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Canonical and China Announce Ubuntu Collaboration
First time accepted submitter GovCheese writes "Canonical, the software company that manages and funds Ubuntu, announced that the Chinese Ministry of Industry and Information Technology will base their national reference architecture for standard operating systems on Ubuntu, and they will call it Kylin. Arguably China is the largest desktop market and the announcement has important implications. Shuttleworth says, 'The release of Ubuntu Kylin brings the Chinese open source community into the global Ubuntu community.'"
They have to make money somehow. I've had no issues using Ubuntu and it is one of the few distros that is easy to use and set up.
Just because it's hard doesn't mean you shouldn't try, it means you should try harder!
This is actually a pretty good move for China. China can't trust all the signed binaries from Microsoft , especially after the Microsoft certificates were used to sign the flame malware. With all the cyber-saber-rattling in Washington, its possible they could do the same thing to China with a Chinese Language patch. This way at lest you can compile the source yourself and check for weird additions.
In exchange for this, Ubuntu should become a lot more popular in a country that is currently producing the most volume of Unix systems. For us Linux users, it means that more drivers will be available before release, and they will continue to manufacture motherboards that don't require us to secure boot into Windows 8. I just hope any espionage China uses on its own people doesn't get committed back into the Ubuntu repo.