Slashdot Mirror
China Looks To Linux As Windows Alternative
Bismillah (993337) writes "Once again, after the Red Flag Linux effort that petered out this year, China is considering Linux to sort out its pressing Windows XP issue. The Windows 8 ban by China's government procurement agency and promises of official support may help."
2014, the year of the Linux desktop!
Wait ... what's a desktop?
Torvalds raging at Asian kernel patches in 3.. 2.. 1..
Good. They should be considering Linux. We all should be.
This is dumb. They shouldn't be considering alternatives to a locked in OS. They should getting rid of the entire premise and going OS Agnostic. Then they can switch OS's at will.
The upstarts with lower cost and equal or better OSs will take the customer's business. No surprise. Bundled deals to keep the price up will also fail.
Microsoft has no choice but to lower prices, significantly. That is the real world of competitive business.
Considering that XP is pirated in China to a significant percentage less than 99%, you're missing that if everybody is using Linux nobody is going to be buying MS anything at all. Effectively total market lockout. Which can affect the NSA as well.
Truthfully, this probably won't affect anything.
MS will not allow this. Look for them to give China whatever they have to, including a few billion in bribes to keep Linux from becoming the official OS.
China replaced it with it's own.
You realize, that I said the same thing ten years ago when they announced Red Flag Linux, right?
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
Somehow, Nazis got a press so bad even Wolfenstein won't show a swastika, yet we have hammer&sickle proudly displayed on major government parades, Stalin and Lenin widely worshipped, and so on. It's scary how investing in some propaganda can whitewash even the most murderous ideology in world's history.
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
That's a cute license but it could never be upheld. You can't prove damages from someone owning a shirt. Moreover you have to be a lot more specific about how licenses are responsible for determining whether Che wearing people are using your software.
It is only meant to raise awareness and let the healing begin. Please, don't hate.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
what ideology is that?
BTW the hammer and sickle predated Lenin.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
I thought this was a Slashdot story from years ago when China was supposed to ditch Windows...so here we are again and China still has no viable homegrown distro. I thought years ago they phased out Windows and used GNU/Linux. Not so. I know a Chinese insider who tells me that the Government handed out bales of cash to develop a GNU/Linux distro of their own and all Red Flag Linux is, is Fedora with a some Catonese/Mandarin. It was a scam of public funds. They really did not develop their own GNU/Linux distro properly. was interested because, in a racist way, I thought--wow, Asians doing GNU/Linux, it must be AWESOME and kick the other distro's ass. Asians are hard working and fastidious and the distro will intall without a hitch and it will be great. Not really. One of the issues with investing in China when it comes to business are corrupt officials and lack of accountability. In China, you pay off the right people, you do what you want--until you get caught and are made an example of for the press. Linus Torvalds mentioned something about how GNU/Linux could not really come out of places like India and China as the peole are far too concerned about trying to survive, and Linux is something that came about 'just for fun'.
"SO we bide our time, waiting for a purer kick to bloom and the future is still bleak, uncertain and beautiful" -GSYBE
I don't even understand why china, of all places, is not 100% Linux wall to wall already...
People forget. One of the biggest reason businesses have for sticking to MS is that their customers use MS and they have to be able to exchange documents in MSs latest format. Well, with China using Linux companies are going to have to use document formats friendly to Linux.
Goodbye a large chunk of vendor lockin.
"Somehow?" The difference is: Hitler lost the war and Stalin won it. He was very popular with most of the people he was oppressing during his own lifetime. Political prisoners in Siberia would write letters to him asking for help, sincerely believing that if only he knew what was going on... Not sure what to draw from this, except the idea we were given as kids that Chinese and Russians secretly envy us and can't wait to throw off their shackles are mostly baloney. And that people really love leaders that make them feel strong.
hello? this is 1980. i want my cold-war rhetoric back. thank you.
um, what? the hammer & sickle is a labor / union symbol. of course it was used as the symbol of communist USSR, but they hardly have a monopoly on murderous ideology.
You realize that in China most corporations are government-funded
Only about 3% of companies are SOEs (state owned enterprises), and that number is declining. The SOEs tend to be big rust-belt companies, such as steel mills, and shipyards, that use relatively few computers per employee, compared to the private companies in the tech and service sectors.
It's scary how investing in some propaganda can whitewash even the most murderous ideology in world's history.
Christianity?
Communism is just as evil in 2014 as it was in 1934 or, indeed, in 1980. Thank you.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
you mean Red Flag?, that's defunct
Yeah... didn't the NSA contribute a whole bunch to SELinux and some of the crypto API as well? Might not necessarily be the smartest thing to switch away from an OS developed by a private American company to one developed by several mainly American companies AND the NSA.
let me know if you'd like to compare track records of so-called capitalist regimes to so-called communist regimes. just to warn you though, you aren't going to like it.
I guess I am the only one that switched to linux because my work placed used it.
