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Red Hat Software Businesses

Red Caps Adopt Red Hat 119

Posted by Nathan from the Mao-Tse-Tux dept.
China, in the news more recently for sentencing hackers to death, now looks set to encourage them. In this article from the South China Morning Post, Red Hat says it will establish a beach head in the rapidly industrialising sleeping giant to push Linux before Microsoft makes its move. We reported in November that Linux was to be China's official OS. I can see Red Hat stock jumping skyward if a billion communists suddenly decide Linux is their desktop and server platform of choice.
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Red Caps Adopt Red Hat More

Red Caps Adopt Red Hat

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  • I can't believe they still say "in the news more recently for sentencing hackers to death." Even if that were valid (as the discussion then proved it wasn't) it wouldn't be valid now.

    First post?

    Work together for the Common Geek Good:
  • nations as they can't afford expensive klunky M$ products.

  • Sensationalism (Score:5)

    by Pascal Q. Porcupine ( 4467 ) on Tuesday December 28, 1999 @07:30PM (#1437252) Homepage
    Usually when something like this happens, I bite my tongue and let the other naysayers come out of the woodwork. However, I would expect better from Slashdot not to use a sensationalist headline like "Red Caps Adopt Red Hat," and I would hope that the editors would know better than trying to stir up flames by pointing out their (not really that recent) sentencing of crackers (isn't this the same news site which is constantly trying to distinguish between a hacker and a cracker?). It seems that whenever things involve China or other non-English-speaking nations, Slashdot gets nice and sensational, showing only one side of the issue even when that side is relatively irrelevant to the issue at hand.

    Thanks, Nathan, for putting a sour taste in my mouth tonight.
    ---
    "'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.

  • As mentioned in this Slashdot article [slashdot.org] the US Government is seriously looking into using Linux - specifically Red Hat 6.x. How will this fare with (potentially) billions of Communist developers contibuting to their OS? While it's good to get more folks on the wagon, what will happen here? Will the Red Scare strike fear into the hearts of the US government? Will they be forced to use the closed-source commie offerings of M$?
  • It would be nice if the people with article posting access would share a common dictionary. Don't we cover into the "Hacker != Cracker" rant often enough? Should we even need to discuss why "Red Caps" is lame?
  • hearing the "one billion" people slogan. If that was really the market size of any product in China, the best product would be underarm deodorants... "two billion armpits". I am sure red hat will do well, but I am also sure that they will face very stiff competition from existing companies that have better connections in China. China is a nexus of many things strange to the western mind and unless Red Hat can buy themselves into this nexus, they will not suceed. I would give a grass roots linux distro made in China a much better chance at making it.
  • People power tends to be cheap, so I do not see them paying for the support. RH will probably see a big boo$t in their trailing programs. This is where alot of the real money is. Think about it, $2000.00 per person, a class of 12, for fives training. That is $24,000 a week minus some expense. It is still a nice chunk of change for a single course.

    RH would be insane not to get a site there.

  • The Soviet military used to wear red berets as a part of their uniforms. Now the comparny Red Hat wants to move into a communist country to establish a business...and with the US government interested in Linux as an operating system, it makes me wonder if there isn't another Chinese conspiracy afloat. I wouldn't surprise me, those reds are awful sneaky.
  • Nonsense. When the next Red Scare finally hits (and hopefully before) emphasis will be placed on the best utilization of Linux (and other Open Source) as a sound method of technological defense.

    My company occasionally dabbles in the military industrial complex and in my experience they're beginning see the strengths of free software just as much as the rest of the world is. They're beginning to understand, albeit slowly, that closed-source is simply another form of security thru obscurity and a potential threat to national security
  • Did anyone read Bruce Sterling's recent novel "Distraction"? He posits an interesting theory on how a proprietary-software-dependent US economy could brought to its knees by China and various third-world nations distributing all commercial software available in the US for free across the internet. Sort of like an intellectual property attorney's worst nightmare/wet dream - the entire world becoming one big warez site. Seriously, though - what would happen if China or any other nation put out a press release announcing that Win NT and 2000 as well as 3DSMAX, all Adobe products and every other expensive pieces of software were now available for free on these 500 servers they had just set up?
  • Is anyone else upset by the association of adopting linux with encouraging hackers? Do hackers not use other operating systems?

  • china is the future of open source (Score:3)

    by tao.ca ( 40816 ) on Tuesday December 28, 1999 @07:56PM (#1437261) Homepage
    regardless of recent market fluctuations, this should boost redhat in a big way. i think its a great move, and hope it spurs catalytic interest in open source computing in china.

    its ludicrous to suggest that 'communists in china' would be the biggest user of gnu/linux/open source, when in fact, its the entrepreneurial class (mixed with the military) that is the driving (economic) force in china right now. the communists are doing their best just to keep up.

    frame this within a deep and diverse culture of a multi-millenial civilization (that is what we call china), and you may find the utopia of new found developers and users. while the chinese state may be harsh and severe, the chinese people are as curious and interested in new things as the rest of us.

    as our respective governments (american and chinese) continue to banter and boast of their power and prestige, is it not then up to us, the people, to brige the cultural gaps, and find a shared space (internet) of understanding (open source)? otherwise what is to stop the hawks on both sides from using we the people as fodder for their conflicts?
  • Can a country with over a billion residents, nuclear and ICBM capabilities, and a stable, lasting government really be called a "developing nation"?
  • It wouldn't really matter for this country. Realistically, the world is one big warez site - if you don't want a legal copy of NT or 3DSMAX, you can get a pirate copy. Fortunately for software companies, most companies try to make sure that they're not violating any copyright laws, and have licenses for everything that they use. As long was we have Lawyers and the SPA, there'll always be a US market.
  • I'm trying to be diplomatic about this one and it's really hard. The headline isn't true, the story isn't true for the most part, and it's just an attempt to dig up that old Linux and Communism canard again.

    • The nation of China has not made Linux its official operating system. The story to that effect was a hoax.
    • The Red Caps are not adopting Red Hat.
    • One billion communists are not adopting Linux as their platform of choice.
    • Exactly one thing in the story is true. Red Hat is opening an office and going after the Chinese market, like a lot of other companies.

    But we knew this much already, months ago. So what's the reason for this story? It's about the worst thing I've seen on Slashdot in quite a while.

    Bruce

  • > Do hackers not use other operating systems?

    Not the good ones. Well, BSD of course, and any other open-source OS. But you can't really get a really good hacking hardon going if your platform is at the mercy of somebody you don't know or trust.
  • Moderate the above as "redundant", I posted a second version with a correction.

