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Linspire CEO Offers S. Korea To Replace Windows
Spy der Mann writes "Noticing the Microsoft threat to withdraw Windows from South Korea, the Linspire CEO, Kevin Carmony, just offered to license every computer in the country with Linspire, for just $5m. This would be around 10 cents / person. 'South Korea could save around a quarter of a billion dollars. More importantly, however, it would break South Korea loose from the monopolistic grasp of Microsoft, which the country currently finds itself under,'"
He's going to provide support for 50 million computers at 10 cents each? Would be quite tough.
If there is no support involved, I'd like to provide South Korea with Linux for 50 million computers in the form of either CentOS, Fedora or Ubuntu for free and free with "community support".
What's the deal?
Banu
Linspire has a service called cnr(click and run). This service costs 49.95 a year. So are they going to charge all the Koreans that fee after the first year? I tried to download BOINC and install it but according to their bulletin boards there is a problem with installing it. It has been 10 months since this program has been released. Wine just went into beta and I am wondering if they will take a year or more to get that version into cnr. They will sell you win4lin for about the same cost as going out and buying a version of windows so they do not have much of an incentive to get the new wine out to its subscribers.
That's my experience, too. Even if they don't require ActiveX, very few Korean websites will actually display properly in another browser - even fewer if you use a pop-up blocker. I don't think that anyone tests on anything else.
Korean computer culture seems to be even more homogenised than it is in other countries. Everyone uses Windows; everyone's on MSN Messenger; everyone has a Cyworld Mini-hompy[1]. My iBook received interesting responses: those that had heard of Macs thought that they were tools for graphic artists.
In addition, there's a big limitation in that SEED, a Korean 128-bit encryption system used in online banking since the days of US 40-bit-only export restrictions, is only supported in IE; although there are moves to port it to Firefox, it hasn't been completed yet, as far as I know.
1. Mini-homepage, a sort of personalised blog/music/photo-sharing site. They are literally miniature, too: even on a large monitor, the 'mini-hompy' is limited to a few hundred pixels in each direction in the centre of the page.
If your comment title says 'Re: Foo', I'm not likely to read it.
It's an interesting dilemma for the S. Korean Govt. Giving in to Microsoft would be like negotiating with terrorists - if you cave in to them, it sends the message that blackmail works, and they'll do it again.
Consequently, South Korea's might feel their best interests like in making the switch, trading the short term inconvenience of the migration against getting out from under the thumb of one of the planet's more rapacious corporations.
This could get very interesting :D
Don't let THEM immanentize the Eschaton!
Korea is largely considered, next to Japan, to be one of the gaming capitols of the world. If they all dump Microsoft I wonder how the game publishing/programming houses will react?
This could be a good thing.
C17H21NO4
All my male, teen students do in their free time is play Starcraft. When I go to a restaurant near lunchtime, the TV is always on OnGameNet (AKA 24 hours CS / Starcraft). The female teens all play MAple Story (online MMORPG). The young adults that I know spend their evenings playing Kart Rider (online racing). Everybody wants to be a progamer when he or she grows up.
As much as I want Linux to succeed here in S. Korea, HanSoft's 3.2 version is already free, and it isn't doing their market share any good.
Not a chance of this happening in the private sector.
Put identity in the browser.
Ahh, we have stumbled across my favorite discussion.
... because it rides on the coat-tails of Windows itself which, of course, only got where it is today by riding on the coat-tails of DOS, which rode on the coat-tails of the IBM-PC
You see, having lived through the whole PC revolution, I contend that MS did not hitch a ride on the coat-tails of the IBM-PC. In fact in my view it is the other way around -- they drove the bus! Until MS came along the pattern was for hardware vendors to also sell you their OS. Everything was closed. Even Apple (a darling of this forum) was closed (and still is). It's "us or the highway" was what all the hardware vendors declared. As it turns out, though, IBM screwed up by outsourcing their OS and not demanding an exclusive (I'm sure they would do it differently if they could have a "do-over"). Gates was no dummy. He developed versions of MSDOS independent of IBM, which ran on IBM machines. And yes, MS got a bit lucky when clones emerged, though frankly if they hadn't have secured rights to sell MSDOS to those clone manufacturers then it would have been much more difficult for them (the cloners) to achieve compatibility. They would have had to "clean room develop" an OS, which is significantly more difficult than clean-rooming a BIOS (which was hard in itself). [note: why is that? it's because a BIOS is a middle layer which is pinned from both ends, an OS is only pinned from the bottom unless you can get your hands on every application ever written to test compatibility at the top] So basically it was MS that broke the hardware vendor's lock on operating systems. This led to competition in the hardware world, which led to cheap hardware. All of that led to Microsoft's hard-won dominance in the marketplace in a self-perpetuating spiral. One more note, by insisting on binary compatibility, MS has managed to maintain their dominance (and at the same time fostered the cheap hardware revolution) all the way to today. Intel/AMD were forced to keep binary compatibility (come out with a new chip that wouldn't run Windows? preposterous), which again led to much competition in the processor world, which led to amazing performance at ever cheaper prices. Counter-examples: Sun SPARC, Intel Itanium, IBM PowerPCs (used by Apple). None of these processors had binary compatibity with another vendor's parts and, surprise of surprises, they are all fading away. You can say all you want about MS business practices, and the quality, security and stability problems with their software, but you cannot deny their significant role in laying the foundations for cheap, compatible hardware which enabled things like FOSS and Linux to emerge.
