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Why The Korean Government Could Go Open Source By 2020
An anonymous reader writes As the support for the Microsoft (MS) Windows XP service is terminated this year, the government will try to invigorate open source software in order to solve the problem of dependency on certain software. By 2020 when the support of the Windows 7 service is terminated, it is planning to switch to open OS and minimize damages. Industry insiders pointed out that the standard e-document format must be established and shared as an open source before open source software is invigorated.
A similar suggestion that Korea might embrace more open source (but couched more cautiously, with more "should" and "may") is reported on the news page of the EU's
program on Interoperability Solutions for European Public Administrations, based on a workshop presentation earlier this month by Korea's Ministry of Science, ICT, and Future Planning. (And at a smaller but still huge scale, the capitol city of Seoul appears to be going in for open source software in a big way, too.)
Here comes the year of the Linux desktop.
2020 is a long way away. Politicians usually only have long term vision when they don't want to make decisions about something. So MS will most probably still be strong in Korea by 2020.
-- Cheers!
For the most common purposes, like text documents and spreadsheets there is already ODF.
It is even an ISO standard. Unless there are unexpected problems with things like Asian fonts, that should be a no-brainer.
C - the footgun of programming languages
Korea is very tightly wed to Microsoft. I've seen linux on some servers and of course embedded devices, but I have never seen it on the desktop there. A huge amount of the software is Windows only, with both Mac and Linux users completely locked out. It's a pretty conservative, conformist culture - especially at a government level.
Last I checked there were at least two Korean governments.
Now that XP is done for we have a horde of insecure PCs that need updates. They cannot be upgraded to a later version of Windows because their hardware is as old as XP is. Conditions are ripe for a switch to Linux.
Korea (presumably South Korea) is infatuated with Microsoft tech. ActiveX is used everywhere - banks, online shopping, even gateways for various official and private services. Despite the technological marvel that South Korea is at times, Active X & Internet Explorer are the apex of their Internet communications and Linux is basically not used anywhere. For open source to work, there will have to be a complete shakeup of how everyone uses computers and the Internet over there, including non-Government business and regular users. That'll take some time.
Here comes the year of the Linux desktop.
The Linux Desktop is already here. In and amongst the pissing contest in early markets consoles; watches, home, health between Apple and Google (What happened to Microsoft). Chrome OS got Android compatibility and Office Update and its Office improved, massive Android integration, and Google Play . As well as some great adoption statistics. 8 OEMs making 15 distinct Chrome OS devices now on sale in 28 countries, 10 highest rated notebooks available on Amazon.com and Chromebooks sold to K-12 schools has risen 6x.
The fact that GNU Linux continues to flourish is just an aside.
2020 is a long way away. Politicians usually only have long term vision when they don't want to make decisions about something. So MS will most probably still be strong in Korea by 2020.
You are so right, governments woldwide are famous for making quick and timely visions, especially when it involves changing major infrastructure.
Korea (presumably South Korea) is infatuated with Microsoft tech. ActiveX is used everywhere
2020...in Five years they can easily do replace everything...with sanctions and tax breaks even sooner.
Also illegal, so far... It's illegal to use something other than the ActiveX plugin authorized by the Korean government to do online banking in South Korea. The current president promised to change things, but so far, nothing has changed. Here's his promise being reported:
http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/So...
The problem is that Korea requires use of their own national encryption standard, which has a governmental back door (and for which exploits have already been demonstrated at BlackHat) in order to "secure" banking transactions from snooping by foreign powers (guess they called that one correctly).
Here are some other articles about where the plugin is required to establish secure communications channels:
http://gadgets.ndtv.com/intern...
http://www.washingtonpost.com/...
https://www.techdirt.com/artic...
All these companies and 'governments' thinking they got screwed over by microsoft because the dropped XP support are dreaming. If they think they will mitigate their exposure to having the support dropped on them by using open source they can think again. Linux/Open Source OS's all have shorted life cycles and have plenty of problems which far outweigh the exploits that the microsoft platform has. What will happen, and ive seen it already, is they will make a major investment into open source, have no end of problems as the costs associated with changing the way they do things will far out weigh living within the long life cycle of a closed source OS backed by a company that does indeed get behind their software. The collective voice of the end users will force them back to an OS that will just work.
