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Japanese Government to Move to OSS
Posted by
Zonk
on Mon May 14, 2007 03:31 AM
from the a-little-less-time-on-hold dept.
from the a-little-less-time-on-hold dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Linuxworld has up an article on the Japanese government's plan to reduce its reliance on a single IT vendor by moving to open source software. 'Oracle, NEC, IBM, HP, Hitachi and Dell are among 10 IT equipment and software vendors that are forming a consortium to develop and sell Linux-based servers and computers for the Japanese market. The move by the vendors to collaborate on Linux in Japan comes from a edict from the country's government to make Linux and open source a priority for all IT procurements, starting this July.' The government has said explicitly it wants to decrease its reliance on Microsoft as a server operating system platform."
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Japanese Government to Move to OSS
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I for one (Score:5, Funny)
No wonder Microsoft is scared (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:No wonder Microsoft is scared (Score:5, Insightful)
America should be the most scared (Score:4, Interesting)
(Last Journal: Friday December 01 2006, @10:51AM)
Re:No wonder Microsoft is scared (Score:5, Interesting)
(http://www.modthemovies.com/ | Last Journal: Saturday October 27, @11:59PM)
Windows 2000 was, is, and will be (until the process of making it obsolete via lack of patches to make it compliant with new hardware is complete) very competitive with anything else, especially when you factor in ease of use and administration.
I switched from the HP-UX / Solaris world to the Microsoft world professionally in '97 when I discovered that A) I could make more money that way, and B) that I actually liked being able to work with a product I was playing games on at home.
When Win2k came along, it was like validation; I didn't at the time, and still don't, like what they did with the DNS server & Active Directory, but it DID work, and worked well.
Towards the middle of NT 4's life, and until about 6 months after the release of win2k, things were sweet in microsoft land; things worked, if you blocked all the ports except the ones you actually used you were pretty safe, and the OS did everything; search engine, internet chat server, web server, early versions of VOIP, the list goes on & on. and if you shelled out the money for a good copy of office 2000, you got a free copy of SQL server and a whole crapload of web-enabled toys to play with from the OSE.
Almost immediately thereafter, however, Microsoft obviously began to come to the conclusion that they had succeeded too well; there was no real reason to upgrade from win2k/office2k. ever.
So they started killing it. They started killing function via patch. the fully developed 64-bit patch was put on the shelf until after the release of WinXP, except for in a highly expensive version of (not absolutely sure about this) Windows 2000 database server LE. Some people think that the code "leak" of 2004 was intentional, in order to push people either to XP or windows 2003. No effort was made to make intel hyperthreading CPU's work properly (they do work, but count each tread as a separate CPU, which they aren't, causing slowdowns). and
In recent years, companies have started releasing games that fail to install on win2k; in all examples to date, the games can be forced to install on win2k, and work easily as well as they do on the target platform.
I retired from full time work for a couple of years now, but when I do consults, it's either Debian, Solaris or Win2k. Screw the
(Feel free to disagree, this is mainly my spur of the moment opinion and not highly researched)
Obligatory Alice in Wonderland quote (Score:5, Interesting)
(http://www.sigsegv.cx/)
That explains the timing of Microsoft Saber rattling. One thing they forget is that it is 50+ times harder to get a patent in Japan compared to a patent in the US and many of those patents do not hold there. Unless they have decided to stop contesting the ATT verdict and turn it to their gross advantage. Hm... If a quick settlement of the ATT case follows it will definitely get curiouser and curiouser...
The other curious point is that some of the usual OSS Japanese suspects are strangely missing. Sony and NTT have many years of history of BSD investment. Both of them do not appear on the list and there are quite a few "foreign devils". Curiouser and curiouser...
Listen (Score:5, Funny)
But the Empire will wake up, and strike back. Unclear the future is.
Magic words (Score:5, Insightful)
These are the exact magic words one needs to say to get a HUGE discounts from Microsoft.
Put up or shut up (Score:2, Interesting)
However I am deeply sceptical of this whole claim, and find it very suspicious that Microsoft has not given any details but prefers to stick to vague sabre-rattling. Until specifics are published, we will have to conclude that Microsoft is merely bluffing: trying to frighten off the weaker and less determined Linux users by the threat of legal action.
At a technical level, it is always possible that any given piece of code infringes upon someone's patents. But how likely is it in this case? Consider that Linux is essentially a clean-room rewrite of Unix, whose design dates from 1970 and the following years. Now recall that, after the original Windows turned out to be too unreliable a foundation, Microsoft hired some ex-DEC software engineers in the early 1990s, leading to the creation of Windows NT - whose similarity to OpenVMS is overwhelmingly obvious and quite undeniable. All subsequent versions of Windows have been based on the same core infrastructure inherited from NT.
So, how likely is it that an OS based on designs that go back to 1970 copies anything from an OS written in the early 1990s, and which borrowed heavily from a third OS written in the late 1970s?
In closing, I have a couple of other questions.
