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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.'"
If we can learn something from the history is that any openness won't work well in China. On the positive side we may see a number of drivers for peripheral devices being developed for Ubuntu. In any case, I wish them good luck.
So the Chinese like the idea of their official Linux distro coming with a keylogger pre-installed?
Who would have guessed.
Waiting for some bright minds in Congress to start holding hearings into whether Communist OSs like Linux are responsible for cyberterrorism.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
In terms of counterintelligence, a smart move on China's part. Although Canonical is UK based, it's significantly easier to migrate from Ubuntu to any other distro than from Windows or OSX, should the need arise. I'm actually quite surprised that Iran isn't doing the same thing. You don't even need to have backdoors in computers of the individuals you're interested in; those of their families are already a big step ahead.
The Chinese government tried pushing Linux in the past, research “Red Flag” Linux. It was a failure. I only saw it once. I happened to be in a shop in Xian and I saw it on a computer. Before I could comment on it the sales man assured me that if I purchased the computer they would put a copy of Windows on it “so it could be useful.”
As others have commented, Linux is competing with free copies of Windows. Further, it lacks the games that the Chinese want (also free).
Free as in speech has no ring to the Chinese ear. The issue is broken down to choosing between two flavours of free beer.
Red Flag and Qomo have huge followings in China. why are they basing on Ubuntu?
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.
After all, 60% of the name Kylin has the word Linux shining through.
For a change, I have mod points, but I'd rather reply than add a random -1 = I disagree. It's no secret that Canonical wants to make money. Unlike competing Linux distros with a commercial and a free version, Canonical refused to split their distro in two. This decision has hampered their financial growth, but helped their community growth. I applaud them for it. Canonical has some financial interest but is clearly willing to sacrifice earnings to be good world citizens. Big American companies passed up valuable opportunities to partner with Canonical. HP and Dell, screwed up, though Dell at least gave it a an incompetent effort. The Chinese and Canonical working together makes sense. The Chinese like to steal whatever they can, but Canonical has already offered everything for free. There's nothing to steal. For example, Lenovo just sold me a $1900 ThinkPad Carbon X1 Touch with a bad display, and they knew it. Rather than eating the lost from buying thousands of bad displays, they decided to screw over all their ThinkPad customers in America. It's the Chinese way. The poor IBM employees supporting the ThinkPad line are screwed. Most companies can't even imagine a productive relationship with the Chinese government. However, there's no downside to Canonical, and tons of upside for China. If a billion Chinese benefit, and Canonical grows from a tiny company to a medium company, everyone wins. Mr Shuttleworth has always cared more about helping a billion people than making another hundred million. The Chinese are simply smart enough to take advantage of Shuttleworth's generousity. I get so tired of how people prefer to tear down good work. What have you done to improve the human condition? Does it compare to Mark's work?
The a-holes above calling Mark a communist pinko can suck my ever-hard wang.
Celebrate failure, and then learn from it - Nolan Bushnell
I'm a Mint user-- Mint's downstream from Ubuntu-- so I can attest to the quality & hard work that its programmers & devs have put into it. My beef is with the direction Ubuntu is taking; drinking the tablet Kool-Aid, and as I mentioned before the adware. As for their revenues, the way to do it right is to make a jim-dandy OS, and sell the support. If I want adware I can get a Windows box.
From using Chinese websites I thought their reference OS is Windows XP with MSIE 6. Try getting any Chinese banking or e-payment systems work on a non MSIE browser...good luck!
So, so much this. Install Ubuntu on your computer and notice how their installer walks you through the process. Then go install Fedora -- and you'll remember why Linux still gets a bad rap.
Even if some of Canonical's decisions have been questionable, there's no question that they've made desktop Linux a significantly more pleasant experience for people who aren't hardcore IT geeks.
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
I think that as a company matures it is forced to find additional sources of revenue and often this revenue comes from those that are locked in i.e. its customers. Ubuntu's granddaddy - Debian is a good way to skip all the ad-ware that Ubuntu is starting to add.
