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Debian to be Marketed to Japan and China
darthcamaro writes "Thanks to Sun Wah Linux and VA Linux Systems Japan, Debian is about to get some major exposure in Asia according to a report.
Debian developer Matthew Garrett told internetnews.com that Debian has always been one of the most international Linux distributions. "It's wonderful to see initiatives that will increase our representation in countries with a growing interest in Linux," he added. "It's especially heartening to see this move coming from commercial enterprises, as it demonstrates that free software can work with business."" There's also a post on Newsforge as well.
how is this new and exciting news? Yes yes, we've known linux is good for years, and we've known that it can work in business. Do I have to keep hearing about it all the time? I've used debian before, it's a great distro. I do think it's great how it's making it's rounds in asia, but linux needs to make serious inroads into India. In India linux usage hasn't increased much in the past year I've read.
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One of the selling points of OSS businesses is that it's (usually) cheaper than proprietary closed-source software, but that point is negated by the fact that piracy is so rampant here that every piece of software is "free". Therefore, Windows wins out since it has the most hardware support, and all the (warezed) games run on it, and that it also runs MS Office.
;) ). Governments are getting more aware of the issues involved with security and transparency of software systems. I think the future is bright, but it'll take time getting there.
Sure, OO.o and all that is available, but MS has a head start with their stranglehold, and everyone just uses what everyone else uses. Price isn't an issue. For home users, support isn't an issue either since computer hardware shops that sold you the computer will do the support for you (whether that copy of Windows is licensed or not). Basically, what a typical home user does when his box is messed up is take it to the shop, and some bored technician will just reformat and reinstall things.
For big businesses, they want a "reputable" brand and therefore go Microsoft. MS has a lot of mindshare, plus they have a monopolistic stranglehold on the iT industry anyway, so Windows and MS is accepted way of running computers.
It's not all bleak though... OSS is getting momentum around these parts. In Malaysia, there has been a drive by the government to OSS-ify their IT infrastructure (this made a few Microsofties cry
"Backups are for wimps. Real men upload their data to an FTP site and have everyone else mirror it." -- Linus Torvalds
Korea should wonder? Asia goes all the way west to Iran, north to Siberia and south to Indonesia, including the itsybitsy country of India. Korea is just a tiny speck compared to greater Asia.
For any debian users who don't know this; change all 'stable' to 'testing' or 'unstable' in /etc/apt/sources.list and run 'apt-get update' and 'apt-get dist-upgrade' as root.
"A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming, is not worth knowing" - Alan Perlis
The asian mindset doesn't really understand the open source concept and would prefer reliable software with a strong manufacture behind it
I am sorry but that just bull. The reason why there is more microsoft products in asia is because they microsoft market them well. There are lots and lots of opensource projects that have started from asia just not popular in the US and Europe.
I think its a really good initiative. This is what Open Source and Linux really needs, letting people know what is available to them.
I have never understood why Debian does not have "Enterprise Acceptance". I work for a Fortune 500 software company. We have some products which require kernel work. Most of the developers complain about the constant changes in the Red Hat and SuSE kernels. Yet Debian Stable, has little change in comparision. You would think we would support the Debian stable kernel. The low volume of change in stable make it a lower cost to maintain for us.
Oh Well, I am sure some MBA formula can show me I am wrong.
Where's the basis for this comment? Open source wasn't working too well in <insert country name here> in 1995, yet 10 years later it seems to be catching on, despite "the <insert country name here> mindset". Maybe mindset has nothing to do with it and it's just that open source is still ramping up in Asia?
Regarding the AC's "kiasu" crack, English has a word for "greed", does that mean we are all greedy? Some countries may use the word more often in their vocabulary, but that also applies to non-Asian countries (especially if you take your stereotypes from the movie "Wall Street").
This statement is just wrong, if anything the "asian" mindset (more specifically, China, and Japan in this case) promote working for the good of the whole over the individual. It would seem that this fits right in line with open source ideals.
The asian mindset doesn't really understand the open source concept and would prefer reliable software with a strong manufacture behind it. I don't see this working too well.
The asian mindset doesn't exist. If it did, there'd only be one language, one country, one party, and no murder. Cops will then go unemployed since everyone agrees with each other.
The truth is, if you take a survey of ten people, there's bound to be a disagreement on something. Some get open source (does Ruby mean anything to you?), most have never heard about it.
Try to bundle two billion people's mindset into one, and there is no way you can succeed, no matter what your anecdotal evidence says.
This is nonsense. The real reason is that Linux/BSD currently have poorly integrated support for CJK characters. There are lots of different standards and programs, it's a pain to input them using the keyboard and everything is incompatible. You might need to lots of additional configuration to do a task as simple as editing a text file in the input method you prefer.
There have been concerted effort with Linux...
Apparently China is on board with Linux. And the vendor is big evil Linux-hating Sun Microsystems! (thousands of trolls' heads explode over this paradox)
-- Microsoft is the most expensive commodity operating system and office suite vendor in the marketplace.
Yes, you're right. It couldn't possibly have anything to do with the fact that Japan is a major "westernized" country with large trade agreements with the US and other western countries, or that China is the largest economy of people in the world (3rd largest after EU and US in terms of economic power, I think?) now could it? Absolutely not.
By the way - learning proper grammar structure would help. What you're to say is obscured by your illiteracy (s/can fit/people/, s/americans/Americans/).
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
You're rated insightful?
How about you RTFA.
It's about a Japanese company and a Chinese company teaming up together to work on Debian.
"Ignorant Americans" has nothing to do with this. Mentioning Japan and China but not Korea is not ignorant, it's accurate reporting.
Of course, information gets lost once posted on slashdot, and their readers who don't RTFA stretch it way out of context. Thanks!
I've been a Debian developer since 1997. I like Debian a lot, and still think it's the best thing out there in many ways.
But "just run unstable in production environments" doesn't cut it for a lot of people.
http://www.welton.it/davidw/
What a load of crap. I live and work in China, write a lot of Chinese, and I use Debian exclusively.
Unless you're running stable (which really is better suited for servers than desktops), you're just spreading FUD. I run testing, FWIW.
Previously, I used XCIN for input, although I used SCIM these days.
It always baffles me when people are like, "Distribution X" doesn't have Y! Especially with Debian, which has nearly every piece of free software under the sun packaged. You just install the packages you want. Sheesh.
No you are right on this one. Its not really community based and I am no fan of commercial distros, but the question is how much are they going to give back to the community. I believe CJK support has a lot to catch up on compared with the rest of FOSS projects. So much so that anything is better than nothing.
In the CJK world there aren't enough i10n developers for the amount of work that needs to be done. (Yes there are some exceptions like Mozilla that is lucky enough to have whole teams of active i10n developers.) I'm hoping that this would at least contribute to make more resources availble for the CJK development as a whole. Make available more translated documentation, CJK compatible packages, and truly pre-configured one-click-to-CJK distributions.
Also its a good way to let people in CJK countries know there is a better alternative out there. I feel optimistic and believe that FOSS awareness is improving. Though not all of them are equally bad there is still a lot to be desired. For instance many popular web sites in Japan still use commercial-consumer-centric-OS's Shift-JIS character encoding despite availability of UTF-8 and ISO-2022-JP.