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Red Flag Linux Distributor Joins OSDL 82

Posted by Zonk from the welcome-your-communist-brethren dept.
segphault writes "Ars Technica reports that Red Flag Linux has joined the OSDL." From the article: "Founded in 2000 through the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Red Flag's Linux software line includes desktop, server, and embedded Linux distributions. Red Flag's products are extremely popular in China, where their desktop Linux distribution is favored by many developers. Red Flag frequently collaborates with other Linux distributors in the region, like Korea's Haansoft and Japan's Miracle Linux."
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Red Flag Linux Distributor Joins OSDL More

Red Flag Linux Distributor Joins OSDL

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  • What I'm curious about is... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by mmThe1 ( 213136 ) * on Sunday January 15, 2006 @06:42AM (#14475149) Homepage
    .... by joining OSDL, are they going to "commit" some of their resources for research/development *online* only? What difference does it then make if the company is in China, or any other country then? The article focussed much on growth of Linux in China, rather than 'Red Flag', OSDL, and whatever they are planning to do.

    • Re:What I'm curious about is... (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      The more Chinese taking up Linux, the better as it will only increase marketshare for the OS and encourage more developers to port/write programs for it.

      The rate of consumer growth in the major Chinese cities is astounding and likley the reason why the article focuses more on that.

    • Re:What I'm curious about is... (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward
      That is the big question isn't it? I'm quite leary of Red Flag because while they are eager to take Red Hat and build some very nice improvements and tools upon it, they are rather reluctant to share the code. Red Flag has a history of not releasing the source and although they are less bad about it, they still don't release the source.

      Case in point, Red Flag is presently shipping version 5 of their product. They offer several different version 5 servers for sale but there is not source to be found. In thei [redflag-linux.com]

  • Link (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Life700MB ( 930032 ) on Sunday January 15, 2006 @06:50AM (#14475161)

    Here's the link to the official red-flag linux web [redflag-linux.com].


    --
    Superb hosting [tinyurl.com] 20GB Storage, 1_TB_ bandwidth, ssh, $7.95

  • A disturbing development (Score:4, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 15, 2006 @06:55AM (#14475172)
    Is this what we in the Linux community really need? A Chinaman developer? Having read the article thoroughly, this startling news shows the flaws in the brewing Open Source Zeitgeist that is gripping the software community. Have you considered that providing software for free to countries such as China is essentially tacit support for oppressive regimes?

    Far-fetched? Think about it: With MySQL, the People's Army will now be able to do multiple queries on their tables of democratic activists in Olog(n) time instead of lengthy searches in card catalogs. The bureaucratic overhead previously allowed activists enough time to flee the country. How about building cheap firewalls so the people can't get the unbiased reporting that CNN provides? Or using Apache to publish lists of Falun Gong people to their police forces instantly? I doubt that never crossed your minds when you were coding away in your parents' basements. Consider putting that little thought in your mental resolv.conf file.

    If that does not concern you ( which it probably doesn't, since the slashdot.org paradigm is publishing articles about how not to pay for things ), consider something else. When China eventually goes to war with Taiwan, we want to be able turn their command and control facilities into the computing equivalent of a train-wreck. One of the advantages of Windows never mentioned in the article is the ability of Microsoft to remotely deactivate Windows XP in the case of a national emergency. Thanks to GNU/Lunix, Taiwan will be on a collision course with the mainland in the near future.

    Which throws into question Mr. Stallman's motives. A known proponent of socialism, the Chinese government and RMS are natural allies. Could it be a back door to Stallman's dream of an uber-Socialist United States? We may never know for sure. Next time you consider contributing to an open source project, ask yourself this question: don't you want to make sure your work isn't used for nefarious purposes? Will you risk having blood on your hands?
  • If by "popular" you mean the government attempts to force people to use their state-sponsored Linux distro to reduce dependence on American software, only to find that people respond by formatting their hard disks and installing pirate copies of Windows.

    It's kinda fitting really. I probably wouldn't want to use Linux anymore if the government were trying to force it on me. Especially if it were the Chinese government.

    • Re:Red Flag's products are extremely popular in Ch (Score:5, Interesting)

      by tpgp ( 48001 ) on Sunday January 15, 2006 @08:05AM (#14475292) Homepage
      If by "popular" you mean the government attempts to force people to use their state-sponsored Linux distro to reduce dependence on American software, only to find that people respond by formatting their hard disks and installing pirate copies of Windows.

