China: Local software for local people
Spotlight project:
The Chinese government plans to deploy over 140,000 Linux PCs in
primary and secondary schools across the Jiangsu province. The deal was
announced by Sun Wah Linux in October 2005 and is thought to be the
largest Linux desktop roll-out in Asia.
Summary
Until China joined the World Trade Organisation in 2001, pirated copies
of Microsoft software were in common use, including in government
agencies. Now it's part of the WTO, China must replace unlicensed
copies of Microsoft software, and it is likely to replace at least some
of these Windows installations these with Linux.
Chinese local and national governments have deployed open source software, and those migrations involving Linux have been given the most publicity. National government agencies using Linux include the National Ministry of Science, the Ministry of Statistics, and the National Labour Unit. Local governments using Linux include the municipal government of the Chinese capital Beijing, which is deploying 2,000 Linux desktops. Aside from Linux, other open source products are supported by the Chinese government, including NeoShine, a Chinese variant of OpenOffice.org, which is on the Chinese government's preferred list for government office productivity products.
The Chinese government has mandated the use of China-produced software in government departments, which has worked as a "strong driver" for open source, according to Andrea DiMaio, research director with analyst firm Gartner. However, this law does not prevent the use of Chinese proprietary software and does not appear to be strictly enforced — Beijing has reportedly bought a "substantial quantity"of Microsoft software .
The Chinese government has spoken of its support for open source on numerous occasions...
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Talkback
Funny, I always thought Brazil was located in the western hemisphere. Oh wait! It is!
anti-Americanism ???
Most of the major Linux distributions are American.
So tell me again how using Linux is anti-Americanism?????
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_Linux_distributions
DO NOT click the Times of India link! It threw a bunch of popups right past my blocker, and started trying to install something(!) When I tried to kill the installer, my whole system hung.
The link to the Times of India has been removed.
Thanks for your feedback -- it seemed to work alright in testing earlier, so apologies for it causing problems.
You can ask every serious IT security expert to learn that it is not paranoid to be afraid of backdoors in closed source systems. For example, do you remember the NSA-key in Windows NT which could be interpreted as a backdoor? What about the CIA-made software bug which caused the explosion of a soviet gas pipeline and was the biggest non-nuclear explosion ever? Finally the US-american spy plane which stranded 2001 in China represents the relationship of the USA to China. Now tell me that there are no good reasons for China to distrust the USA! This is not paranoid and it is not anti-Americanism as well. Anti-Americanism is to decline everything from America without a reason. (In fact you are talking about anti-US-Americanism and not anti-Americanism)
F/OSS is pro-American. Where do you get this anti- Americanism from. MS is not the US -- yet -- as much as Gates would like you to think so. Gates has no respect for US laws whether traffic laws or trade laws. No respect for the US DOJ. MS pays little or no taxes and causes billions of damage every quarter through lost productivity in the work place caused by its defective products (downtime, maintenance, viruses, cracking and phishing).
What's more "American" freedom and self governenance which you get with F/OSS? Or the one-size-fits-all, top down Soviet style monolith provided by Microsoft?