    Bruce

  • Is anyone else upset by the association of adopting linux with encouraging hackers?

    I think so, but I am not one of them.

    Do hackers not use other operating systems?

    Sure, they also use FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD &c. and I even know hackers who use Windows, just like most crackers.

  • Oops, this one should have said shame on you Nathan, not Jeff. I must be tired. Moderate as redundant, I'll try _once_ more. Then I'll go to sleep :-)

  • Windows does beat linux for I18N (Score:5)

    by poopie ( 35416 ) on Tuesday December 28, 1999 @08:09PM (#1437270) Journal
    Developing nations *can* afford klunky M$ products. Pirated CDs with MS software cost the same as linux cds. I do not endorse piracy, but there *are* thousands of shops that sell pirated software in Asia and they do it publicly.

    So, price isn't an issue. Maybe copyright compliance is, but not price.

    The biggest problem I can see to increasing linux use in Asia is internationalization. I'm willing to bet that many millions of people would rather use windows in their own language than linux in english.

    I know, for european languages, you can set LC_ALL , and I know that there are localized version of linux in Thai, Japanese, Chinese, but until we have a single distribution of linux that can imput and display all the major languages in every app, we're not finished.

    There's more to it than meet the eye.

    Do you have any idea how many different ways there are to type chinese? (at least 18 different imput methods if memory serves me)

    Do you have any idea how many different and incompatible character sets there are for Chinese? (at least 3 completely different ones)

    Do you have any idea how few of the total chinese characters are even represented in a complete UNICODE font? (I think unicode font includes about 20,000 Chinese, Japanese, Korean glyphs while Chinese has over 80,000 characters)

    add on a batch of other languages with accents above, below, or on either side of character, and then start thinking about right to left text input. (arabic, hebrew, ...)

    sadly, X wasn't designed with these in mind. The GNOME folks are working on pango to address these issues... seems redhat is putting a lot of work into internationalizaion...

    Here's a link to gscript [redhat.com]

    Here's a gtk internationalization whitepaper [gnome.org]
  • I'm not sure exactly what you mean. It sounds as though you're thinking a hacker is a bad thing. In my book, hackers are the people that make things *work*. They hack together code to create usable projects - not just software, but many different useful tools. Software just seems to be the biggest, most recognizable. Adopting Linux does seem to encourage this behaviour, however. Maybe it's the easy access to many different distributions? Maybe, it's because all the source is easily obtainable, making it easier for less experienced people to see *how* things work?

    Maybe it's because, straight out of the box, it comes with all the needed tools to create c/c++, perl, html, etc... I dunno, seemed to work for me when I started using it 4 years ago.

    Just a thought.....
  • Posted by Cmdr.Taco:

    I know that characterizing a potential Linux market as "one billion communists" sounds kind of funny, but it's really quite wrong.

    The newsmedia has been doing this for quite a while -- to set things straight: this is a communist government (which, of recent, has had some serious capitalist leanings!) Most of the Chinese people did not choose Communism, and several recent studies have shown that most Chinese don't even agree with Communist ideals. In addition, most of the "one billion" are rural people, who have little knowledge of their government. They abide by the Communists because they are unaware of other "options."

    So, let's say "one billion people in a Communist country"... it's a bit more accurate!

  • sentencing hacker to death (Score:3)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 28, 1999 @08:14PM (#1437273)
    Just in case, given with a particular country,
    given with a particular hacker who commit
    a particular crime(not necessary hacking) that worths death penality in that particular country.

    I will not surprise to hear a story in Yahoo.com that "Sentence hackers to death".

    However, if that paritcular country is the
    Goddamn fucking CHINA, then everybody will
    gone insane and mock, accuse and swear on it
    whatever the reason is.

    Similar titles can be heard from CNN.com and
    abcnews.com everyday.

    (1)China violating human right on XX YY ZZ
    (2)China government sentence two AA BB CC
    (3)YYZZXX organization were banned from China.

    Just adding the term China in the news headline
    makes the news worth reading. And then adding
    violating human rights is another additive to
    make it sounds "TRUE"--the correctness of the
    story itself doesn't matter. Everybody gonna
    love this kind of news.

    Remember the USSR in 70's and early 80's?

    I wonder why these people never learn.
  • no propaganda will be accepted


    yes lets all join in and help them out !??4%?^&?6

    what about the billion communists ?

    its only like .00000000001 that actually have access to a desktop !

  • Shame on you, Nathan! (Score:5)

    by Bruce Perens ( 3872 ) <bruce@perens.com> on Tuesday December 28, 1999 @08:16PM (#1437275) Homepage Journal
    I got so pissed off by this story that I've had to type in this comment three times just to get it right.

    I'm trying to be diplomatic about this one and it's really hard. The headline isn't true, the story isn't true for the most part, and it's just an attempt to dig up that old Linux and Communism canard again. Did Jeff and Rob decide to fly to California and leave Slashdot with the wrong baby-sitter?

    • The nation of China has not made Linux its official operating system. The story to that effect was a hoax.
    • The Red Caps are not adopting Red Hat. They never said they were.
    • One billion communists are not adopting Linux as their platform of choice. That is speculation.
    • Exactly one thing in the story is true. Red Hat is opening an office and going after the Chinese market, like a lot of other capitalist companies.

    But we knew this much already, months ago. So what's the reason for this story? It's about the worst thing I've seen on Slashdot in quite a while.

    Bruce

  • Agreed - Sterling's/my supposition wouldn't affect a lot of US consumers - big law firms, large corporations, etc. are still going to pay Microsoft or Adobe 200 seats-worth for their 200 users. I also agree with you that a lot of people know that if they don't want to pay $500 for Photoshop they can probably find a pirate copy somewhere. However, I'm also pretty sure that most people who would take the "illegal" but free and practically un-prosecutable version from my theoretical PRC site currently don't know how easy it is to steal software. My money would be on Joe Computer going "Alright, fuck the man, I'm not dropping $200 on Win2000 after I bought a computer with Win98 pre-loaded two months ago, I'm downloading it from this free site", and Joe Art-Major-Collegestudent, instead of cruising down to the computer lab, spending 1/2 an hour with his University's highspeed connex to pull down the full install of Photoshop 5.5. Also, I think we should take into account that (correct me if I'm wrong) I'm pretty sure that the US these days is far less than %50 of the market for software. I am pretty sure that your average small advertising firm or design house in Poland or Russia or the Czech Republic would have a lot fewer qualms about pirating Macromedia or Microsoft than their American counterparts. What happens to Adobe or Macromedia or Microsoft if a large percentage of their customer base suddenly realizes that they don't have to pay for it anymore?
  • I think Rob and Jeff decided to fly to California for the hearing and they left Slashdot with the wrong baby-sitter.

