Japan eyes Linux

NEC, the world's second largest semiconductor manufacturer, believes that the sucess of Linux would allow another microprocessor architecture to be established in the PC market. If Linux becomes mainstream, the basis for microprocessor competition would be cost/performance and not architecture. Although NEC might design its own processor architecture for Linux, it's more likely that they use the existing MIPS architecture. In related news, Justsystem will port its Ichitaro word processing program to Linux, and offer in July ATOK, a program for Japanese-language input.