Canonical and China Announce Ubuntu Collaboration 171
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.'"
Re:This has been tried before (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Poor decisions lately Mr. Shuttleworth? (Score:5, Interesting)
For a change, I have mod points, but I'd rather reply than add a random -1 = I disagree. It's no secret that Canonical wants to make money. Unlike competing Linux distros with a commercial and a free version, Canonical refused to split their distro in two. This decision has hampered their financial growth, but helped their community growth. I applaud them for it. Canonical has some financial interest but is clearly willing to sacrifice earnings to be good world citizens. Big American companies passed up valuable opportunities to partner with Canonical. HP and Dell, screwed up, though Dell at least gave it a an incompetent effort. The Chinese and Canonical working together makes sense. The Chinese like to steal whatever they can, but Canonical has already offered everything for free. There's nothing to steal. For example, Lenovo just sold me a $1900 ThinkPad Carbon X1 Touch with a bad display, and they knew it. Rather than eating the lost from buying thousands of bad displays, they decided to screw over all their ThinkPad customers in America. It's the Chinese way. The poor IBM employees supporting the ThinkPad line are screwed. Most companies can't even imagine a productive relationship with the Chinese government. However, there's no downside to Canonical, and tons of upside for China. If a billion Chinese benefit, and Canonical grows from a tiny company to a medium company, everyone wins. Mr Shuttleworth has always cared more about helping a billion people than making another hundred million. The Chinese are simply smart enough to take advantage of Shuttleworth's generousity. I get so tired of how people prefer to tear down good work. What have you done to improve the human condition? Does it compare to Mark's work?
The a-holes above calling Mark a communist pinko can suck my ever-hard wang.
Re:Poor decisions lately Mr. Shuttleworth? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Linux is now terrorism! (Score:4, Interesting)
Because "communism" is what people commonly associate with "enemy" in much of the Western world.
The actual meaning of the word has been lost long ago in case of general populace, just like other similar politically loaded words such as "freedom", "democracy" and so on.
I'm sure China has the Windows source (Score:4, Interesting)
It is not the big secret people think it is. Many institutions, including research universities, have a copy. They have a program specially for governments, the Government Security Program.
I mean do you really think the NSA, one of the most institutionally paranoid places there is, would allow Windows to be used if they couldn't audit it? Not hardly.
MS's page on that kind of thing is here: http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/sharedsource/default.aspx [microsoft.com]
So if China wants it, I'm sure they have it. I think this is more of a "We have to have our own thing since China Strong!" and crap like that. China seems to have ego issues about not having home grown stuff (they aren't they only country that does) and wants to have their own everything. However turns out they aren't always equipped to develop it from scratch, so they often start with something else.
Similar to their "Loongson" microprocessor. It was to be a Chinese CPU, home grown and all that. In actuality they ripped off, and then later licensed, the MIPS architecture and it is a MIPS64 based chip running at 1GHz on a 65nm process.
This sounds similar. "Hey we want an OS, but writing one from scratch is a ton of work and we don't really have enough of the skillset around to do it well. So let's get a Linux distro to start on, and then make it our 'own'."
Re:This has been tried before (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
You might be surprised to learn that there are already thousands of Ubuntu stores and Kiosks in China, selling laptops with Ubuntu preloaded. China was a natural fit for Canonical because it's already a bigger market for them than the US.
Re:This has been tried before (Score:5, Interesting)
It's extremely frustrating when I see people pirate something when there are free alternatives. One could argue that the free/FOSS alternatives for certain classes of software aren't good enough, but there are enough cases nowadays where the quality of the free stuff is sufficient enough to make this something of a cop-out.
A Google engineer recently blogged about his experiences in Vietnam and how computer science was taught there (http://neil.fraser.name/news/2013/03/16/ [fraser.name]). The story itself is interesting enough (when it comes to computer science Vietnamese kids kick the ass of American students, to the point where half of the students in one particular grade 11 class could pass the Google interview process), but he mentions this:
Linux/LibreOffice is free, and yet still ignored. Obviously they aren't concerned about the BSA breaking down their doors to arrest everyone (yet), but it'd be nice if more countries with limited funds learnt the same basic techniques with more open source software. If you can't even give away your software, then Microsoft clearly have nothing to fear.
Re:Poor decisions lately Mr. Shuttleworth? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Red Flag / Qomo are supposed to what, pound san (Score:2, Interesting)
Possibly the difference is Canonical has a superstar jetset personality in front of it who's even been to space.
I'm not kidding. That'll help getting the crucial first few seconds of foot-in-door attention with mainstream people outside and inside government.
Also it's (sorta) South African. China is investing massively in Africa, and Africa has never been an Enemy. Together these are good hooks and waay better than from America/Finland and Stallman/Torvalis. Those are no hook at all.
This is enough, though flame me to a crisp for suggesting that Ubuntu may be better, too. _I_ don't like where they're heading these days, but their aggressive pursuit of future-leaning touchscreen masses may well be a really good plan for greater adoption.