    This story really sucks!

    There, I said it. It's not just you with a sour taste in your mouth tonight, Pascal.

    Bruce

  • Moderate the above down as redundant please. It's not often that I made two misworded posts, but this story made me that annoyed. I posted a correct one below.

    Bruce

  • I can not believe that you said "a billion communists". I am not Chinese, nor have I ever been to China. However, I have *many* Chinese friends, and um, not a single one is Communist. In fact, part of the stigma is pinhead Americans/whites thinking that way. They are people just like you and me. You think they like their government any more then we like ours? I think not.
  • It's not that Linux being adopted by new markets isn't nice, but why is it a good thing that a potentially hostile foreign government recognizes the value of open source easier than our own? (see US Navy...)
    To add to that, 'Red Caps adopt Red Hat' is the most sensationalist headline I've seen in a while, not to mention the 'sentencing hackers to death' part. Who's Nathan, anyway?
  • I certainly hope Red Hat have done their market research. Despite the rather gung-ho image projected by the State Department, China is still predominantly an agricultural based economy (average GDP/capita $3.6K, CIA factbook [odci.gov]). Hence if they buy computers, it is likely to be cheap knock-down clones from the Taiwanese or white boxes assembled from components sourced inland. Getting the average person to spend a third of their (average) yearly income on a luxury good (to them) seems rather extreme. Microsoft have decided to go for an internet appliance and I beleive the home red team is also flogging their own TV hookup box. While the coastal regions like HK and Shanghai may be good prospects for sales, given that you can get pirated CDs/VideoDiscs/DVDs for near cost of media (if you even look foreign, they'd come up to you and openly offer to bargin titles) I'd wonder about the chances of any foreign firm trying to sell full-priced equipment. It is a really tough environment to do business, just read AsiaMoney [asiamoney.com] archives on the pitfalls of western capitalism meeting eastern greed (not a pretty sight). I wound rank Japan, Singapore, Taiwan, India, Thailand, Korea higher up in the priority list as those countries have got good educational systems and would benefit more from computer automation and there are likely to be more multinationals there who could benefit from Linux support. It will be interesting to see what the WTO agreement will do to the ISP industry in that region though.

    LL
  • ok...i may be smoking crack on this one, but i could swear that in 95/96 the chinese gov't "adopted" windows 95 as their "official operating system". anyone else remember this, or is it just one of my beer-induced fantasies?
  • Absolutely it can. Typically, when the term
    "developing nation" is employed, it refers to
    a country's economic status. Just because a
    particular nation has advanced military capabilities and a stable system of government is
    no reason to assume that such conditions apply
    across the board for the population at large.
    This is especially true for countries like China,
    where an essentially totalitiarian regime holds
    the reins and can mandate that something like
    military development is to receive the highest
    priority. See Republics, Union of Soviet Socialist for more information.
  • I thought it was weird that after China declared OS/2 Warp v3 its official OS, Microsoft comes in a year later and gets Windows 95 declared the official OS. Here we are, five years later and now Linux is being declared the official OS of China. Sounds like China and Microsoft are very similar in their lack of credibility and thier leaders demand for control. IMHO Locutus

  • GNU/Linux is already entrenched as the platform of communists. ;-)

    Cheers,
    ZicoKnows@hotmail.com

  • yes, and please help redhat do their i18n work. the following bug has beenopen for two months and is either abug in the locale files or in glibc. i've detailed my bug hunting, feel free to add to it:

    http://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi ?id=6000
  • Based on the poster of this articles comments... Ahem. If I am ruled by a communist Government that makes me a Communist? (The 1billion communist remark) Ouch ouch ouch. I hope someone gives you a spanking! hehe Youve been bad.
  • Not again.....this China market myth has been going on since the days of Marco Polo. People have to realize that 99% of people in China couldnt even afford a computer , let alone an operating system. 70% of the populace still worries about three square a day and a roof over their heads while working in a rice field. Linux has great potential in China, TurboLinux leading the charge already, but it is hardly a tool for some of these half-assed "conspiracy theories" I keep reading about. oh and the hackers that were sentenced to death, I believe that was because they used their computing prowess to embezell $ from a local bank. Hey , Im against capital punsihment, but dont be mislead to think that these people were sentenced solely for cracking, they were sentenced for stealing

  • China, UNIX, and Windows: a true story (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I worked on a engineering application originally written for mainframes, then ported to UNIX workstations, and most recently ported to Windows. By far the largest demand worldwide was for Windows where the price/performance ratio was clearly ahead of the other platforms.

    Curiously China insisted on buying the application only for UNIX workstations. It turned out that the Chinese customers would put all of their computers - Windows PCs and UNIX workstations - in common room where eventually the Windows PCs would get broken due novices and experts alike monkeying with them. The UNIX workstations, however, were so difficult to use that only engineers would use them and the novices would leave them alone. The redeeming value of UNIX was that it was so difficult to use!
  • yeah, I think that hacking in the explorative sense is much easier on a system where the vast majority of software is open source. Linux is the most prominent example of such an OS.
  • There are more computers in the US then there is in in the sum of all of the other country's computers. There are a lot of people in china but not many have computers... and nuch less a connection to the internet.

    I would not be surprised if there would be more computers in a country like Canada than there is in china.

  • I know it's a hoax, but it would be rather amusing if MS couldn't claim its current 90% of the market share because of 1 billion installed desktops in China. For some reason Windows users seem to think that 150 million installed desktops proves the superiority of Windows. I suppose the same argument could be used to claim shit is the superior food, what with 1 billion flies eating it every day...
  • Ummm, I think your hat needs more tin-foil.

    dave
  • I hope this is a troll, but if not, I think it's
    illustrative of something I find pretty amusing.
    Namely, that the ones who carp and bitch about
    Linux zealotry the most so often seem to be
    equally as zealous in opposing it.

    Thomas S. Howard

  • Re:STOP (Score:3)

    by odaiwai ( 31983 ) on Tuesday December 28, 1999 @09:47PM (#1437301) Homepage
    For many people in China, a desktop would be useful mainly to shelter under when it's raining or too sunny.