      Nope, they don't mean popular by that - noone forces anyone to use it. Frankly i'm astounded that you think the Chinese peole would not want to use a local distro with better support for Chinese Characters & popular applications.

      There are plenty of reasons to dislike the Chinese Government - no need to go round making up new ones.

      It's kinda fitting really. I probably wouldn't want to use Linux anymore if the government were trying to force it on me. Especially if it were the Chinese government.

      Well thanks for sharuing your thoughts with us. Care to let us know why you believe people are being forced to use Red Flag?

      I'm sure its not because of some sort of irrational anti-chinese bias you have, so please provide links.
  • This is just further proof that the Open Source community is full of a bunch of communists. : p
  • As far as china is concerned, it can be considered to be a milestone. But how does it affect the rest of the (non-chinese) linux users ? Is it really that significant ? I doubt it will make any difference at all. As far as china's embrace of Linux over propritery OS is concerned - Bill gates once told in an interview that microsoft was running across a brick wall in getting chinese government support for their OS - it is a very good thing. I feel most governments should take a leaf from the chinese and pa
    • Try this on for size:
      If Linux is popular enough in China, then the Chinese government will ensure that next-generation CPUs and mother-boards can run it.

      If that's true, then it is indeed a VERY important thing. (That's also the reason it's important that it be widespread elsewhere. I don't really care what everyone else chooses to run, but I do want to be able to run Linux, and this means that DRM lockout at the CPU and motherboard level need to be prevented...and that can only happen if the large custome

  • it's not popular... (Score:1, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    > Red Flag's products are extremely popular in China,

    I call crap on this. I have business interests in China that involve IT, and none of the shops I do business with uses Red Flag. They'll use Red Hat or Debian, but they refuse to use the state-sponsored Red Flag.

    Linux has a miniscule usage in China anyway. This whole line of Linux being popular overseas is just one big stinking pile of crapola.

  • I remember... (Score:1, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    ..when the first rumors of "Red Flag Linux" appeared and people took them as a joke on RedHat + Linux users being communist hippies. Then when their site first appeared it looked like crap with broken links and images and so on and in chinese only. But slowly it evolved and people realized it was for real. Blame the Taiwanese translators of MS Windows for embedding anti chinese easter eggs in the chinese version of MS Windows. Oh.. and I really dig their "propaganda" images.. :) .. Now let some professional
  • Any distro putting ISO without source package is just that in my book, RED FLAG. Their FTP/HTTP server doesn't allow anyone to download individual source package. Since ISO files are probably just install disk with binary, I was looking for source package ISO, but no such luck.

    I believe distribution without source is actually breaking the GPL agreement. If anyone can prove me wrong on it, let me know.
    • Has anyone actually contacted Red Flag and asked for the Sources? You do NOT need to distribute the source on cd or ftp without people asking for it...and then you can charge for the media used for delivery.

      Someday I hope people will read the GPL...

    • GPL Violation? Pfft. (Score:1, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      HELLO. Ubuntu doesn't put any sources on their disks. None. Zilch. Nyet. It's not worth the space; this isn't Gentoo. If you want the source to something, you have to apt-get source it, which could very well be how it works in Red Flag. *smack*

  • Prartners (Score:3, Informative)

    by pilsner.urquell ( 734632 ) on Sunday January 15, 2006 @09:54AM (#14475546)
    Red Flag frequently collaborates with other Linux distributors in the region, like Korea's Haansoft and Japan's Miracle Linux."

    Actually, no. Red Flag is a trinity member of Asianux http://www.asianux.com/about_us.php [asianux.com] which develops (co-develops) the software these companies use.

    • Maybe THAT'S the answer to the question that I repeated just a bit ago about "Is the source code available?" And it would seem to be a distinct "Yes".

  • Upstream patches? (Score:1, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Has anyone ever seen an upstream kernel patch from the Red Flag people?

    They have absolutely no concept of patch management (tending to keep all their changes as one huge patch against the mainline), and are frequently tasked with projects such as kernel improvements to make individual software load faster (where the kernel is of course the best place for application-specific optimisations).

    While there are without a doubt many skilled people working with them, their technical leadership is a bit of a joke.
  • Say you can't do it, say you can't do it, say you can't do it, then you slip it on in!
  • ...by about a year. According to this article on internetnews [internetnews.com], Red Flag joined the OSDL in January 2005. The Ars Technica reporter must have referenced the same press release, too, since both stories use the exact same quote from Chris Zhao.

    LinuxScribe

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