Canonical and China Announce Ubuntu Collaboration

First time accepted submitter GovCheese writes "Canonical, the software company that manages and funds Ubuntu, announced that the Chinese Ministry of Industry and Information Technology will base their national reference architecture for standard operating systems on Ubuntu, and they will call it Kylin. Arguably China is the largest desktop market and the announcement has important implications. Shuttleworth says, 'The release of Ubuntu Kylin brings the Chinese open source community into the global Ubuntu community.'"

This has been tried before

[RobertinXinyang]

The Chinese government tried pushing Linux in the past, research “Red Flag” Linux. It was a failure. I only saw it once. I happened to be in a shop in Xian and I saw it on a computer. Before I could comment on it the sales man assured me that if I purchased the computer they would put a copy of Windows on it “so it could be useful.”

As others have commented, Linux is competing with free copies of Windows. Further, it lacks the games that the Chinese want (also free).

Free as in speech has no ring to the Chinese ear. The issue is broken down to choosing between two flavours of free beer.

Re:Poor decisions lately Mr. Shuttleworth?

[xyzio]

They have to make money somehow. I've had no issues using Ubuntu and it is one of the few distros that is easy to use and set up.

Pretty smart

[stewsters]

This is actually a pretty good move for China. China can't trust all the signed binaries from Microsoft , especially after the Microsoft certificates were used to sign the flame malware. With all the cyber-saber-rattling in Washington, its possible they could do the same thing to China with a Chinese Language patch. This way at lest you can compile the source yourself and check for weird additions.

In exchange for this, Ubuntu should become a lot more popular in a country that is currently producing the most volume of Unix systems. For us Linux users, it means that more drivers will be available before release, and they will continue to manufacture motherboards that don't require us to secure boot into Windows 8. I just hope any espionage China uses on its own people doesn't get committed back into the Ubuntu repo.

Re:Poor decisions lately Mr. Shuttleworth?

[MrEricSir]

They have to make money somehow. I've had no issues using Ubuntu and it is one of the few distros that is easy to use and set up.

So, so much this. Install Ubuntu on your computer and notice how their installer walks you through the process. Then go install Fedora -- and you'll remember why Linux still gets a bad rap.

Even if some of Canonical's decisions have been questionable, there's no question that they've made desktop Linux a significantly more pleasant experience for people who aren't hardcore IT geeks.

Re:I'm sure China has the Windows source

[Squiggle]

Does anyone compile their own Windows? If you don't compile it then the source code that you see is just for show.

Hm, I am curious if orgs like the NSA do compile the source and compare their binary to the official one, they wouldn't have a licence to distribute if the binaries differed, but if they were identical that seems pretty safe. If you're serious about security you compile and distribute your own version of the software yourself.