    As for a computer, the big barrier is literacy in English.

    Handwritten input of chinese characters is big business here and that input method is something Linux needs to work on.

    dave



  • I fully understand the need for some to dig at China whenever they get the chance, but this time I am afraid it has gone too far.

    The people who frequent slashdot should have understand the differences between CRACKERS and HACKERS.

    A Hacker is someone who derives joy from discovering ways to cirvumvent limitations, while a Cracker, on the other hand, is someone who intentionally commiting CRIME using his/her knowledge of hi-tech hacking.

    The reference to the guy who was sentenced to death in China as a "Hacker" is simply erroneous. The case involved was a CRIMINAL CASE, where two brothers have ROBBED A BANK, using hi-tech hacking maneuvers.

    BANK ROBBERY, no matter via the "stick-em-up" way or via computer hackery, is still BANK ROBBERY, and I believe the very act of ROBBING BANK constitutes a CRIME in China, as well as US or Australia.

    In US, BANK ROBBERY is a FEDERAL CRIME, that is, the case is immediately under FBI's jurisdiction, no matter where it happens in the U. S. of A.

    If bank robbery is a crime in the USA, how come we have people here rooting for bank robbers who robbed banks in China?

    Why the double standards?

    A crime is a crime, there is no two ways about it.

    There should not be a double standard here, especially when the people who frequent /. are supposed to be better than the average joe-on-the-street. We are supposed to be the people who understand things better.

    My only hope for the new millennium (just a few days away) is the people who frequent slashdot.org would respect China's right in carrying out its duty to protect its own citizenry.

    Please stop denying China its right to punish its own criminals, just as US wouldn't want anyone from India or Afghanistan to meddle in the US criminal justice system.

    Just a side-note:

    China is just another country, and we all know there _are_ people who would fault China for whatever reason they can find.

    Of course, these people are experts. They would package their condemnations in such ways that they would appeared to be non-racis. But we all know the true reasons behind all those condemnations.

    Meanwhile, lest we forget, USA is _still_ a country practicing capital punishment. How come we do not see the same people who condemn the death pernalty in China condemns the death pernalty in the U. S. of A?

    Why not?

    I mean, are the poor souls who were put to death in the USA _less_ dead than their counterparts in China?

    We can do better. We should do better.

    We should be able to differentiate CRACKERS from HACKERS, and we should be able to understand that in order for the Americans to condemn China for putting its own citizens to death, USA should first stops its own capital punishment.

    Want to demand China to stop executing its own people? Let the United States be the first one to put a stop of all its capital punishment cases. Then perhaps you can start demanding China to do the same.


  • Linux and Asian languages (Score:3)

    by Taco Cowboy ( 5327 ) on Tuesday December 28, 1999 @10:38PM (#1437305) Journal



    Dear Poopie,

    Thank you for bringing up the issue of how difficult it is to use Chinese in the cyberworld.

    Yes, there are 22 different ways - not 18 ! - of inputing the Chinese characters into computer-understandable form.

    Yes, there are three completely different encodings for Chinese characters.

    And the problem faced by most Chinese (and most Asians as well, for that matter) is not that computer is difficult to use, but TYPING IN their own languages, be it Thai, Korean, Japanese, Tamil or Chinese, is SO DIFFICULT one would have to re-learn the whole concept of typing !!

    It is no longer QWERTY or Dvorak keyboard routine, but mind-boggling act of memorizing STUPID key sequences that has TOTALLY NOTHING TO DO with how the characters are shaped....

    For that matter, using MS-Windoze to type in the Chinese (or Thai, or Korean, and so on) isn't that easier than Linux. You _still_ have to memorize those STUPID key-sequences, or there is no go.

    But help is on the way. IBM's "Via Voice" and all other voice-recognition softwares are transforming the landscape - we no longer have to crack our brains in order to type in a simple sentences, - using the voice recognition software, all we have to concentrate on is WHAT WE WANT TO SAY.

    I hope, in the near future, all the languages in the world will be easily used in computer, and I would like to express my sincerest thanks to all the talented individuals who have done such a superb job in creating the voice-recognition softwares, and companies like IBM which has generously supported such herculean efforts.


  • I'll choose a different horse to beat with this post... ;-)

    Seriously, most of the accounts I've read of what LinuxOne is planning indicate that they're going for the Asian market, particularly the Chinese community in these countries (i.e. mainland, Taiwan, Singapore, and the overseas Chinese elsewhere). If RH is ratcheting up their efforts in this area, will LinuxOne have a decent shot at establishing a market? Will being run by ethnic Chinese help LinuxOne's "China cred" enough to overcome the "Red Hat is Linux" impression out there?

  • Request for Moratorium on China Articles (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I humbly request a moratorium on all articles relating to China until the overall clue-level of the slashdot staff and readership rises to a level that is appropriate for discussing political matters that are presently magnitudes far more complex than they comprehend.

  • Irony of Irony (Score:3)

    by Inoshiro ( 71693 ) on Tuesday December 28, 1999 @11:37PM (#1437311) Homepage
    I can't believe no one picked this juicy nugget out:
    "I can see Red Hat stock jumping skyward if a billion communists suddenly decide Linux is their desktop and server platform of choice."

    Yes, a communist country feeding a free market economy -- Association with communism will increase the free market valuation. :-)

    <cliche>Only in America.</cliche>
    ---

  • This story is sending lots of bad feelings all around.

    'X wasn't designed with these in mind'
    RTFM

    Xlib Programming Manual by Adrian Nye
    Chapter 10 - Internationalization
    Chapter 11 - Internationalized Text Input

    I can say nothing that hasn't already been said many times before by Kenton Lee [rahul.net] or by Christopher Browne [ntlug.org].

  • I took hacking as having a negative connotation because the article I was replying to used the term "hacker" to refer to a man who "hacked" into a bank's computer, stole money, got caught, and was sentenced to death. That doesn't sound like making things "*work*".
  • "They are the analog of the airport Sky Cap."
    I'm not sure that analog is quite the appropriate word here but at any rate it's more the other way around as they were around long before the airport guys.
    I, too, immediately thought of luggage.
  • If they did, then the US would sewer trade relations, and keep China out of WTO, etc. It would be extremely costly to any country trying something like that.

  • The War in Asia for Linux (Score:4)

    by Conspire ( 102879 ) on Wednesday December 29, 1999 @12:40AM (#1437319) Homepage
    The War Ahead for Linux in Asia

    Hello All!

    I am an expatriate living in Asia and running a trading/consulting company.

