Japan Subsidizes Linux Development, Considers Switch 248
TheAB writes "Japan is betting 50 million yen ($450k US) that the next-generation of high-tech products and computer networks will rely on open-source software. The money is to develop an 'operating system for consumer electronics goods'."
Actually... (Score:5, Informative)
In either case it's not that big of a sum, but any amount helps!
Re:I don't know about this (Score:3, Informative)
Or something...
Re:Math (Score:5, Informative)
Of course, I'm putting my money on "linux", too, but you can never just assume things...
Re:Here's the REAL question (Score:5, Informative)
Lots of companies are already shipping products with embedded linux in it. You dont have to ship the code with the microwave. You can to make it available on a website.
Re:Oh boy! $450k! (Score:-1, Informative)
RTFA!
In Japanese that means like $50 Million, and that's a lot!
Re:Oh boy! $450k! (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Oh boy! $450k! (Score:5, Informative)
The $450k figure in the article comes from this: " Tokyo has already budgeted 50 million yen (US$416,000) for next fiscal year to study the possibility of switching government computers to an open-source operating system." Note, that's the city of Tokyo, not the Japanese government.
Read the article.
Re:Oh boy! $450k! (Score:1, Informative)
Japan plans to spend about 1 billion yen (US$8.3 million) funding Asian software developers working on the open-source Linux.
Re:WOOHOO! GUNDAM! (Score:3, Informative)
Yo, I had no idea that folks were building wacked out stuff like that over there! What's up with the control seat?! It looks like a freakin back-hoe operator's chair! LOL.
Seriously, though... they need to port Mechwarior, and write device driver's for that thing! Put a couple of LCD moniters in there, a throttle control and joy-stick, maybe some foot pedals... Yo, if anybody want's to open a file on source-forge, and make a port of MechWarrior for Gundam-mech, there, count me in! =)
Mod the parent up! That's the coolest link on this thread!
Re:I don't know about this (Score:5, Informative)
As far as illegal software, there is a great deal of street vendors who pawn that stuff off, but I've seen the same thing in New York. It may be a little bit worse in Japan due to the vast availablilty of high-speed broadband. And no, my use of high-speed and broadband is not redundant. I have a 12MBit ADSL line which usually averages 2.5 MBit, but on sites that can handle it, I've gone as high as 7.5MBit sustained. There are also regions that run 100MBit ethernet straight to your home. I only pay 2800yen (~$25) per month for my ADSL, which makes piracy quite cheap for me if I decided to go down that road to make an illegal yen or two.
Now, I have also been to Hong Kong, where after 5 days I had still not located a store that was actually selling legitimate copies of software. But there were more places than I could count pawning off the illegal copies.
bad economy makes open source nessicity (Score:1, Informative)
Any body that has worked in government or a large institution will know how much hassle it is to purchase a piece of software. Going with open source makes financial sense, development sense and management sense. If your developers can get to work immediately and not wait for 5 weeks due to purchasing delays, that's 5 very valuable weeks. If you work in the government, where purchasing beakers can take 6 months, it can make/break a project.
Microsoft is it's own worse enemy. They have huge profit margins and it's commonly accepted as truth, so business are pissed their own margins are razor thin. Really, why in the world should company A cut their own margins down to 1-2%, when microsoft's is over 50%. But take the name microsoft out of the picture and say it's just a monopoly company. You can easily replace it with big 5 car manufacturers vs mechanics. Saving money is the primary force driving open source growth.
Re:Japanese Linux (Score:2, Informative)
Chris
Just like the days of E-TRON. (Score:4, Informative)
Actually, its not really news that the Japanese government is doing this. They've been doing this for years - trying to get a globally accepted embedded device-control operating system widely adopted among the industry.
There used to be a project, headed up by one of Japans most respected computer scientists, called TRON.
This was pre-Hollywood "TRON" movie, which actually had some basis in its script and 'ideology' on the Japanese ideals put forth by the TRON project; which were, simply, to create a global networked computer 'system', accessible throughout the world, out of the embedded OS in consumer devices. In other words, put chips *everywhere* and have them all function as part of a global computer system.
I guess the end result would be so that the phrase "imagine a Beowulf of that!" could be applied to *anything*, in actual fact there would be nothing *but* Beowulf clusters of everything, and its name would be "TRON".
TRON was a project to try and define this OS and how these devices would communicate with each other - in 1978!!
(It may also be referred to as the "E-TRON" project, I seem to remember there being some move to change the name at one point...)
Anyway, just wanted to point out that the move of the Japanese government to promote OSS is probably based on an even older ethos among the Japanese techno/industrial zaibatsu's...