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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.
Maybe Debian will finally start moving again. I understand there have been problems, but I really wish something would happen.. and as much as I love it as a server OS, I dislike spending my time updating every package or recompiling half of the software when I do a clean install to a server.. then I'm stuck with some very old packages that, though I don't use, I fear may be dangerous. Maybe I should use Sarge?
Off topic a bit, but what is a good distro for servers in general? I've always picked Debian due to the fact it feels Unixish to me, and can be very cleanly installed. Local Community College uses Red Hat, and the SysAdmin swares by it. Any comments?
Proceed with Format (Y/N)? Y
That, and the fact that piracy is so rampant here that practically everything is "free", makes it hard for OSS to compete.
Does that mean that one of the big reasons why Linux
is a strong competitor in the west is because it's
free & the competitors aren't?
There have been concerted effort with Linux, however, and it has some concerted long term backing. China, Japan, and South Korea are working together on this - there have various reports like this in April 2004, or this in Spetember 2003. The notable aspect is that, as mentioned here, this isn't a short term program to adopt Linux, and results shouldn't be expected immediately - rather it is a long term plan to reposition themselves to be more independent of Microsoft.
A large part of the push is making sure Linux support for Chinese, Japanese and Korean character sets and translations is robust and well developed - think of it as a massive scale localization project that reaches down as deep as they can get it.
How this current Debian push fits into the grand scheme of things (part of the larger project, at least in some sense, or just an independent push) is not clear to me, but regardless it represents a growing desire in Asia to move to a more flexible system that can be adapted to their specific needs. This isn't an attempt at promotion so much as a growing interest from China, Japan and Korea. Expect to see more such stories over the next 5 to 10 years.
Jedidiah.
Craft Beer Programming T-shirts
I'm all for supporting truly Free and independent software like Debian, but the problem of which release should be unleashed upon the general public?
Stable? Sadly, not an option due to its complete lack of support for modern hardware or moderm features. It's a marvelous example of what computing should have been in 1997.
Unstable? Far too likely to break at the next apt-get upgrade.
Experimental? Same as Unstable, but worse.
Testing? Probably the best bet, though still not recommended for production use by Debian.org.
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
While it is true that there are various piracy issues to be worked out, I'm fairly confident that the Asian market will do as the west has done which is take the best of OSS and adapt it to their needs.
In fact, with Asia's help, maybe we can finally solve the problem of people following false editors and settle on the one true editor -- nano!
"Your admirers in the street
Got to hoot and stamp their feet
in the heat from your physique" -King Crimson
The penetration rate of linux would still low unless certain basic requirment is meet:
- eye-easy fonts and fonts engine, the asia fonts structure is complex. In 10-12px web page they just look horrible
- out of the box input methods: intelligent phoenetic type input or chanjei should be enabled as default. (Common newbies cannot install it themself)
I know that some improvement is progressing like firefly-arphic fonts and iiimf. Unless they become mature things won't start right.