    I recently switched our network over to a RH solution from NT4.0. I did this for the following reasons:

    1. I did not want to fork over upgrade fees for NT4.0 and Office 2K next year.

    2. I installed sp5.0 on our NT4.0 Alpha server a couple months ago, crashing the entire server, losing lots of valuable information, and forcing me to re-install from step 1. I decided on that day that I want a stable Unix based solution for our enterprise server.

    3. I had played with Linux (RH6.0) on my workstation, and found it easy to install, configure and use. I then installed on another employee's computer, and he found it to be ok for application use. The stability of the kernel is VERY GOOD (Thanks to all you developers out there!!! Drinks are on me when you are in town!)

    4. I believe in Open Source as a defense against possible dangers to the free world caused by proprietary network solutions and protocols.

    Ok, the war is ahead, and there are MILESTONE battlefields that must be crossed before anyone using, developing, selling, or banking on Linux and the open source movement can cheer: THESE BATTLEFIELDS ARE:

    1. A STABLE INTERNATIONALIZED BROWSER. Netscape is half a load short of bricks for Linux. We all know it. It crashes all the time and drives me nuts. Options? Not Opera, which I have tried in beta form and find flaky. Not Amaya, which I can't even read WIRED.COM with. And surely not Lynx, which I like using now and again but find just a little too much like gophering for the year 2k. What do I do if I want to read a Chinese Big5 charset page in English Linux? If I am running M$, I can do this, and read Arabic, and read Japanese, without any glitches. LINUX NEEDS A GOOD STABLE BROWSER WITH INTERNATIONALIZED READING AND INPUT CAPABILITY. The future is the internet, and this is the key to having any market share on the desktop of the future. MS may realize this one day and just release IE for Linux. They may be working on it now, and if it were out tomorrow, I would pay for it.

    2. STABLE INTERNATIONALIZED OFFICE APPLICATIONS. Running Office 97 English under NT4.0, I could read a Chinese big5 business plan submitted to me. Now, I have to go to one of the Chinese NT4 Workstations to read one. And why are there still Chinese NT4 Workstations in the office? Well, because there IS NO CHINESE APPLICATION software for Linux. That's right NONE. So the NT workstaions gotta stay, and I will have to pay M$ for upgrade fees sometime next year for NT5 and Office2K. I would much rather pay for a Chinese version of StarOffice, or Applix or even Office2K for Linux! The Chinese employees refuse to use English office apps, as they don't even speak fluent English! IF LINUX WANTS TO CONQUER THE DESKTOP, IT WILL NEED TOOLS TO DO IT. As this is a world market, Linux needs tools for worldwide use. There are posts about this above this one, so I will not go into more details here.

    3. WORLD DISTRIBUTION. M$ is used on 90%+ desktops in China, and of those probably 90%+ are not paid licenses. M$ does not care, because this creates a barrier of entry to competitors' products at the present and in the future. WHEN the average Chinese user can afford to pay for the M$ License, which is much sooner than most of you who have never been there think, THEY WILL PAY FOR IT. And, they would rather pay for it than pay the time needed learn a new OS and Office Application Platform. This is the economics of software gentleman and ladies, and we are living in a single market world economy. M$ is available at every single software store, both legal and illegal, in China. What about Linux? It took me 4 hours of computer shop hopping and alotta "duh, what is Linux you freak?" looks before I found a book with RH6.0, RH6.1, CLE0.8 and some local disto CD all included in the book for about 12.00 $USD. I could have got a pirated copy of NT4.0 and Office97 for the same price, in about 2 minutes of shopping!

    4. PROFITABILITY AND SHAREHOLDER VALUE. Wall Street can be very understanding and kind in the beginning of a relationship. Unfortunately, as time goes on (not much time et'all), investors start looking at the value of their investment and the overall profitability of the enterprise. RH, LNUX, and all the latest Linux IPOs companies will need to prove their value in bottom line numbers in the coming year. Anyone of you involved in Open Source based Companies, please remember, PROFITABILITY IS THE LIFEBLOOD OF THE FIRM, and you must be profitable to survive the years ahead and win the war. I hope that RH, LNUX and the others are very profitable and bless their shareholders, but it will be tough to beat M$. Per employee perhaps the most profitable company in the world, M$ buys new revenue streams with that income, and hence my next battlefield-M&A.

    5. MERGERS AND ACQUISITIONS IN THE LINUX COMMERCIAL COMMUNITY. Giants rule the modern corporate world with market share and profitability. Niche markets are for small players, and small players will get acquired in time. In order for Linux to compete, there will need to be a consolidation in the industry. Fortunately, M$ is distracted by the Justice Dept at present, and can not consider an open Linux buyout. Now that Linux related shares are a commodity, they are for the picking by the giants if they want it. It is only a matter of time UNLESS the Commercial Linux Community itself begins consolidations through M&A and grows into a giant itself. I was very disappointed to NOT read "Corel and RedHat finalize merger deal today" during 1999. Applix would make a great buyout target for RedHat. Get wise gents, and get together to get big.

    Well, just a few humble opinions. Sorry if some stuff is repeated from above posts.

    If I were a developer, I would be contributing to Linux in every way I could. Since I am not a developer, all I can do is educate and encourage friends to try Linux, and prepare them for the revolution that may or may not happen. I hope it happens, and Linux and the Open Source movement in general have my cheers, 100%.

    By the way, did anyone figure out that chess move Knight takes Rook checkmate move #5? It's got me stumped!
  • An AC has already poined this out, but as it got an automatic socre of 0, you may miss it, and I think you need the reality check, so I'll repeat it (and take it further, lest I be moderated down :o) ):

    It was only a bank robbery

    That was all - no-one got hurt, and no-one really lost any money (banks are insured, or certainly should be).

    Regardless of the amount that was stolen, I can't believe that you really, truly agree with executing someone just for stealing money. Sure, if you walk into a high street bank with an automatic rifle and gun everyone down first, then maybe there's a case for capital punishment (although I personally don't enirely agree with it, but that's another matter).

    This isn't justice, it's revenge, and a warning to anyone else who was thinking of doing the same. It also sets a dangerous precedent - if you can be executed just for theft, what other crimes will start carrying a death sentence? Fraud? Software piracy? Parking violations?

    I agrree that people (not just Americans) should think a little harder about their own countries and values before criticising others, but this time, I really do think that the criticisms are more than justified.

    Tim

  • Yes, there are many different ways of inputing Chinese chararcters. However, people usually make use of only two or three of them. They choose the input methods which suit them best.