"That's right...I said it."
In linux, the source code is visible, makes it harder to hide stuff.
In my experience - and I have quite a lot - linux is *far* more secure than windows.
Closing ports, or whatever, is ridiculously simple. Finding hidden code in a binary distribution is much tougher.
As soon as you reverse engineer windows, MS will change something so that your reverse engineered version is no longer compatible.
Look at MS does with it's ms-office formats.
May have an opportunity here.
Gotta think long term.
MS has been pulling the same scams for decades. Bottom line: you cannot trust Microsoft. Not now, not ever. MS is going to do everything it can to force people onto win8, everybody knows it.
Maybe China has finally wised up?
I was just thinking the same thing. For any serious governments, I think a BSD would seem a better choice from their perspective. The license allows them to keep their source changes closed to prying eyes, and the secure reputation of using something like OpenBSD would seem a natural for a nation with concerns about spying. Perhaps they're concerned they won't be able to spy on their own people that are using a BSD as easily as spying on users of other OS's?
China knows to have its own local cpu options, networking, telco systems and OS code.
China knew the GCHQ (Tai Mo Shan and other sites) and NSA where into every telco system and signal around China looking in from shared sites in Asia and from above.
The US and UK also liked to use Western container ships as cover to hide complex collection equipment via tame Western shipping firms.
China understood US supplied networking, telco systems and OS would be a natural evolution of past data collection efforts.
China seems to have had its own neat magic in rapid growth with consumer and prosumer US products.
China seems to have had its own ability in watching foreign backed dissident groups using junk default encryption on consumer and prosumer US products.
Now that China has its own backhaul telco systems, its own hardware, cpu options and software its time to re think vast use of expensive US networking products.
The other option is to produce, code and sell brand China via a next gen product range from factories in China, shipped and sold under well funded 100% China owned brands. The worlds emerging and established markets can be flooded with a diverse product range at a fair price without the US "gov inside" reality many trusted US brands now offer.
China gets total control of hardware, software, export cash, jobs, its own branding around the world and can secure its coastal and river shipping lanes. The OS is just the next small step.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
oh that's where _nsakey.lkm comes from (kidding - it's a joke referring to _NSAKEY
It was a ploy to get better terms from Microsoft then and I suspect the same this time.
Any insufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from technology.
um, what? the hammer & sickle is a labor / union symbol.
What non-communist labor/union group uses the hammer & sickle symbol? I'm genuinely curious.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
A concerted government initiative to adopt Linux is great, but what about reverse engineering Windows? You also have to consider compatibility with the Windows applications that already exist in greater numbers than comparable Linux/Unix applications.
Somehow that seems like the US reverse engineering the Trabant.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
Also, don't mark me as a troll, but Linux platforms when not constantly maintained can be more susceptible to attack than Windows machines.
For some reason, that got me to thinking of all those old Windows XP Machines.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
The fact that Stalin brought Russia from a mostly agrarian backwater to a massive industrial superpower during his 30 year rule doesn't hurt neither.
Sent from my PDP-11
Letting you know. Name a few evil things done by America, UK, or even France in the last 100 years, that was not matched — with gusto — by USSR, China, or North Korea.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Hmm, so the government actually pays for all of its windows clients? That's great if that's true. The prevaling wisdom here ( which is dripping with xenophobia), is that China doesn't pay for licensed software.
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
China can't move to Linux, they will alienate the Windows MMO Chinese gold farmers.
Yeah, cherry-pick the nicer capitalist regimes and the worst Communist excesses look horrible. I'd suggest looking at Nazi Germany and militarist Japan to start with. As far as I can tell, their murder rate exceeded the Soviets and Chinese, and their totals are lower only because we took them down like mad dogs.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
US involvement in south america. cuba. guatemala. peru. chile. nicaragua. all in the name of "stopping the spread of communism".
bam.
i completely agree. i was responding to the "communism is evil" comment. murder is murder no matter which political ideology it's framed inside, and any nation that is or was once powerful has blood on its hands.
Communism. The most murderous school of thought known to humanity. Even Hitler's peculiar brand of Fascism is but a distant second.
Wherever Communism was attempted in earnest, the results included mass murder and economic misery for survivors...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Neither Nazi Germany nor militarist Japan were truly Capitalist.
Stalin's USSR killed more of its own citizens, than Nazi Germany did...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Nothing evil about that. Chile, where we succeeded, is Latin America's top economy today. Where we failed (Cuba), the place is a craphole.
Meanwhile, USSR openly invaded Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Afghanistan to enforce Communism — the most murderous school of thought known to humanity (even Hitler's brand of Fascism is a distant second).
Bam, indeed.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
really dude, you have no freaking clue. pick up a history book. or just freaking google. this is all very well known and isn't the least bit controversial.
