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All of Vietnam's Government Computers To Use Linux, By Fiat
christian.einfeldt writes "The Vietnamese Ministry of Information and Communications has issued an administrative ruling increasing the use of Free Open Source Software products at state agencies, increasing the software's use both in the back office and on the desktop. According to the new rule, 100% of government servers must run Linux by June 30, 2009, and 70% of agencies must use OpenOffice.org, Mozilla Firefox, and Mozilla Thunderbird by the end of 2009. The regulation also sets benchmarks for training and proficiency in the software. Vietnam has a population of 86 million, 4 million larger than that of Germany, and is one of the world's fastest-growing economies."
Man, I don't know.. they make some pretty crappy cars, I'm not sure I'd trust them to make a decent operating system distribution.
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Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer take a S.E. Asian vacation...
A giant customized Starbucks in Cupertino California where lattes and no soy skim macchiatos are given out free to all employees. The background music involves a playlist of Nora Jones, David Matthews, John Mayer, and Bono on loop from an Ipod docked somewhere in the Apple/Starbucks facility. Hours are long but morale is surprising high as developers, hardware and software, are given 30 minute breaks to masturbate to the new itunes interface.
All developers sit at cafe type tables with a Mac Book Pro while their lord and master Steve Jobs stands deskless in his predictable attire of a turtleneck and jeans. In fact, this is the preferred (mandatory) dress code at Apple. Jobs walks around to each and every department, separated by latte and vegan preferences, and checks on the performance and efficiency of his developers. At any given point in the day one may see Mr Jobs yelling at a programmer for not implementing a button in the perfect shade of corn flower blue (#6495ED) and immediately sends him to the apple punitive chamber, consisting of a HP Compaq running Vista Basic.
There are 2 software development departments and 2 hardware development sections in Apple. For software there is the Apple core team, Apple Open Source team. In hardware there is the Apple systems and management team and the iDevice team. Since the OSX kernel consists of a BSD darwin kernel there is no real need for low level programmers and as such the entirety of the Apple core team consists of UI designers and photoshop junkies. All software churned out from the core team is designed in a program strikingly similar to Visual Studio's form designer but with Cocoa Objective C generated instead. The 16 hour day (Jobs demands 16 hour days since he himself never sleeps) of a core dev involves lining up the right shade of chrome with the latest photoshopped graphite button and maintaining the correct color scheme, not an easy job at all.
The Apple open source team involves a little bit more coding, which is mandated to be done in TextEdit or the option of a $80 third party mac text editor. The Apple open source team doesn't actually create much code but searches the internet for interesting BSD licensed software and modifies it as it's own through obfuscation and conversion to objective C. Many of the items a mac user sees comes from the open source world stamped by apple such as the ability to play music taken from 67 different originally linux based players, CD burning, and the overall ability to click a mouse. Apple's legal department has no qualms about this practice and has assured many that since most of the code is BSD and if any is GPLed many Linux hippies should be grateful that Apple fostered WebKit by using KHTML and adding some Gecko bloat. Perhaps one of the most important items that the open source team has done to date is use parts of the FreeBSD to keep the kernel up to date.
There's not much to say about the Apple systems and management team. I suppose they can be classified in to desktop and laptop systems. Because hardware work is beneath Apple in general and thought of being only worthy of Windows Users and as such can be found working on these beauties in the starbucks bathroom. Desktops are currently made by buying dell machines and putting them in Lian Li cases, where the majority of the costs goes to buying titanium Apple emblems to paste on the sides. Laptops consists of the rebranding of only the most silver and black Sony Viaos but talk has been going around about rebranding Asus EeePCs for a new Apple netbook but you didn't hear that from me, for fear of my life.
The iDevice team's job is to develop for the ipod, iphone, itouch, and many other portable electronics apple may release in the future. Their jobs are very interconnected with the open source team as well as the core dev team. Using firmware from random samsung devices and giving it an OSX skin the ipod stands as a shining example that infringement only applies to greasy file sharers and that the music player remains the best in market
Also, this bodes well for Open Source everywhere. Eventually all other countries will follow suit and the people will have government systems that work best for their diverse cultures, tailor made UIs and logic, that can also extend inventive solutions.
You BET! Every country on the globe (with the exception, perhaps, of Cambodia) is eager to follow in anything that the hip, trendy Vietnam does. Hell, I would be surprised if the United States can resist the trend, I predict they will issue a government mandate to run free software* by 2010!
*Of course, don't hold me to exactly what that free software will be. The US Govt could, pretty easily, simply mandate that Microsoft Windows be given to them for free.
You cannot scare Vietnam with office furniture.
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
Is that some sort of laundry joke?!?
The world is made by those who show up for the job.
Good thing software will be free. My mom only lets me spend $5.
You never expect irony, do you?
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Eventually all other countries will follow suit
Are you suggesting there will be a domino-effect?
So all Microsoft needs to do to get the deal...
Lower License Costs.
Hire Vietnam Workers to work in Vietnam
Disable Active X
Use Vista with Norton.
Give them some stock options
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Why?
Charlie don't surf!
"Waste not one watt!" - CZ
They tested OpenBSD first but Vietnamese people and flames do not mix well.
It didn't help that they were using the "Napalm" release.
This is my sig.
Civ E's build targets".
There is no "E" in the Roman Numberal system, IIRC. So there will never be a Civ E.
Or perhaps you mean "e" as in e=mc^2?
If it's X they're doing, then they'll love Linux. I've always found that the various X implementations for Windows integrate poorly with the native desktop, whereas on Linux, X is the native desktop.
ROFL.