Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

OSS in One-Fifth of Japanese Businesses

Posted by Zonk on from the penguins-abroad dept.

WillAffleck writes "According to a recent Infoworld article, one-fifth of all Japanese businesses now use Open Source operating systems. From the article: 'By contrast, 33 percent of U.S. companies have adopted open-source operating systems in at least some of their servers, MIC said. Among the companies polled by the MIC, 66 percent said open-source operating systems have low initial costs, while 47.8 percent said the software has low operating costs '"

5 of 99 comments (clear)

  1. So in other words by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Japan is behind the U.S. in OSS adoption? Or is the Japan 21 percent figure "exclusively use" and the America 33 percent figure "partially use"? This article is somewhat confusing.

  2. Uhoh by THEUBERGEEK · · Score: 5, Funny

    Time to impose sanctions, we cant have Microsoft being run out of foreign markets, it is unfair competition.
    Opps I am sorry, I had a momentary bout of insanity there

    --
    Talking to Geeks is like eating jello with a chainsaw, interesting, but painful.
  3. Servers... by advocate_one · · Score: 4, Insightful
    not desktops... so this could be as little as 1 machine per business...

    someone slap the editors with a cluestick please...

    --
    Donald 'Duck' Dunn: We had a band powerful enough to turn goat piss into gasoline.
  4. Re:free oss? by Canadian_Daemon · · Score: 4, Informative

    Support costs money.
    Indeed it does. Until MS nuts realize that MS products need support as well, this arguement is not valid.

    --
    This sig is definitive. Reality is frequently inaccurate.
  5. The Government is helping too by Ta+Pere+* · · Score: 5, Informative
    The Japanese Government is helping OSS development too, and the m17n library funded by the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry, Japan is probably, IMO the most exciting thing to come out of the whole process.

    The m17n library allow you to view and type complex text languages like Indic, Arabic, Hebrew and other languages. While this is possible by using QT3.2+ & GTK2.0+pango, this restricted one to just 2 toolkits and to two heavyweight desktops(XFCE4 is the exception though). The library is also a good compromise between a toolkit dependent solution like pango/QT3.2 and Server based solutions like the doomed Indix and STSF.

    The screenshots here show firefox and magicpoint, applications that use different toolkits displaying multilinugal texts. I have even seen but not used windowmaker rpms compiled with m17n support.

    A very practical example would be something like Damn Small Linux, which is a pretty lightweight live CD in both disk size (~50 MB) and Memory usage (runs on 64 MB RAM). This was ideal for a school near my place that wanted to use it as a teaching resource but wanted it in their native language. I finally am settling for XFCE4 and GTK2 applications like OO.o, Firefox.

    The keyboard solutions were too rudimentary, in the case of xkb for phonetic keymaps for indian languages or too buggy and complex, in the case of IIIMF. M17n was a joy to use from day one and rpms for Mandrake 10.1 & debs for Ubuntu/Debian unstable are available.