OSS in One-Fifth of Japanese Businesses

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 '"

So in other words

[Anonymous Coward]

Japan is behind the U.S. in OSS adoption? Or is the Japan 21 percent figure "exclusively use" and the America 33 percent figure "partially use"? This article is somewhat confusing.

Re:free oss?

[minus_273]

There is another way to look at it. I am sure there are more MCSEs out there than linux admins because of the way they are churned out. The MCSEs may know nothing, but they are probably good enough to do some basic point and click with the GUI. Keeping that in mind a linux admin who is probably far more competent is more expensive.

best selling PDA in Japan is linux based Zaurus

[speculatrix]

I've heard it from a reliable commentator that the Sharp Zaurus is the most popular PDA in Japan...

My own guess is probably due to the fact it comes with built-in Japanese-English dictionary/translation software (I don't speak Jp so I can't tell you anything about it, I blatted over my Japanese ROM with the Cacko distribution within hours of receiving it).

The interesting thing is that the latest Zaurus, the SL-C3100 [gizmodo.com], the successor to the C3000 (which was the first ever PDA with a built-in hard drive), is marked as FCC approved. Hopefully Sharp will bring the Zaurus back to the North American market sooner than later, to make up for pulling the much missed 6000L model (which they initially rebutted [infosyncworld.com] but later turned out to be effectively true when they disappeared from retail sellers like amazon [amazon.com]).

Re:The Government is helping too

[patio11]

I work in a Japanese government-established technology incubator and we're pushing OSS as hard as possible. Heck, I got two weeks off of my normal development schedule to contribute to an OSS *game*, for God's sakes. Especially outside of Tokyo (in the vast chunk of the Japanese economy that the rest of the world doesn't hear about), OSS is taking off like a rocket -- we've had a lot of consultations with itty-bitty businesses about "Say, do you have any of that free software stuff that does ?" They're pretty happy when it actually works.

The reason American OSS geeks should be happy Japanese OSS is starting to take off (despite the barriers like language and etc -- keep in mind that Windows took a while to hit 20% penetration here, too, because like half of the Linux distributions it didn't ship with a way to natively input Japanese text) is that Japan exports technical knowhow like crazy. Our last OSS conference had delegates from governments in about six countries (Phillipines, India, etc) who we were telling "Hey, you can save yourself a heck of a lot of money and you'll never have government continuity threatened by loss of a key vendor ever again... Did we mention you save a lot of money?" Obviously, countries take their cues from US usage too, but as the biggest foreign aid donor in the world when the Japanese government says "Hey, we'd appreciate if you economized on our technology funds we're giving you -- here are some ideas on how", people tend to listen.