Just because it's hard doesn't mean you shouldn't try, it means you should try harder!
It is not the big secret people think it is. Many institutions, including research universities, have a copy. They have a program specially for governments, the Government Security Program.
I mean do you really think the NSA, one of the most institutionally paranoid places there is, would allow Windows to be used if they couldn't audit it? Not hardly.
MS's page on that kind of thing is here: http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/sharedsource/default.aspx
So if China wants it, I'm sure they have it. I think this is more of a "We have to have our own thing since China Strong!" and crap like that. China seems to have ego issues about not having home grown stuff (they aren't they only country that does) and wants to have their own everything. However turns out they aren't always equipped to develop it from scratch, so they often start with something else.
Similar to their "Loongson" microprocessor. It was to be a Chinese CPU, home grown and all that. In actuality they ripped off, and then later licensed, the MIPS architecture and it is a MIPS64 based chip running at 1GHz on a 65nm process.
This sounds similar. "Hey we want an OS, but writing one from scratch is a ton of work and we don't really have enough of the skillset around to do it well. So let's get a Linux distro to start on, and then make it our 'own'."
I think all the ad-ware & other "extras" Ubuntu has, are all tied into Unity, so one could skip it by just installing Cinnamon or Gnome and using those instead.
Couldn't agree more! If not for Ubuntu, I'd probably still be stuck with Windows. I tried installing Debian, a couple other distros, and FreeBSD. When they worked out fine, I found it was all command line and I had a hard time getting online & installing Gnome, Cinnamon, Xfce, or KDE. So I just stuck with Ubuntu. I'd really love to get into FreeBSD, but hey... I'm just a web developer, I don't need to spend a lot of my time trying to get my system to work and I don't want to spend a lot of my time on that either. I often think part of the reason Linux isn't more popular is because it almost always requires the Linux newbie to learn the hard way first, in order to use the system in a more intuitive way (GUI). And when there's OS's like Windows & Mac, that don't require the hard way to be the 1st thing you learn, then why waste the time going through all the hoops? That's how I see it. That's what held me back for about 12 years.
Yes, I'm a "shill" because I have better things to do than waste my time with poorly designed installers.
Good call.
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
Actually, few *aren't* easy to set up: which have you tried? I fell for the "Ubuntu is the only user-friendly distro" FUD for my first two years as a Linux user, and when the Ubuntu releases became intolerably unstable on my computer starting in late '09, I almost gave up on Linux entirely because I was so certain all other distros were a nightmare for non-geeks & had forums full of snarky asshats.
Thankfully I had a few live CDs I'd been thinking about trying when an Ubuntu update rendered my hard drive unbootable... I tried Simply Mepis for a few months and was enchanted, then gave OpenSuSE & Fedora a few months each and tried lesser-known distros I heard about like Samity or Petite. The results: the ones I tried were uniformly more stable & easier than Ubuntu -- my mother, a barely computer-literate senior citizen, can use & even install/set up the mainstream ones without trouble -- and *all* of them had a much friendlier, more user-centric vibe at their forums. I only ran into a handful that weren't functional out of the proverbial box, and almost all of those stated openly that they're for advanced users.
I'd highly recommend that you give the other mainstream distros a try if you haven't done so at least within the past 4 years; you just might be very, very surprised... (FWIW I think the easiest/friendliest is Simply Mepis, which is my favorite, but I'm sure that fans of the others would argue!)
Now mostly at Usenet:comp.misc & SoylentNews.org (it's made of people!)
"The Chinese are simply smart enough to take advantage of Shuttleworth's generousity."
Mark is richer than 99% of the people here on Slashdot, but he's barely a billionaire, nowhere near the wealth of Mark Z, the Google twins, let alone Bill G. The Chinese have a cash pile that runs into the hundreds of billions. They have no need for Shuttleworth's generosity.
