>The only reason I can see for them supporting OSS is because the Chinese seem to be going away from MS.
I would say it isn't true. That Asialinux is probably just a small move in order to cut cost of servers. Chinese in linux isn't ready anytime soon and the government isn't helping at all. From fonts to input there are still lots of problems.
Common forks would just use windows, it's the doorway for using pirated software to save money.
the word of sabotage should apply to windowsupdate instead. They can direct the way people administrate their PC. When they patch your media player, they could have default it as default media player as well. I didn't remember when did I install that.net runtime on my PC.
So basically we need a modified Arphic font with APL license, adding more characters and hint it manually like what firefly is doing. Or else we would need another 4-8 years for the expire of the hinting patents
The penetration rate of linux would still low unless certain basic requirment is meet:
- eye-easy fonts and fonts engine, the asia fonts structure is complex. In 10-12px web page they just look horrible
- out of the box input methods: intelligent phoenetic type input or chanjei should be enabled as default. (Common newbies cannot install it themself)
I know that some improvement is progressing like firefly-arphic fonts and iiimf. Unless they become mature things won't start right.
It may not be able to boost linux.
For people who pirate windows, they would keep using a hacked windows without windows update. People still can share windows on few PCs.
Most people there were poor, they had a habit of pirating commercial software and it is unlikely to be changed. In my observations, people there are already locked with MS products. If they can get Windows + MS Office + Photoshop + Antivirus for free they won't give a chance on OSS.
Their soul are sold to devil already, even if their government put 4x efforts on OSS. It wouldn't change. China is likely to be Microsoft's next empire.
Just a warning.
It's likely to be my problems but I would like to post here as a warning. I used to use Open Office but when I upgrade from 1.1.1 to 1.1.4, I found that some documents look a bit difference. The texttable functions could messed up the my preformatted numbers and credit cards numbers. I had to do some extra python programming in order to solve this problem. It made me really disappointed about open office's quality.
I would like to use this opportunity to suggest LA to test the openoffice suite first and distribute only a tested, tweaked version. e.g. Add a print preview icon on the main tool bar, disable some try-to-be-smart autoformat/autocorrect
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>The only reason I can see for them supporting OSS is because the Chinese seem to be going away from MS. I would say it isn't true. That Asialinux is probably just a small move in order to cut cost of servers. Chinese in linux isn't ready anytime soon and the government isn't helping at all. From fonts to input there are still lots of problems. Common forks would just use windows, it's the doorway for using pirated software to save money.
the word of sabotage should apply to windowsupdate instead. They can direct the way people administrate their PC. When they patch your media player, they could have default it as default media player as well. I didn't remember when did I install that .net runtime on my PC.
So basically we need a modified Arphic font with APL license, adding more characters and hint it manually like what firefly is doing. Or else we would need another 4-8 years for the expire of the hinting patents
www.study-area.org/apt/firefly-font/
cle.linux.org.tw
www.oaka.org/freefonts
freedesktop.org/wiki/Software_2fCJKUnifonts
The input method is another issue yet we have all kind of gui working together.
If people cannot see and cannot write, they would just turn back immediately. At this rate the future of linux in China/TW/HK shouldn't be optimistic.
Let's hope Japanese/Korean could do it better
The penetration rate of linux would still low unless certain basic requirment is meet:
- eye-easy fonts and fonts engine, the asia fonts structure is complex. In 10-12px web page they just look horrible
- out of the box input methods: intelligent phoenetic type input or chanjei should be enabled as default. (Common newbies cannot install it themself)
I know that some improvement is progressing like firefly-arphic fonts and iiimf. Unless they become mature things won't start right.
what if someone wave a reader a few inches behind my butt?
It may not be able to boost linux. For people who pirate windows, they would keep using a hacked windows without windows update. People still can share windows on few PCs.
Most people there were poor, they had a habit of pirating commercial software and it is unlikely to be changed. In my observations, people there are already locked with MS products. If they can get Windows + MS Office + Photoshop + Antivirus for free they won't give a chance on OSS.
Their soul are sold to devil already, even if their government put 4x efforts on OSS. It wouldn't change. China is likely to be Microsoft's next empire.
Just a warning. It's likely to be my problems but I would like to post here as a warning. I used to use Open Office but when I upgrade from 1.1.1 to 1.1.4, I found that some documents look a bit difference. The texttable functions could messed up the my preformatted numbers and credit cards numbers. I had to do some extra python programming in order to solve this problem. It made me really disappointed about open office's quality. I would like to use this opportunity to suggest LA to test the openoffice suite first and distribute only a tested, tweaked version. e.g. Add a print preview icon on the main tool bar, disable some try-to-be-smart autoformat/autocorrect