Debian to be Marketed to Japan and China 173
darthcamaro writes "Thanks to Sun Wah Linux and VA Linux Systems Japan, Debian is about to get some major exposure in Asia according to a report.
Debian developer Matthew Garrett told internetnews.com that Debian has always been one of the most international Linux distributions. "It's wonderful to see initiatives that will increase our representation in countries with a growing interest in Linux," he added. "It's especially heartening to see this move coming from commercial enterprises, as it demonstrates that free software can work with business."" There's also a post on Newsforge as well.
all this linux (Score:2, Insightful)
Piracy in Asia hurts OSS adoption (Score:5, Insightful)
Sure, OO.o and all that is available, but MS has a head start with their stranglehold, and everyone just uses what everyone else uses. Price isn't an issue. For home users, support isn't an issue either since computer hardware shops that sold you the computer will do the support for you (whether that copy of Windows is licensed or not). Basically, what a typical home user does when his box is messed up is take it to the shop, and some bored technician will just reformat and reinstall things.
For big businesses, they want a "reputable" brand and therefore go Microsoft. MS has a lot of mindshare, plus they have a monopolistic stranglehold on the iT industry anyway, so Windows and MS is accepted way of running computers.
It's not all bleak though... OSS is getting momentum around these parts. In Malaysia, there has been a drive by the government [star-techcentral.com] to OSS-ify their IT infrastructure (this made a few Microsofties cry
Re:they forgot one... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Maybe they'll start moving a bit now? (Score:3, Insightful)
For any debian users who don't know this; change all 'stable' to 'testing' or 'unstable' in /etc/apt/sources.list and run 'apt-get update' and 'apt-get dist-upgrade' as root.
what a load of bull... (Score:5, Insightful)
I am sorry but that just bull. The reason why there is more microsoft products in asia is because they microsoft market them well. There are lots and lots of opensource projects that have started from asia just not popular in the US and Europe.
I think its a really good initiative. This is what Open Source and Linux really needs, letting people know what is available to them.
Enterprises (Score:4, Insightful)
Oh Well, I am sure some MBA formula can show me I am wrong.
Re:Tried already with BSD (Score:3, Insightful)
Where's the basis for this comment? Open source wasn't working too well in <insert country name here> in 1995, yet 10 years later it seems to be catching on, despite "the <insert country name here> mindset". Maybe mindset has nothing to do with it and it's just that open source is still ramping up in Asia?
Regarding the AC's "kiasu" crack, English has a word for "greed", does that mean we are all greedy? Some countries may use the word more often in their vocabulary, but that also applies to non-Asian countries (especially if you take your stereotypes from the movie "Wall Street [imdb.com]").
Comment removed (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Tried already with BSD (Score:5, Insightful)
The asian mindset doesn't exist. If it did, there'd only be one language, one country, one party, and no murder. Cops will then go unemployed since everyone agrees with each other.
The truth is, if you take a survey of ten people, there's bound to be a disagreement on something. Some get open source (does Ruby mean anything to you?), most have never heard about it.
Try to bundle two billion people's mindset into one, and there is no way you can succeed, no matter what your anecdotal evidence says.
Re:Tried already with BSD (Score:5, Insightful)
This is nonsense. The real reason is that Linux/BSD currently have poorly integrated support for CJK characters. There are lots of different standards and programs, it's a pain to input them using the keyboard and everything is incompatible. You might need to lots of additional configuration to do a task as simple as editing a text file in the input method you prefer.
Re:Tried already with BSD (Score:3, Insightful)
Apparently China is on board with Linux. [sfgate.com] And the vendor is big evil Linux-hating Sun Microsystems! (thousands of trolls' heads explode over this paradox)
Re:they forgot one... (Score:3, Insightful)
By the way - learning proper grammar structure would help. What you're to say is obscured by your illiteracy (s/can fit/people/, s/americans/Americans/).
Re:Tried already with BSD (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:they forgot one... (Score:1, Insightful)
How about you RTFA.
It's about a Japanese company and a Chinese company teaming up together to work on Debian.
"Ignorant Americans" has nothing to do with this. Mentioning Japan and China but not Korea is not ignorant, it's accurate reporting.
Of course, information gets lost once posted on slashdot, and their readers who don't RTFA stretch it way out of context. Thanks!
Re:Piracy in Asia hurts OSS adoption (Score:3, Insightful)
One of the selling points of OSS businesses is that it's (usually) cheaper than proprietary closed-source software, but that point is negated by the fact that piracy is so rampant here that every piece of software is "free".
I doubt parent knows what his talking about. First of all, when the cost of using FOSS in business is concerned, it does not only refer to the initial purchase price of a piece of software. It refers to the TCO (total cost of ownership), which includes such fun items as damages incur by malware. Even if pirated programs were free, Windows still loses in TCO by being such a huge magnet of nastiness.
Secondly, pirated programs are not free. Sure, you can find free ones on warez sites, but then that wouldn't be limited to Asia (read: East Asia). Pirates need to eat, too.
Thirdly, but probably the most important point, is the big push toward Linux in East Asia is all about security. Not only Microsoft stuff got all these huge security holes, but these countries also worry about programs they can't see and examine. What's in the blackbox? Why are all these strange processes calling home? I don't blame them -- in fact, being paranoid is a positive trait in security. So, they are going to FOSS, because they can look at the source and know exactly what the software does.
Gambling with customers (Score:5, Insightful)
But "just run unstable in production environments" doesn't cut it for a lot of people.
Re:heh (Score:5, Insightful)
Unless you're running stable (which really is better suited for servers than desktops), you're just spreading FUD. I run testing, FWIW.
Previously, I used XCIN for input, although I used SCIM these days.
It always baffles me when people are like, "Distribution X" doesn't have Y! Especially with Debian, which has nearly every piece of free software under the sun packaged. You just install the packages you want. Sheesh.
Re:Hardly seems community based (Score:2, Insightful)
No you are right on this one. Its not really community based and I am no fan of commercial distros, but the question is how much are they going to give back to the community. I believe CJK support has a lot to catch up on compared with the rest of FOSS projects. So much so that anything is better than nothing.
In the CJK world there aren't enough i10n developers for the amount of work that needs to be done. (Yes there are some exceptions like Mozilla that is lucky enough to have whole teams of active i10n developers.) I'm hoping that this would at least contribute to make more resources availble for the CJK development as a whole. Make available more translated documentation, CJK compatible packages, and truly pre-configured one-click-to-CJK distributions.
Also its a good way to let people in CJK countries know there is a better alternative out there. I feel optimistic and believe that FOSS awareness is improving. Though not all of them are equally bad there is still a lot to be desired. For instance many popular web sites in Japan still use commercial-consumer-centric-OS's Shift-JIS character encoding despite availability of UTF-8 and ISO-2022-JP.
Re:Gambling with customers (Score:2, Insightful)
If it is developer's desktop, unstable is perfectly fine. (At least you do not need to recompile like gentoo.)
But for hosting any service for others, I agree it does not cut it for a lot of people unless they QA every updates in advance in details.
What we need is more regular desktop release
By the way, I have to admit we have not so many active Asian DD when compaired to Europe.
Osamu
---