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Why The Korean Government Could Go Open Source By 2020

Posted by timothy on from the file-formats-matter dept.

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.)

3 of 64 comments (clear)

  1. Very difficult to do by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

    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.

  2. Also illegal, so far... by tlambert · · Score: 5, Informative

    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...

  3. Re:Google I/O by jones_supa · · Score: 5, Informative

    On PC desktop the QA is still terrible. For example, Ubuntu 14.04 LTS ships with a media player which does not work properly with touchpad and which crashes when the subtitle setting is changed. Also the ACPI fan speed control is broken for a bunch of laptops. Sure, the correct solution here is simply to switch from Totem to VLC, and use a different kernel for the fan problem. Easy enough... but soon enough, some other glitch pops up. As long as Linux desktops (not only Ubuntu) are filled with these nasty surprises, the support costs will be enormous for fixing all these bugs or finding workarounds for them.