OSS in One-Fifth of Japanese Businesses 99
WillAffleck writes "According to a recent Infoworld article, one-fifth of all Japanese businesses now use Open Source operating systems. From the article: 'By contrast, 33 percent of U.S. companies have adopted open-source operating systems in at least some of their servers, MIC said. Among the companies polled by the MIC, 66 percent said open-source operating systems have low initial costs, while 47.8 percent said the software has low operating costs '"
Re:And the other 33%? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:free oss? (Score:4, Informative)
Indeed it does. Until MS nuts realize that MS products need support as well, this arguement is not valid.
The Government is helping too (Score:5, Informative)
The m17n library allow you to view and type complex text languages like Indic, Arabic, Hebrew and other languages. While this is possible by using QT3.2+ & GTK2.0+pango, this restricted one to just 2 toolkits and to two heavyweight desktops(XFCE4 is the exception though). The library [m17n.org] is also a good compromise between a toolkit dependent solution like pango/QT3.2 and Server based solutions like the doomed Indix and STSF.
The screenshots here [m17n.org] show firefox and magicpoint, applications that use different toolkits displaying multilinugal texts. I have even seen but not used windowmaker rpms compiled with m17n support.
A very practical example would be something like Damn Small Linux, which is a pretty lightweight live CD in both disk size (~50 MB) and Memory usage (runs on 64 MB RAM). This was ideal for a school near my place that wanted to use it as a teaching resource but wanted it in their native language. I finally am settling for XFCE4 and GTK2 applications like OO.o, Firefox.
The keyboard solutions were too rudimentary, in the case of xkb for phonetic keymaps for indian languages or too buggy and complex, in the case of IIIMF. M17n was a joy to use from day one and rpms for Mandrake 10.1 & debs for Ubuntu/Debian unstable are available.
Re:Japan is beating us (Score:2, Informative)
Now, perhaps they're ahead of us on the residential adoption - I couldn't say.
Re:So in other words (Score:2, Informative)
"The use of open-source operating systems in enterprise servers is growing in Japan"
and
"So far, 21 percent of Japanese companies have already introduced open-source operating systems including Linux, FreeBSD, and OpenBSD systems"
and
"Open-source operating systems are used with much less frequency in applications for financial, payment, distribution and customer service applications, the report said."
It seems to me that the article is talking about the use of OSS for running servers (web, etc.), but doesn't specifically say anything about personal workstations. Based on the third quote, I surmise that this means they're still using Windows in other places around the office.
Bad article!!!! (Score:2, Informative)
Here is the bottom of it. 21.0 % of Japanese business currently use OSS for server, 7.6 % of Japanese business is planning to introduce OSS for server, 14.6 % of Japanese business is considering to introduce OSS for server. In the same white paper, they have the figures for USA and South Korea. According to the white paper, the figure in the US is 33.0 % currently use OSS server, 5.7 % is planning to use, and 20.6 % is considering to use. In South Korea, 21.0 % is currently using, 4.7 % is planning to use, and 12.9 % is considering.
If you don't believe me, you can read it yourself at (it's on the fourth page on this PDF): http://www.johotsusintokei.soumu.go.jp/whitepaper
In short, OSS use in Japan in server market is less than that of the US! Is this supposed to be a news? I don't think so!
I thought something was wrong when I saw the headline, as I never saw any OSS machines around when I used to work in Japan. In fact, everywhere I saw, I only saw Windows machines (not even Mac back in 2002).