Japan, China, S Korea Agree To Standardize Linux 270
Ooi writes "Japan Today News reports: 'The governments of Japan, China and South Korea have agreed to work together to come up with an alternative computer operating system to reduce reliance on Microsoft's Windows, the Yomiuri and Nihon Keizai newspapers reported Sunday.
According to the reports, the three countries will help their private sectors develop Linux, an open-source OS that can be copied and modified freely. The agreement was signed in Beijing on Saturday by senior government officials from the three countries.'
Australian IT has an article on the issue prior to the meeting." A few weeks ago, I spoke at the Asia OSS meeting in Hanoi of which the three gov'ts above are also members. There's a very serious commitment to OSS especially among the governments represented there.
Re:But will it be OS (Score:3, Informative)
Not true.
Quoted from the peopledaily.com.cn article [peopledaily.com.cn]:
Sources concerned said that as the three nations were heading for the same goal of promoting the cooperation on and development of open source software and pushing forward the campaign of opening source code in the northeast Asia, they agreed to exchange information on open source software, share research results, and make joint efforts on developing open source software of next generation based on the software with freely available source code represented by Linux.
..
The three parties vowed to adhere to the principle of opening source code and make joint efforts to give contribution to the global open source software community.
Re:Red Flag (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Can we please stop saying MS has a monopoly? (Score:2, Informative)
http://news.com.com/2100-1040-232565.html?legac
Re:So the Monopoly is now..... where? (Score:4, Informative)
May I ask why you think that IT infrastructure is a sector that government should not touch? I mean, is there a real reason for believing that the private sector is superior in this area?
Re:So the Monopoly is now..... where? (Score:3, Informative)
monopolies are capable of being very good, for example they can make things standardised and there's no waste caused by repeating what's already been done. monopolies are ONLY bad when they act in such a way to remove a user's choice, otherwise survival of the fittest still applies.
Re:What about Red Flag? (Score:2, Informative)
Actually, I can answer my own question. According to this story from the Korea Herald [koreaherald.co.kr], Red Flag will contributing knowledge, if not helping with the development:
My only question..."Asianux"??
Re:I'll believe it when I see... (Score:1, Informative)
-auction.co.kr (The korean version of eBay) works fine on firefox
-http://hosting.cafe24.com/ --this hosting site offers linux based hosting (haven't looked at any other hosting sites yet)
-microsoft.com/korea works fine on firefox.
-korea.com works fine on firefox and loads faster than on IE.
The major portals (naver/nate/daum) all work fine on Firefox
Yes there is a lot of MS action over here in Korea, cause there are a whole lot of pirated installs of Windows over here. But the attitude is slowly changing, why just two days ago I saw a guy on the subway with a GNOME hoody.
Re:I'll believe it when I see... (Score:4, Informative)
http://www.securityspace.com/s_survey/data/200403/ kr/index.html [securityspace.com]
which is somewhat a prerequesite for Linux on the desktop. If admins in companies have experience with Linux on servers, only then they will evaluate it on the desktops. It seems Microsoft has already lost the Korea-server market without any hope of gaining ground (When you run Linux, you have more choice of webhosters, have better support and on top pay less.) the desktop is next. It will take much longer than on the servers, but it will happen, especially when the government is helping.
Re:It really says something (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Asian-language localized UNIX tools (Score:2, Informative)
This was discussed when the Asianux thing first came up on
I have enough trouble getting japanese & cyrillic characters to display correctly as it is (sometimes i'll get a mish-mash of squares and glyphs, or nothing at all). I have yet to see uniform treatment for internationalization in the consle (making file administration of foreigh-language encoded files completely impossible without a GUI).
And heaven help me if i want to work in hebrew, or that weird ancient greek thing where they went left-right on one line, and then went right-left the next (okay, now I'm joking).
Point is, you won't get the functionality these governments want using gettext, pango and i18n. (hell, i use all those and i'm still pissed off) The changes need to be funadmental to the software itself, not just after-market mods to western goods.
Re:3 countries have different causes (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Nano (Score:3, Informative)
Re:I'll believe it when I see... (Score:2, Informative)
The site she seems to spend most time at is daum.net. This site often fails to render correctly - the front page is generally OK, but many bits are slightly screwy. She used to access it through public Internet kiosks though running Opera on Windows, which was a real rendering nightmare.
For reading news and accessing her email it's OK, but for anything more than that Daum seems to require a Windows only plug-in. This is for simple things like accessing a chat room (which should be a simple Java applet) and viewing comic strips (which could be in Flash format, or even JPGs). For discussion boards they require you to read a two character code from a graphic and type it in to ensure it's not a bot posting to the board, but even with exactly the right characters entered it fails to recognise them.
The reliance on Windows only plug-ins seems prevalent amongst Korean web sites. This is probably in part a reflection of the fact that they have had ubiquitous broadband for quite some time now and developers cater for the most common option first. It also seems like poor planning to me, since there have usually been cross-platform solutions for many years.
At a really simple level some web sites also fail to identify that they are written in Korean, so they get rendered with strange Roman characters. Easily fixed by picking the appropriate language encoding in the browser, but easily fixed too by the web master mmaking sure their server correctly tags their web pages.
Both of us usually use Safari - MS Internet Explorer generally gives an even worse experience.
It seems to me that Korean web masters are both very lazy and are indeed, as the parent post suggested, owned by Microsoft.