    I don't think those key sequences are STUPID, they have SOMETHING TO DO with how the characters are shaped or how they are pronounced. There are rules behind the key sequences, they are not random, nonsense keystrokes. I rarely have to memorize those STUPID key sequences.

    It is not difficult for people to learn and get familiar with typing in their own language, in a month or two. Some people do complain, but they are the ones typing their English letters with one finger, in most cases.

  • The problem isn't Unicode, it's the lack of sufficient Unicode support in Linux (so far). Unfortunately, Gtk (so GNOME) and Qt (so KDE) overlooked the recent lessons of MS (NT), Sun (Java), Oracle (8), Perl (5.6), Apple (OSX), XML, HTML 4, etc. and went ahead and designed "The" Standard Linux GUI based on the obsolete char == byte model instead of Unicode. Doh!

    They then released them that way, so the brokenness will have to be maintained for backward (as in "primitive") compatibility as they now work to fix their mistakes and move on to Unicode.

    The Trolls have taken full advantage of the fact that Qt is all C++ to replace all the method implementations with Unicode and added a Unicode-based string type that they will recommend in place of const char* for all future development. You'll still be able to use const char*, but it will be converted internally into a modern data type automatically if you don't do it yourself.

    One of the highest priorities on RedHat's agenda when they started pumping resources into GNOME was to fix it's obsolete byte == char architecture. Unfortunately, it's a lot harder with C than with C++. In Qt, you'll think you're incrementing a const char* with a ++ operator, but what actually happens (due to operator overloading) is that you'll be advancing one unicode character in a unicode string. Doing the same in GNOME (GTK) is still just going to move a const char* one byte ahead. Because it's C, there will be a lot of extra pitfalls that the GTK people won't be able to paper over that the application developer will have to deal with personally.

    This is likely to cause GNOME programmers to curse Unicode, when the real fault lies with the shortsighted architecture, which should have been based on Unicode to begin with.

    As for Chinese character repertoire, Unicode is more than up to the task. It is essentially a superset of all official Chinese, Japanese, and Korean national character sets. (The exception is one Taiwanese standard (CCCII) that has never been implemented by any font maker because its absurdly long list of characters are mostly glyph variants, antique typos, and nonstandard forms for which there is little demand in Taiwan and essentially none anywhere else.)

    That's not to say that there are no missing characters. There is a multinational group of representatives from China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Japan, Korea, Vietnam, and the US whose job it is to continually determine what additional Chinese characters need to be added to Unicode/iso10646 for real-life applications, characters that don't even exist yet in their own national character standards.

    These countries themselves do not want a kitchen sink approach to character sets, because it will make all other aspects of their national computing infrastructures more difficult (fewer complete fonts, bigger fonts, bigger memory footprints, larger collation tables, large equivalency tables for searches, etc.) The Asian specialists want to be as comprehensive as they can be without loading themselves down with a lot of obsolete baggage.

    Support for legacy encodings and other considerations have given Unicode some warts, but it's clear to i18n specialists that a single, consistent, language-neutral text data format (encoding) is going to gradually replace most language-specific encodings. Unicode appears to be the clear choice, and Linux needs to reflect that to the greatest extent possible if it is to function as a general purpose OS in an interconnected world.

    • I think Rob and Jeff decided to fly to California for the hearing and they left Slashdot with the wrong baby-sitter.

    Now that sounds like an interesting story.

    What hearing in California?


    -Jordan Henderson

  • Nathan from the Mao-Tse-Tux dept ? (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I was not that offended at first when I read your headline "Red Caps Adopt Red Hat" and your 1 billion communists cheap shot, OK, may be mildly surprised.

    Then I read some of the replies. Some genuinely caring /. readers have voiced their anger. Now, I was interested. Perhaps, I have been de-sensitised of this whole stereotyped-Asian mentality thingee. I should have been more offended by it, being one of Asian descent myself. The more I read, the more annoyed I got. Your "article" was meant to be inflammatory from the start. Even if your writing "style" could be excused, what's with the "....Mao-Tse-Tux dept " snipped remark ?! My parents are still cursing the "TAKEOVER", many in Hong Kong did not agreed that it was a "handover", by China. And I am pretty sure that my parents are not communists.

    There must be a point somewhere... are you suggesting that Open Source = communism ?? or, Redhat Linux in China will somehow "cloud" Linux purity ??

    If creating stories is your thing, I heard that M$ is looking for people in their FUD camp.

    This probably doesn't mean much to you, but this is actually my very first post to /. after almost 18 months of quite reading.

    Sorry to be such an unpleasant one.
    from Australia


  • i'm no expert on Linux with Chinese

    That's pretty obvious. If you're on Linux, then you're probably using Communicator, right? Pull down the View menu and have a look under Character Set (yeah, you know, it's that item that you've never bothered to check before). It lists three Chinese encodings - Big5, EUC-TW and GB2312.

    And then there's Japanese, which has three widely-used encodings - JIS (not listed in Communicator but still viewable), SJIS (as used by MS and Apple) and EUC-JP (UNIX-related OSs).

    Learn something about the subject before opening your mouth next time.
  • I suspect the DeCSS hearing. See yesterday's (? - timezones muck me around) story [slashdot.org].

  • Free the software, the chinese people will follow. (Score:3)

    by MattMann ( 102516 ) on Wednesday December 29, 1999 @03:08AM (#1437331)
    One billion communists are not adopting Linux as their platform of choice. That is speculation.

    Absolutely correct. The official announcement from China stated that they would make "a billion free copies of free operating system softwares for the free Chinese people." 3chelon picked up that communique inadvertantly as part of its program to monitor the FSF, but dropped its hand to enlist Stallman's help in deciphering it. In this case, he has taken the position that only the latter usage is appropriate: "think of them as LGPLed", he said. TomC joined the discussion to say the Chinese government could do whatever it wanted with its software or its people as he would never presume to coerce anyone, and asked, did we know that they call Larry, "The Great Wall"?