I second this. SUSE is a damn great distro and gives the best KDE4 experience out-of-the-box of ANY Linux. It's easy to install and detects almost everything I've thrown at it (TV cards and wireless might be a problem) and is very user firendly. It gets a bad rep here in /. culture because of the M$ deal. For that matter Fedora's getting a bad rep because of their UEFI Secure Boot deal with M$. Slashdot culture is a funny thing. Criticize Apple and it's like kicking over an anthill. Now apparently ditto Ubuntu and Unity, & Ubuntu's practices. But it's okay to bash Metro and W8, whose lead Shuttleworth seems hell bent on following. Go on, people. Criticize away.
Possibly the difference is Canonical has a superstar jetset personality in front of it who's even been to space.
I'm not kidding. That'll help getting the crucial first few seconds of foot-in-door attention with mainstream people outside and inside government.
Also it's (sorta) South African. China is investing massively in Africa, and Africa has never been an Enemy. Together these are good hooks and waay better than from America/Finland and Stallman/Torvalis. Those are no hook at all.
This is enough, though flame me to a crisp for suggesting that Ubuntu may be better, too. _I_ don't like where they're heading these days, but their aggressive pursuit of future-leaning touchscreen masses may well be a really good plan for greater adoption.
Canonical isn't a U.S. company.
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Why unfair?
N...
Electronic Music Made Using Linux http://soundcloud.com/polyp
He isn't as rich as others because he blows it all on expensive holidays. I probably would too if I had the cash.
The installer's only one side of things though. There are still lots of annoying bugs and edge cases that simply don't get any attention by anyone apart from the occasional bug report that's never acknowledged. Don't get me wrong I appreciate a good installer - make it easy and it's easier for a novice user to start experimenting with Linux. Just don't expect them to remain when they start to compare the levels of polish to the proprietary systems with far more support.
Well, we have not seen Mr. APK for a while and I think he is not accepting your challenge either.
I just saw APK a couple days ago. He surfaced, blew once, and submerged...
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Couldn't agree more! If not for Ubuntu, I'd probably still be stuck with Windows. I tried installing Debian, a couple other distros, and FreeBSD. When they worked out fine, I found it was all command line and I had a hard time getting online & installing Gnome, Cinnamon, Xfce, or KDE. So I just stuck with Ubuntu. I'd really love to get into FreeBSD, but hey... I'm just a web developer, I don't need to spend a lot of my time trying to get my system to work and I don't want to spend a lot of my time on that either. I often think part of the reason Linux isn't more popular is because it almost always requires the Linux newbie to learn the hard way first, in order to use the system in a more intuitive way (GUI). And when there's OS's like Windows & Mac, that don't require the hard way to be the 1st thing you learn, then why waste the time going through all the hoops? That's how I see it. That's what held me back for about 12 years.
FreeBSD now has a desktop distro called PC-BSD, that is aimed solely at the desktop, which supports several DEs and which has a far improved way of updating packages that rivals even Debian. It's no longer just command line, unless you are administering a server. If you don't need a server, than on the BSD side, PC-BSD is right for you. Ubuntu is okay if you like Unity, and if you prefer one of the other DEs, you could try out Kubuntu, Xubuntu, Lubuntu or Mint/Cinnamon or Mint/KDE or Mint/LDXE or Mint/XFCE. There are plenty of choices.
The other upside to this is that in China, Canonical can port Ubuntu to non-x86 CPUs such as the Loongson and Allwinner. They can make their distro available on the Lemote laptops - similar to gNewSense. In China, while sticking to the GPL, they can sell Ubuntu on such computers and have a captive market, since even Windows 8 won't run on those. They could spawn a big developer community in China to help them at least gain marketshare in that market, if not anywhere else. Unlike in the West, where we freely complain about Metro, Unity, GNOME3, KDE4 and what have you, in countries like China, they'll simply learn and use what is given. So Mark can push Unity there, get it capture mindshare there and then try and use that market leadership in China to drive Canonical activities elsewhere in the world.
Not a bad strategy