Chile, where we succeeded, is Latin America's top economy today.
chile's success is in spite of us, not because. after meddling in their elections failed to keep out the popular candidate, we covertly intervened to overthrew their *democratically elected* leader (because he was a marxist), then installed one of the most well-known brutal dictators, general augusto pinochet.
From its beginning, the new military government implemented harsh measures against its perceived opponents.[6] Various reports and investigations claim that between 1,200 and 3,200 people were killed, up to 80,000 people were interned and as many as 30,000 were tortured during the time Pinochet was in government ... By the time of his death on 10 December 2006, about 300 criminal charges were still pending against him in Chile for numerous human rights violations during his 17-year rule, and tax evasion and embezzlement during and after his rule;[12] he was accused of having corruptly amassed at least US$28 million.
yep, that's our guy. in a military dictatorship, having a "thriving economy" has very little to do with how well (or not) the people live (not that chile is special in that regard).
Where we failed (Cuba), the place is a craphole.
cuba is a craphole because what would otherwise be it's main (only) trading partner has isolated it for 50+ years.
Nope. You make a statement, you offer supporting evidence. I'm not doing the googling for you.
Nope, it is because we persuaded him to adopt Capitalism and free markets.
Compared to millions exterminated by Stalin, for example, those numbers don't even qualify as the proverbial peanuts. And Pinochet stepped down on his own — whereas Castro enjoys such overwhelming love and adoration, they just keep electing the man...
But even if we assume, for the sake of argument, that none of those 3200 dead deserved it... That just about matches the number of dead in Soviet invasion of Hungary. But Hungary was just one... Do you know, how many Afghans died, when USSR invaded them? A nice and round million... And not the million of the imaginary people as in that infamous Lancet study, which counted the unborn, but of actual people killed in fighting or "restoring order" or whatever Soviets called it back then.
Once again, Chile is special — the top economy of Latin America. Thanks to Capitalism and freedom.
Wrong... In our stead, USSR was buying Cuban sugar and whatever else they could produce to support them (such as cigars). For 3 years I was going to high-school in Kyiv walking by a "Havana" shop. And just plain giving them money. And yet, they are still a craphole. Because they are Communist.
My point, though, was not that the US is truly innocent, but that whatever dirt you can throw at us, the USSR, China, or North Korea have done far worse.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
You missed the story earlier this year: Red Flag software has shut down
Nazi Germany and militarist Japan were capitalists. Japan might have gone something more like Socialist, had the "Showa Restoration" actually happened, but in fact both countries based their economy on private firms owned by stockholders.
And, yes, the Soviet Union killed more Soviet citizens than Nazi Germany. That's because it operated for longer. Both Nazi Germany and militarist Japan were so incredibly murderous and aggressive that we had to take them down hard and fast.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
In Nazi Germany it was the government, that created a number of firms (including Volkswagen). This disqualifies it from being Capitalist on technicality. (And it also, unfortunately, disqualifies modern-day America, but that's another story). No head of a major firm in Germany could possibly survive Hitler's displeasure (fortunately, Koch brothers are a living proof, that the US has not fallen that low, even if the case of the producer of an anti-Islam YouTube video is discouraging.)
But, more importantly, we were talking here not merely about economic systems, but entire schools of thought and political systems. You are attempting to switch the semantics down to pure economics — today's China, in such understanding, would be Capitalist. Hitler's party was called "National Socialists" for a reason. Here is the man's Programme — it is all about government providing (what it deems best) and the citizen serving dutifully. Collective trumps the Individual all over it — much like in the USSR. It is such Collectivism, that easily leads into mass-murder at home and abroad. It also cripples the development of free markets (where they are attempted at all), condemning the survivors to lower standards of living.
Read back to the beginning of this thread — were I denounced Che Guevara and (other Communists), and was told, "Capitalists are just as bad". You take this (or pretend to) as a comparison of economic systems: Free Markets vs. Central Planning. That's wrong — the "battle" is between Collectivism (such as represented by Guevara) and Individualism.
No. Even in the short period between 1933 and 1941, USSR murdered far more of its citizens, than Hitler murdered of his. Holodomor alone took several millions of lives.
And do not forget the sordid detail of Stalin encouraging Hitler (such as by making a Pact with him) and is thus responsible for some of the Hitler's murders.
That they were. My point is, USSR was even worse. And then there is Pol-Pot's Cambodia...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Please don't try to tell me that you believe anything Hitler ever said on the basis that he said it. National Socialism was not socialism, not after 1935 anyway, but Hitler kept the name.
And read up a bit on the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. I am well aware of it, and also aware of the context. Stalin had hoped to negotiate an anti-Hitler alliance with France and Britain. Britain in particular showed almost no interest in negotiation. Given that the West was clearly not interested, Stalin tried an alliance with Germany, in the hope that he could at least buy time. Had the West been interested in negotiating, and anybody actually interested in combining against Germany, I think the war would have been over in 1940 or 1941.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes