IBM's Interest in Red Flag Linux

eldavojohn writes "For those of you unfamiliar with Red Flag Linux, it's an OS for the growing Chinese community of Linux users. Interestingly enough, IBM is looking to support Red Flag Linux as the next distribution of Linux that its more than 300 applications will run on. Support from a huge vendor like IBM certainly raises the rate of adoption of a distribution of Linux so this is certainly good news for Red Flag Linux and also the Chinese open source users. IBM currently supports Red Hat and SUSE Linux, which creates twice as much testing for each of their applications. Will Red Flag Linux cause them to require three times the amount of normal testing?"

Comments

This is a good thing.

[miffo.swe]

If IBM is smart they will target LSB (Linux Standard Base). Then they will ask the distributions to please conform to that standard. If anything this is the kind of thing that could work on unify Linux even better if done right. Ofcourse testing will have to be done anyway but the likelyhood of problems will be very small for every new distribution supported.

Re:This is a good thing.

[Mateo_LeFou]

Actually, if they're smart they will do what it takes to get a foot into the door in China, which has a potential market 5 times the size of the U.S. Then they can use their early-supporter status to influence Red Hat's direction, which I agree should be toward LSB.

Re:This is a good thing.

[teg]

RHEL and SLES are both LSB certified already - the problem is that LSB doesn't specify enough to be useful. An LSB-compliant application needs to include everything outside the LSB scope in itself, which ends up being the OS minus the X libraries and glibc (I'm exagerrating, but not that much). LSB is the lowest common denominator, and a very static target, in a world of rapid evolvement (e.g. GNOME every 6 months, new compilers, new glibcs etc).

There's only one problem with Red Flag Linux

[tomhudson]

... aside from the obvious(it raises a red flag with right-wingers ...)

... an hour after you finish installing it, you want to install it again.

Asianux

[raffe]

Red flag is based of Asianux which is based on red hat.The current release version of Asianux is 2.0 , which is based upon Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4. Asianux 1.0 was based upon Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3. The first releases of red flag was very poor quality. Asianux is a joint development between Linux vendors Red Flag , Miracle Linux Corporation and Haansoft .

I havn't seen any Linux in China

[RobertinXinyang]

I am in China and I havn't seen any Linux at all. All I have seen is Windows, and most of it is XP.

In the markets I have seen the entire office suite going for 10 Yuan (1 US dollar = 8 Yuan). This was not one of the little markets that we hear of being raided, this was at one of the largest chains in the country.

As far as Apples, I have the only one that I have seen here. In a stor with, literaly, hundreds of MP3 players, I saw one iPod. It was priced out of line with the local economy.

With this being the situation, I find it hard to believe that Microsoft will fail to dominate this market. There may be a small market for Red Flag, much like there is stil a market for SCO Unix; However, look in the stores, it is al Microsoft.

Re:I havn't seen any Linux in China

[chawly]

In communist China it is the footballs which are red - and all your footballs belong to us anyhow ! Flags also - every damned one of them

Re:I havn't seen any Linux in China

[nizo]

Luckily the government installed backdoors are all contained in a simple and well documented kernel module.

Serious Question -- Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

All I learn from this is that IBM has an awful China strategy, and probably knows less about linux than it wants people to think.

Can anyone point to any contribution Red Flag has made to open source software? The company has released something like 2 distributions over the last four years or so while being heavily funded by the Chinese government. Neither distribution was usable (I've tried both). Their desktop version of Linux even removed a lot of usable software in order to cram in crippled language demoware.

Most of the Chinese people I know who use Linux use Red Hat and wouldn't touch Red Flag with a ten foot pole. And if IBM thinks that it will start making major enterprise sales in China by partnering with these guys they are simply delusional. This is just another step in Red Flag's strategy of doing nothing, but doing it extremely loudly to the cheers of overseas linux fanboys.

Re:Serious Question -- Why?

[Americano]

I think you just answered your own question about why:

The company has released something like 2 distributions over the last four years or so while being heavily funded by the Chinese government.

It's funded by the Chinese Government == lucrative government contracts == profit.

IBM is in the business of making a profit. If doing so results in a net contribution to open source software, then good for IBM & good for OSS. If doing so doesn't result in a net contribution to open source software, you'd be wrong to think that IBM gives a toss, so long as they're still making money.

More Red Flag info (and why IBM supports it)

[savio13]

Red Flag Linux is actualy a distribution of Asianux2.0. Red Flag (Chinese), Miracle Linux (Japanese) & Haansoft (Korean) are all built on Asianux2.0 and targeted for the specific countries listed above. AFAIK, Asianux2.0 is a RHEL clone, so that helps with testing (vs. having to test a completely new distro).

I can't speak for "IBM", but back when I was product manger for WAS Community Edition (WASCE), I know that we decided to support Red Flag Data Center (RFDC) with WASCE right from v1.0 because our Asian customers were asking for RFDC (in addition to RHEL).

Savio

Re:Excerpts from the Red Linux FAQ

[CockMonster]

Oh spot the geographically illiterate yank!

Re:Red Flag...LSB compliant

[ronanbear]

A list of Linux Standard Base compliant distros is available on their site http://www.freestandards.org/en/Products Asianux 2.0 (which Red Flag is based on) is listed as compliant so it would be reasonable to assume compliance. I've never used Red Flag so YMMV.

Re:times as much testing?

[anzev]

This is not true. Testing is time consuming because in a commercial environemnt you HAVE TO test ALL THE FEATUREs on ALL THE SUPPORTED PLATFORMS. Testing is not what most users think, that you just run the app, click a few buttons and that's it. The common mentality is, as it appears:

"Ok, let's test this on OS A, and if there are errors fix them, otherwise, see if the program also runs on other OSes and that's it".

Sorry to dissapoint you, wrong! You need a test plan. The test plan specifies how to test each feature (steps to acomplish it). These test plans have to be carried out on any given platform that you mark as SUPPORTED. There is the obvious difference between supported and "it also runs on". Maybe a quick example of why testing the features is important. Java for example, on Windows and on Linux behaves differently. In particular, it treats String objects differently. On Windows it is legal to compare two strings like this:

if(str1 == str2)

But this approach fails on Linux. And it's also technically more correct to write:

if(str1 == null || str2 == null) throw new IllegalArgumentException();
if(str1.equals(str2))...

Even testing between different distrbutions can be a problem due to versions and "uncontrolled" API of open source applications. In our company we had to test (this is execute the test plan) on a few different Linux distributions because we tested it on Debian and it didn't work on Red Hat!

Re:IBM ?

[leoPetr]

No, the article means IBM, which develops the DB2, Informix, Rational, WebSphere, and Lotus ranges of software products. Lenovo is the new manufacturer of Thinkpads. They are not the new IBM.