Im not anti-linux, I use linux as much as I use windows, but linux is still not ready for the desktop, but its close and IMO opensuse has the best chance on making a successful platform alternative.
Am I seriously the only one annoyed that people say "Korea" (the peninsula) when they mean "the Republic of Korea" (South Korea), or rarely, "the People's Republic of Korea" (North Korea)? When I hear people mention they enjoyed their trip to Korea, I ask how they liked Pyongyang.
Is Tizen the "OS of everything" part of the plan ... this would make sense
Anyway there are several flavour of opensource and I am wondering what OSS could mean over there ...
See you again in 2020 ...
-- http://rzr.online.fr/
Open Source will thrive when documents mandate that every device must be accompanied by a document describing how this will be programmed. In other way you buy an NVIDIA card or an smart phone and you get a PDF that gives detailed specification of how software can use the device (not how it is manufactured) to get the advertised functionality. this should extended to all sub-components that interact with the software. Using undocumented functionality should be illegal since it is a means to provide illegal competitive advantage. No blobs.
The death of WinXP support should be a huge boon to the ReactOS project. It's an open source Windows clone. It's not a layer on top of the Linux kernel designed to run just applications. It's a (soon to be) full implementation of the NT kernel (which is a terrific kernel, IMHO) on up. Like it or hate it -- this means that every layer of the Microsoft stack is there providing compatibility with drivers, ActiveX crapola (eventually), and all the other tons of Windows specific software that, like it or not, people use on a daily basis.
While the upper layers of Windows have a somewhat questionable design the kernel layer and base are quite well designed thanks to David Cutler. If you're looking for a great open source project to invest some time in try ReactOS.
The problem is that Korea requires use of their own national encryption standard, which has a governmental back door (and for which exploits have already been demonstrated at BlackHat) in order to "secure" banking transactions from snooping by foreign powers (guess they called that one correctly).
[citation needed]
Can you provide a link to the paper/presentation in which the exploit and/or backdoor has been shown?
A quick search doesn't turn anything up, but "seed" is a bit of a generic term (and is also used in reference to RNG in crypto) and so there's a lot of noise.
... considering you can do nothing on a computer in South Korea now without Windows. Not interact with banks or the government at least. :)
They're negotiating a huge discount for Windows 8 perhaps?
MS has their programmers and then their designers. The linux world is missing designers. Linux needs an intuitive and stable DE. All DE's that I have tried are buggy and feels like I'm running windows 98.
Kool Korea, or Krazy Korea?
Once someone with serious financial muscle, namely Google, took up the idea, it was game over for the desktop. Google docs has much smaller set of features compared to Microsoft Office. But it is enough to meet 100% of the needs of 90% of the population. It is also enough to meet 90% of the needs of the remaining 10%. Mere 10% of the user base using these bells and whistles for just 10% of the time. ChromeOS is based on a Linux kernel. Android pads and phones are based on Linux. Linux has taken over the server market. It has been the decade of Linux.
In a meta sense, the old PC desktop market was based on selling everyone the superset of needs of all the users. Grandma wanting a machine to look at pics of grandkids was buying a machine capable of developing C++ projects or doing video editing. Once Apple broke the market into two pieces, content creators and content consumers it was a true paradigm shift. But even grandma needs to type a letter once in a while. The browser is enough to meet that need,
Similar shift will happen in automobiles. Everyone is buying a machine that can refuel/recharge in 10 minutes to go another 250 miles. Even the second and the third car of the family is bought with the same mind set. But it can change very quickly. Solar is picking up. It is cost effective for people to ditch the grid. Utilities are looking for a way to keep them in the grid. Grabbing a piece of the transportation energy market would be very attractive to them. When Big Oil gets a real well financed competitor well versed in dirty local politics, the electric utilities, that is when electric cars will take off.
There are many technologies maturing. Basic range of 100 miles is well within reach. Range extending options based on rentable charged batteries, battery swaps, towable range extending battery packs, range extending IC engines are all possible. The challenge is not the technology, but the investment needed for infrastructure.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact