Red Caps Adopt Red Hat

China, in the news more recently for sentencing hackers to death, now looks set to encourage them. In this article from the South China Morning Post, Red Hat says it will establish a beach head in the rapidly industrialising sleeping giant to push Linux before Microsoft makes its move. We reported in November that Linux was to be China's official OS. I can see Red Hat stock jumping skyward if a billion communists suddenly decide Linux is their desktop and server platform of choice.

Comments

Sensationalism

[Pascal Q. Porcupine]

Usually when something like this happens, I bite my tongue and let the other naysayers come out of the woodwork. However, I would expect better from Slashdot not to use a sensationalist headline like "Red Caps Adopt Red Hat," and I would hope that the editors would know better than trying to stir up flames by pointing out their (not really that recent) sentencing of crackers (isn't this the same news site which is constantly trying to distinguish between a hacker and a cracker?). It seems that whenever things involve China or other non-English-speaking nations, Slashdot gets nice and sensational, showing only one side of the issue even when that side is relatively irrelevant to the issue at hand.

Thanks, Nathan, for putting a sour taste in my mouth tonight.
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"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.

Windows does beat linux for I18N

[poopie]

Developing nations *can* afford klunky M$ products. Pirated CDs with MS software cost the same as linux cds. I do not endorse piracy, but there *are* thousands of shops that sell pirated software in Asia and they do it publicly.

So, price isn't an issue. Maybe copyright compliance is, but not price.

The biggest problem I can see to increasing linux use in Asia is internationalization. I'm willing to bet that many millions of people would rather use windows in their own language than linux in english.

I know, for european languages, you can set LC_ALL , and I know that there are localized version of linux in Thai, Japanese, Chinese, but until we have a single distribution of linux that can imput and display all the major languages in every app, we're not finished.

There's more to it than meet the eye.

Do you have any idea how many different ways there are to type chinese? (at least 18 different imput methods if memory serves me)

Do you have any idea how many different and incompatible character sets there are for Chinese? (at least 3 completely different ones)

Do you have any idea how few of the total chinese characters are even represented in a complete UNICODE font? (I think unicode font includes about 20,000 Chinese, Japanese, Korean glyphs while Chinese has over 80,000 characters)

add on a batch of other languages with accents above, below, or on either side of character, and then start thinking about right to left text input. (arabic, hebrew, ...)

sadly, X wasn't designed with these in mind. The GNOME folks are working on pango to address these issues... seems redhat is putting a lot of work into internationalizaion...

Here's a link to gscript

Here's a gtk internationalization whitepaper

Shame on you, Nathan!

[Bruce Perens]

I got so pissed off by this story that I've had to type in this comment three times just to get it right.

I'm trying to be diplomatic about this one and it's really hard. The headline isn't true, the story isn't true for the most part, and it's just an attempt to dig up that old Linux and Communism canard again. Did Jeff and Rob decide to fly to California and leave Slashdot with the wrong baby-sitter?

• The nation of China has not made Linux its official operating system. The story to that effect was a hoax.
• The Red Caps are not adopting Red Hat. They never said they were.
• One billion communists are not adopting Linux as their platform of choice. That is speculation.
• Exactly one thing in the story is true. Red Hat is opening an office and going after the Chinese market, like a lot of other capitalist companies.

But we knew this much already, months ago. So what's the reason for this story? It's about the worst thing I've seen on Slashdot in quite a while.

Bruce