    To get to the truth, industry has been surveyed:

    • Redhat has reported 1 download of 6.1 through China's internet gateway
    • Microsoft has reported selling 1 copy of Windows 98 in China (an upgrade from Win3.1, actually), and 2 copies of NT (um, let's see, yes, 1 server and 1 workstation), both as competitive upgrades from OS/2 through a local retailer called Hundred Year Old Egghead.
    • Microsoft has also reported several attempted downloads of Windows 2000 but they were from a Netscape browser and had not yet been successful, though the spokesman did twitch and then robotically issue an assurance of total browser compatibility, and went on to promise the imminent release of IE for linux which would "make the whole thing work more smoothly, that is if you can trust an unstable, unsupported kernel, with nobody to sue."
    • Mac Warehouse indicated that they sold a Mac G3 and a Torx toolkit, but both were returned (for merchandise credit to resolve a lengthy dispute over whether stripped screwheads indicated that the cover had or had not been opened)
    • after consulting the many factions, it was also determined that no copies of BSD had been downloaded, but it was pointed out that the core of Win2000 could legally be BSD for all anybody knew, and then the line went dead, then switched to a modem carrier right after shouts of "hey, let's grep for 'Regents!'" "Yeah!" "hey, grep for my name, grep for my name"

  • Everyone hates LinuxOne enough as it is.... if it went and dominated the Chinese market can you imagine the stories that would get posted on Slashdot?

    And I'm only partly joking...

    I don't have any problem with the Chinese - I'm one of the few people (it seems to me) who wouldn't mind if the Chinese govenment had declared Linux to be their official Operating System. I don't like LinuxOne much, though.

    That reminds me... time to go and keep the Anti-LinuxOne-IPO stuff going on all the stock boards I can find.

  • Wouldn't the truly communist/socialist thing to do be to find a less commercial dist of Linux, put some government progs to work at it, remove any silly Westernizations, and then distribute it freely across the country? Call it "Chinux", perhaps?

    Ah well. They want to look good by making use of this new US-China trade thing, I guess. Kind of a lame attempt at looking like budding Russia-esque capitalists. I'm sure they can shell out for a few thousand RH6 CDs, and then they'll be able to say "look, we're even helping your bourgeois economy."
  • Yeah right,

    1 trillion copies of Redhat x $0.00 = $0.00

    Correct me if I'm wrong but Linux is free. Don't forget that the Chinese are very thrifty people and probably chose Linux for this in the first place.

    Once the market is saturated, who needs to buy Linux anymore? I've stopped buying the stuff because everybody and their brother's mother has a distro that I can *legally* make a copy of. Don't get me wrong, I love Linux but let go of my Redhat stock because selling free software isn't exactly a great business model for a $16 billion company (read: the stock is way overpriced already and won't be jumping unless we see more fools with money).

    dsginter

    "Never underestimate the power of stupid people in large numbers"
  • It is true that the GDP/capita's a little low, but if you look around in the major cities, i.e. Shanghai, Beijing, you'll notice that the GDP is significantly higher. Many, if not the majority of the families in metropolitan cities either own or have access to computers. Many have relatives overseas that send over older (but not obsolete) computers. There are also many public computers for use in libraries, etc. You also have to remember that 10,15 year ago, when a decent sized TV cost a family that same percentage of their income, most families went out and bought a TV set. Somehow, they can scrounge up that much money from their savings and earnings to buy that TV/Computer, because their CHILD wants/needs one.
  • ...can see Red Hat stock jumping skyward if a billion communists suddenly decide...

    Ever been there? Probably not. You wouldnt find
    too many "communists" there. But it would take
    your breath when you feel their will to innovate.

    It is amazing to see that computing America
    has first class technical knowledge but
    information state about other countries remained
    on a cowboy level. I dont want to insult
    cowboys, a profession which I like very much.
    They are IMHO connected with freedom (same thing
    applies to Linux :).

    But while a cowboy doesnt need to know too much about politics, cyber cowboys should.


    --
  • 1. Outside of major urban centers the population of China is not some desperate set of people looking to buy the latest techno-wonder. They would much rather have a colour TV with bunny ears rather than a Unix-based PC running Xwindows.

    2. Due to their culture, Microsoft Windows is easily pirated in the open. Why should they jump to Linux? Because of the cost? Because of the line-command prompt in using English characters?

    3. Instead of RedHat stock taking a jump, wouldn't chip/computer makers do better? Assuming that the story is true, copying a Linux disturbution costs about $1 for the cd, while the actual MACHINE is way more expensive, must be bought legally and has a higher profit margin.

  • Five posts, and no content other than bitching at
    Nathan.

    Hmm...

    If you don't like the article, feel free not to read or respond to it. Slashdot is not required to genuflect to your editorial desires (nor mine), regardless of how often you post, or how high your Karma is.

    Now, to add a little RELEVANT content, the article linked to in this story IS interesting, if a little obvious (Red Hat making moves to penetrate the Chinese market). Certainly, it's enough to qualify as newsworthy to someone.

    Yes, the "China's Official OS" bit is bogus, but at least Nathan linked to the /. article on the subject, which is CHOCK FULL of comments explaining exactly how bogus it is.

    Fine, so this article might better be titled "Red Hat adopts Red Caps". And, as others in here have pointed out, the "one billion communists" wording might have been better, but at least I got some actual news (Red Hat's opening of a Chinese office) out of Nathan's article. All I got from your posts was bile.

    -Isaac
  • You said: "A Hacker is someone who derives joy from discovering ways to cirvumvent limitations, while a Cracker, on the other hand, is someone who intentionally commiting CRIME using his/her knowledge of hi-tech hacking."

    Circumvent limitations? Hackers are people who enjoy solving problems, pure and simple. Seems to me like a cracker is someone who derives joy (and maybe money!) from circumventing security systems.

    You said: "... especially when the people who frequent /. are supposed to be better than the average joe-on-the-street. We are supposed to be the people who understand things better. "

    Huh? Who on earth ever claimed /. peeps were "better" than anyone else? Oh, wait, does this mean I finally get to wear my 3l1t3 badge now?!

    Good grief.

    You said: "My only hope for the new millennium (just a few days away) is the people who frequent slashdot.org would respect China's right in carrying out its duty to protect its own citizenry."

    By executing somebody that stole something shy of $100K? Good heavens...

    You said: "Of course, these people are experts. They would package their condemnations in such ways that they would appeared to be non-racist. But we all know the true reasons behind all those condemnations. "

    Oh really? You know my "true reasons" for condemning a government for executing someone that stole $87K? Because I'm a _racist_? You don't even know what race I am.

    You said: "I mean, are the poor souls who were put to death in the USA _less_ dead than their counterparts in China? "

    Of course not. But our dead people take up less space.

