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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.'"
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
China has an ARM license now, and several ARM chipset manufacturers. Low power requirements makes this a good fit as their power infrastructure is struggling already. As open source it leaves open the potential for home grown app development. Finally, it is time for China to get off of XP and the modern hardware and software proprietary platforms are not piracy friendly. Going legit opens up export potentials for China. Pretty obvious really.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
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.
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
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.
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.
You might be surprised to learn that there are already thousands of Ubuntu stores and Kiosks in China, selling laptops with Ubuntu preloaded. China was a natural fit for Canonical because it's already a bigger market for them than the US.
It's a "qílín" ("qinlin", if Slashdot eats the markup): a mythical Chinese creature that is "said to appear with the imminent arrival or passing of a wise sage or an illustrious ruler." Make of that, what you will.
Ref: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qilin
Oh... I've just thought of something interesting: I wonder if the name (as a "creature") was also choosen as a counter-force to the Chinese Grass Mud Horse meme of a little while ago??
Oh, well done Chinese leaders, well done. /slowgolfclap
It's extremely frustrating when I see people pirate something when there are free alternatives. One could argue that the free/FOSS alternatives for certain classes of software aren't good enough, but there are enough cases nowadays where the quality of the free stuff is sufficient enough to make this something of a cop-out.
A Google engineer recently blogged about his experiences in Vietnam and how computer science was taught there (http://neil.fraser.name/news/2013/03/16/). The story itself is interesting enough (when it comes to computer science Vietnamese kids kick the ass of American students, to the point where half of the students in one particular grade 11 class could pass the Google interview process), but he mentions this:
Linux/LibreOffice is free, and yet still ignored. Obviously they aren't concerned about the BSA breaking down their doors to arrest everyone (yet), but it'd be nice if more countries with limited funds learnt the same basic techniques with more open source software. If you can't even give away your software, then Microsoft clearly have nothing to fear.