Use Linux

sameerdesai writes "Seattletimes is carying this story on Intel helping major countries like China and India to help build Linux machines as an alternative to Microsoft Windows. It definitely looks like both Microsoft and Intel are using the big potential market in Asia to establish a foothold. Microsoft is using its scare tactics to warn of possible lawsuits because Linux violates about 228 patents. What do fellow slashdotters think on trends of OS and hardware in Asia will be?"

Comments

Patent violations

[Lurker McLurker]

Microsoft is using its scare tactics to warn of possible lawsuits because Linux violates about 228 patents.

No, it doesn't. There are areas identified as being possible grounds for a dispute about patents, just as there is in any other piece of software with a large enough amount of code. But Linux has not been shown to violate any patents.

Review this very issue at OpenAsia.org

[davejenkins]

Forgive the shameless plug, but we are trying to address this very issue at OpenAsia.org. Some cursory points:

1. The Chinese market and Indian markets are huge-- beyond your wildest dreams huge. Imagine the combined market of the US and EU in EACH country, but the economic maturity (read potential) of 1955 in the US.

2. Desktops are old skool, and the Chinese are leapfrogging directly to cell phones and notebooks. Think embedded (see interview with Rasterman on our site)

3. The posts here about keyboard compatability are non-sequiter: Chinese have Chinese-language keyboards if they want them; most Indians can speak some English (some are fluent), and Indian scripts are not so hard to do with specific keyboards

4. Linux is racing RACING in these markets-- espeically in India. Linux provides cheap, sturdy platforms for "free", while openning up the world of adaptative platforms and apps without having to go through the Americans.

5. Microsoft has its foothold, but that market is self limiting because of price, piracy, and functionality.

6. Red Hat, SuSE and the other "major" distros are equally limited via piracy (they cannot get money out of China or India). However, Red Hat's marketshare is growing rapidly in China.

7. We welcome any comments and stories based on these topics. (Forgive the membership requirement for posting comments-- we do not sell or transfer registration info.)

Re:Asian pirate issues?

[mallumax]

Mod parent up!

I'm an indian and the rampant piracy is the main reason why open source hasn't caught up much. But in governments and corporations linux is slowly gaining momentum.India's biggest insurance company LIC moved it's entire infrastructure onto linux.LIC moved 25,000 desktops and 1000 servers to linux.(But the conversion was from Unix) Even in most organisations linux use is limited o proxy servers,mail servers and file servers. The biggest concern is support.With Redhat and IBM in the arena now the situation is much better.

But consumer adoption remains a distant dream. The only way linux can win over the consumer is local language computing.Though Hindi is the official language of India ,individual states, whose borders are mostly drawn on socio-linguistic borders, are free to decide their own regional languages for internal administration and education, so there are 22 official languages spoken throughout the country Some of the LUG's are very active in local language computing.Gnome has been translated into Hindi,Bengali and Malayalam.

Over 40% of the computers sold in india are assembled by some neighbourhood vendor.(Brand PC's are more expensive hence not very popular among the pric conscious and in India price is the single most important factor in buying ANYTHING).Allmost all the vendors install pirated copies of windows.If MS ever decides to go after these vendors they will be digging their own grave.