    You said: "Want to demand China to stop executing its own people? Let the United States be the first one to put a stop of all its capital punishment cases. Then perhaps you can start demanding China to do the same. "

    Guess what, Skippy-I do ask that the US stops executing people. Guess what else-I don't make the decisions around here. I'll admit, I have a bit more eye-for-an-eye mentality than many of my ilk-I see a big difference between executing someone that raped and killed a child and someone that stole $100K.

    Guess that makes me racist.

    Dave
  • I suggest you try the same with Russian. In the same menu, you'll find three Russian encodings (at least, on my NT box here at work, you do): ISO, KOI8-R, and Windows. Does that mean there are three completely different Russian character sets? No...It just means there are different encodings available for the one alphabet. Now, I'll admit that I also am no expert on Chinese (and, if there is one around, it would be nice if s/he would add some knowledge to this thread), but I have heard my friends who *do* know Chinese say that there are multiple distinct spoken languages, but that they all use the same written set of characters. I'm not real sure on how that works, but I'm willing to take their work for it.
  • That was all - no-one got hurt, and no-one really lost any money (banks are insured, or certainly should be).

    Even if it were insured, somebody still looses money.
  • All crackers are hackers; not all hackers are crackers.

    Thus, the statement about which you're complaining is correct, in the same sense that saying "sentencing primates to death" would be correct, since all crackers are primates, but not all primates are crackers. :-)
  • There's current 2 different set of written Chinese characters, Simplified and Triditional.

    As for encodings, 3 atlease not including unicode, HZ, GB and Big5.

    There is infact a few... 2 or 3 Chinese Linux Distributions that I know of, TurboLinux Chinese being one of them.

    www.turbolinux.com.cn ( page in chinese gb )
  • The blurb seems to use both senses of hacker at the same time.

    "China, in the news more recently for sentencing hackers [should be crackers or, more accurately, bank robbers] to death, now looks set to encourage them [hackers, NOT crackers]."
  • I'm no expert on Linux with Chinese
    I speak, read, and write Chinese and I've used Chinese Windows, Chinese Turbolinux.

    * perhaps there are a million ways to input Chinese, but 3 will cover 99.999% of needs.
    WRONG! So Wrong. Foreigners will probably use PinYin, Taiwanese will start out using BoPoMoFo, Speed typers might want to use ChiangJie (sp?), Cantonese speakers will use another imput method based on different romanizations, data entry operator with a keypad would use other methods. 3 isn't enough.

    * it is absolutely untrue that there are at least 3 completely different chinese character sets
    I mean encodings. ... and it's quite common that Chinese text will not have any sort of text or encoding tag to indicate what encoding is used. So, if you get a text message written in Chinese, it's virtually impossible to have a program guess which encoding is used. You have to do it visually by switching encodings.

    By the way, there *are* TWO different Chinese character sets as well, Traditional Chinese and Simplified Chinese. Traditional Chinese is used in Taiwan, HongKong, Malaysia, and to a lesser degree, China. Simplified Chinese is used mostly in China. The Character sets a similar, but they definitely are DIFFERENT.

    * perhaps unicode has a very limited set of Chinese character, but they are enough for all practical purposes.
    Depends on what you consider practical. Granted, unicode contains most characters, but how would you feel if Unicode left out one of the characters in your Name? How would you feel if you couldn't type the name of a Temple because Unicode didn't have the right character?
  • Thanks for the correction. I suppose I should have said that our current x-based applications haven't implemented any or haven't implemented a consistent method for dealing with multinational input methods and most distributions still lack a number of international fonts.

    We really need to have a standard low level IME like windows has, where users can change input methods to ANY language from a single location and not need to run all sorts of different input method programs. That way developers could add an IME plugin instead of recoding the who darn language or input method from scratch in every application or input method program.

    English programmers didn't really care so much about internationalization -- it's a lot more work to implement proper internationalized date sorts based on other calendars, and alphanumeric sorts based on different alphabets (with >26 characters or multiple ways to sort the characters)

    No offense to the x developers intended. I was primarily referring to X intenationalization WRT the major apps in use today and the fragmented efforts for various non-compatible input method servers that run on top of X.
  • I thought the Chinese were capitalists now, albeit in a totalitarian regieme.
  • [SARCASM ON} Well, thank you so much for the news flash! [SARCASM OFF]

    Hate to tell you, but I read Chinese and Japanese, and if you'd bothered looking, I said three encodings. There are two main character sets - the Traditional Chinese set, which uses the older, more complex form of characters, and Simplified Chinese, which was an effort by the mainland Chinese to cut down on the number of strokes required for most characters, as well as unifying similar characters into one.

    As for your comment about the same set of characters for multiple spoken languages (actually dialects), that's true in a broad sense, but many Chinese dialects have words and phrases that cannot be expressed correctly in written Chinese.

    And last of all, just because you don't bother actually learning about a subject before you spout off, don't assume that everyone else is on the same level of ignorance as yourself.
  • Even if it were insured, somebody still looses money.

    Ah, but you pay to be insured - insurance companies don't lose money when they pay out on a claim, hey just don't make as much as they could've done :o)

    Tim
  • My initial reaction to this 'news' is curiosity as to what effect this may have on existing distributions (such as RedHat). As some posters have already noted, there are various interested parties trying to capture early market share in the asian sector. Whichever provides the best targeted language support will likely hold the lead. However, since the revenue model is not only based upon consulting/troubleshooting and training but also on distribution, success is dependent on fast and secure local access (i.e. a local mirror). Will that mirror house a RedHat "China" version and the US sites an English variant? Will content fork (not the kernel of course, but the packages) as well in response to local demands? Finally, can a "priority" ftp service charge model exist there... what if the govt. establishes its own mirrors on largeish pipes? Anyone? Tranq

  • Uh, your comments were good, but the issues you cite affect Linux everywhere, not just in China. Non-technical users, irrespective their nationality, want the things you mention (fully-featured browser, comprehensive Office suite, ease-of-use, etc.). However, *technical* users -- here and in China -- will appreciate Linux for what it currently offers and seek to improve it for their own needs. We simply need to get the software in the right people's hands "over there," and I believe it will take off just as it has in the U.S./Europe.

    My point in short: if Linux hasn't appealed to the masses here in the U.S., it's not going appeal to the masses over in China, either.
  • Only if you're unconscious or get to drive (or both :-) )
  • I am of the opinion that the software market is an entirly world market, in that it does not have the barriers to trade that traditional products may have. With this in mind, developers need to focus on internationalization from the beginning and not only concentrate on "English and Euro" versions. MS has done a great job with this, and that is why I think LNX developers need to approach this issue now, not tomorrow.

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