The more you regulate a company, the worse its products become.
This is not funny. This is true. You can joke all you want, "Starcraft kekekeke," but it doesn't change the fact that computer games are a major part of life over there, and even after all these years, Starcraft is still king. If Microsoft pulled out of Korea, their popular culture would be sent reeling.
Well, for about six months. After six months, all the game manufacturers start pushing Linux in a big way, since there's no way any of them would leave Korea of their own free will -- and they sure as hell won't let Microsoft pull them out without a good fight.
South Korea's got some 17 million PC gamers. How many does America have? If you count consoles, it's probably no contest, but I'm under the impression that PC gaming is a bit of a niche market in the US. I wouldn't be surprised if South Korea has more PC gamers than the entire US, even with only 1/6 the population.
No, the day Microsoft pulls out of Korea is the day that Blizzard and NC Soft shift focus to Linux. Once that happens, the hardware vendors start writing decent drivers for Linux, and all of a sudden Linux doesn't suck as a gaming platform anymore, and Windows becomes an "also supported" platform.
This is a bluff, and Microsoft stands to lose a lot from it. They've set the charges and are pushing the plunger from inside the parking garage.
(despite being Linspire)
.jpg) is beyond their realm. All of these users will be more or less indifferent to their operating system as long as it boots up and the internet works.
I agree you have a point here, but I think if you could move an entire country over to Linus, for even a little while, it would be a huge step in the right direction. Even if it is a terrible distro, I think a lot of people would be willing to switch from Linspire to another Linux distro. The switch from a crappy distro to a good one would certainly be easier than individuals switching from Windows to Linux on their own.
Hell, maybe everyone will use it and decide to go back. Fine. Just raising awareness is plenty enough. Most people still don't know what Linux is. "Is it like a computer?" "Is it a program or something?" Hell, I would be willing to bet maybe a quarter of computer users don't know what an "Operating System" is, much less know that there even is one that isn't Windows. Giving the average non-technical user the insight that there is a world outside of Microsoft is a step in the right direction, even if the whole plan turns out to be a disaster.
Next, there are extremely non-technical users. Namely my mom, grandma/grandpa, etc. I'm talking "I don't know, I just click on the e" people. Generally, these people use their computers for email, internet, and maybe instant messaging, but thats about it. Even simple photo editing (I'm talking rotate/crop/save as
Sadly, I think the above-named group represents a LOT of people. Not only will they have simpler problems (could you imagine your grandma complaining that she can't install Mathematica?), but will probably ask friends/family members before hounding support techs.
Ultimately, Linspire is probably biting off a bit more than it can chew, and will probably have to pay a lot more support dollars than it was planning on, which may prove to be a fatal flaw. On the other hand, maybe it would get some very, very generous government grants?
The bottom line here is that if they actually pull this off, it'll obviously be a REALLY rocky road for quite some time, but I think it'll be at least feasible. Porting apps (performance-intensive ones that won't run well on WINE or similar) will probably be a disaster for quite some time. But in the long run, it'll probably generate more of a market for Linux apps, which would be huge for the rest of the world.
Now, we wait and see. Go Roh Moo-hyun.
Partial Credit: The Engineer's Best friend
"Well, the bridge didn't fall all the way down!"
"Although the basic GNU/Linux system is free software, most of the GNU/Linux versions now available include a small amount of non-free software--just enough to spoil them as a way to attain freedom. But Linspire is in a class by itself; large and important parts of this system are non-free. No other GNU/Linux distribution has backslided so far away from freedom. Switching from MS Windows to Linspire does not bring you to freedom, it just gets you a different master."
-- Richard Stallman
"It is our choices, Harry, that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities." -- Prof. Dumbledore