1. How much brass neck does it take for a company like Microsoft to accuse anyone else of infringing on its patents, given Microsoft's own track record of systematically taking other people's ideas and incorporating them in its products without payment or even acknowledgement? One could accurately sum up Microsoft's history as a process of taking ideas whose inventors have failed to capitalize on them, and turning them into revenue.
2. When can we hope for HP, which has presumably inherited DEC's patents and copyrights, to threaten Microsoft with legal action?
Unfortunately both of these questions are purely rhetorical.
I hope they are sincere about it this time! (Score:4, Interesting)
(http://whatjapanthinks.com/)
Suffering for the master. (Score:3, Interesting)
How about another sort of conversion... say trying to implement an affordable healthcare system? Hell, I would love to be able to afford health insurace.
How about a more thouroughly reviewed/reviewable patent system, not just for software, but across the board?
Most other 'first world' nations have these things. Their implementations differ. Some work better than others.
All of these issues are related.
If you can cite a reason that America lacks these things other than special interest profit motive I would love to hear it. Maybe you could also apply that reason to my governments consistent resistance to acknowledging human influenced environmental change (many highly placed officials deny it exists!)
Congratulations to the Japanese for joining the ranks of countries taking measures to fortify and secure their information systems through diversification. Not to be unpatriotic or anything, but I'll keep my fingers crossed that this move and others like it will do serious harm to certain American companies, and force some true competition for government contracts here in the states.
Regards.
V E N D O R S (Score:4, Informative)
C ON S U M E R S (Score:4, Insightful)
(http://www.dina.kvl.dk/~abraham/)
From the article:
The government is a (very large) consumer, this (very large) consumer says that is will spend ten billions on mostly Linux based infrastructure. Not surprisingly, the vendors try to bid into this very large order.
Curious mix of vendors... (Score:3, Interesting)
(Last Journal: Monday August 22 2005, @11:02AM)
With the possible exception of IBM... all the other vendors above are the worst offenders when it comes to NOT promoting choice, adherence to standards, avoiding vendor-lockins etc. which is what the Open Source philosophy is all about. These vendors have Linux offerings and Open Source partnerships more as a PR exercise, than to promote the Open Source philosophy. Even IBM still maintains separate Linux and AIX offerings... and still maintains ambivalence over it's future... whether it will have 2 separate OSes or just AIX or Linux.
Does not bode well for Open Source in Japan, I guess. RedHat might've made a big impact, but it's not listed.
Just Plain Wrong (Score:5, Informative)
(Last Journal: Monday October 29, @05:30AM)
They say "Though we are strong supporters of Linux,No such alliance are planned.Recent nikkei article [nikkei.co.jp] is wrong"
ubuntu (Score:5, Funny)
(http://sinoc.org/denis/)
Why not moving the clients? (Score:2)
Then you find out that they are actually going to think to plan to move the servers to Linux.
For every server they run they also have dozens of clients running some
Vista caused this? (Score:1)
It seems that all this pro-Linux/OSS talk from these big companies like Dell is coming right on the heels of the disappointing launch of Vista. It must be depressing for Microsoft to realize that their wonder-OS has turned people off so badly.
Hopefully this news will be good in two ways: encourage Linux to polish up it's user-friendliness to be relevant to the non-techie average user... and to give Microsoft a clue.
Now lets see, can This happen (Score:2)
(http://www.webgeekworld.com/ | Last Journal: Thursday April 27 2006, @07:47AM)
but, despite linux community's challenge, they are not saying what infringes upon their iS., neither they are suing, yet.
lets say that major players migrated to linux, then, lets say that there REALLY was code in linux infringing microsoft's, and then microsoft sued these companies.
now, at this point, wouldnt microsoft's position be of the one that manipulates, and hides the truth from justice until it can exploit justice to acquire undeserved compensation through reparation lawsuits ?
in turkey for example, if you allege someone of some crime publicly, you HAVE to come up with its evidence. else, you yourself get sued.
wont microsoft be in knee deep shit because of this hide and seek manipulation when the time comes ?
In other news... (Score:1)
New Patent (Score:1)
Monopoly Politics (Score:1, Offtopic)
(http://slashdot.org/~Doc%20Ruby/journal | Last Journal: Thursday March 31 2005, @01:48PM)
Instead we "elected" Bush, whose Justice Department never met a monopoly it didn't love.
Seems like a sensible, intelligent move (Score:1)
Not that I'm in charge of anything for big companies but if I were, I'd use open source as much as possible, paying people to write the middleware as necessary, and paying them double to make sure that everything is documented thoroughly. You don't even have to be talking programming to see how poorly things are documented in most companies, just talk about business practices! You'll never find it written down. You lose one person in the department and nobody will know how x or y gets done or even that z is necessary. All computers do is take this preexisting level of disorganization and make it worse. The bigger the company, the bigger the chaos.
Or, as Bill Hilf would say... (Score:1)
(http://www.originofstorms.org/)
The answer is obvious (Score:1)
(http://mikedonaghy.org/)
companies are starting to trust open source a little more
to general consumers is higher than ever before