This could potentially be quite big for Ubuntu and Linux in general. Canonical and the Chinese government have announced a collaboration to build a version of Ubuntu specifically for the Chinese market, which will become the reference architecture for standard operating systems in the country.
The first version will be released next month, and will be named Ubuntu Kylin. This first, initial version will already contain a number of China-specific tweaks, such as Chinese input methods and the Chinese calendar, and search support for the most popular Chinese music services will be built straight into the Dash, Ubuntu’s global search thing. Future releases will expand to include integration with Baidu maps, the Taobao shopping service, Chinese payment processors, and local public transport information. The collaboration will move past desktops in the future.
“The release of Ubuntu Kylin brings the Chinese open source community into the global Ubuntu community,” according to Mark Shuttleworth, “With Ubuntu Kylin, China now has its own secure and stable desktop operating system, produced alongside Ubuntu’s global community. Ubuntu combines proven technology with a mature ecosystem and strong OEM and ISV partners, and this initiative allows the Joint Lab to bring those strengths to China across the full range of platforms: desktop, server, cloud, tablet and phone.”
China Software and Integrated Chip Promotions Centre has decided to work with Canonical to produce the “reference architecture for Chinese operating systems”. The Chinese government has a preference for home-grown products, and this announcement fits within that preference. This China-tailored version of Ubuntu will be “widely-used” and is part of a five-year plan by the Chinese government to promote open source software.
An immediate concern here is the political and possible ethical implications of working with the Chinese government – especially for an open source project. China still has a totalitarian regime, and internet use in within the country is widely regulated and censored. Virtually every major corporation already operates in China, so while it certainly isn’t as big an issue as it used to be, such close cooperation still raises questions.
However, I think it’s unlikely we’ll see creepy backdoors or monitoring software built into Ubuntu Kylin. First, the open source nature will mean it’d have to be done in binary form, and even that will stand out among the rest of the open source operating system. Aside form that, there’s the simple fact that monitoring on the device itself is inefficient compared to monitoring the network itself.
Still, this could be huge for Ubuntu, and thus for Linux.
So every time the government changes, a few things break.
That should be an improvement then. The Chinese govt. only changes once every 10 years. As it is Ubuntu and most desktop Linux distros tend to break every single update. 10 years of stability is enterprise level stuff that you only get with the likes of RHEL/CentOS.
Edited 2013-03-22 14:52 UTC
You’re going to be down-voted to all hell for daring to say this. (I’m about to join you.)
However, this is my experience as well. I’ve only ever managed a single successful upgrade from one version of Ubuntu to the next (12.04 -> 12.10); every other one has left the machine in an unusable state. I’m even wary of ordinary package updates since the fact that I use NVidia’s own drivers often conflicts with kernel updates.
Of course, that’s probably my own fault for being so unreasonable as to expect to have hardware-accelerated graphics.
Running Ubuntu on a old Macbook here (Core Duo, 32 bit). Today’s kernel update left the system unable to boot. I still can boot with the previous kernel version. It’s not the first time this has happened in the last year. They call this “stable”. ๐
Debian is your friend… I don’t know how Ubuntu takes such a stable base that is pretty flawless as far as upgrades go (I upgraded from Sarge(during testing) to Etch, to Lenny to Squeeze, and the only thing that broke was some php code I had that was obsoleted due to PHP being updated. Which of course is PHP’s fault.)
I finally ended up doing a fresh install of Squeeze because it was easier to convert my system to amd64. Granted it was ‘possible’ to go from i386 to amd64, but just I just figured I could clean up some cruft as well.
Ubuntu.. I agree, it seems to break randomly just between normal updates.
>I use NVidia’s own drivers often conflicts with kernel updates.
I Guess you’re installing it manually from the vendor site/installer? These are not meant for end-user usage since you must manually update then every kernel update. You should be using the Canonical supplied one, which is automatically updated every kernel update, and shouldn’t break unless something very funky is happening.
You’re probably thinking with a Windows mindset where you must check the vendor site in order to keep drivers update (arguably nowadays most are kept updated with Windows update). In Linux the kernel either supports everything out of the box or the distro takes care of providing support for proprietary drivers. Doing it manually is pretty much advanced users only, and asking for trouble.
Also, I don’t know about Ubuntu upgrading conditions, but my ArchLinux install has been alive and up to date since it’s inception in 2009. It even handled a full upgrade from 32bit to 64bit, without reinstalling!
You say that, but only today I’ve had the same problem as him. Like yourself, I run Arch and installing the drivers from official Repos.
My issue was that the Nvidia binaries were compiled against a specific version of ABIs which were updated with Linux. I ended up having to rollback the updates.
I’m also using the nvidia drivers and no breakage happens. They are always updated in sync with the kernel, just like in any sane distro that does this for you.
Might you be holding off the update for one of then, or rolling your own kernel? Anything like this is not supported by the distribution, thus making you the one who must keep an eye at it.
Just to be clear, are you running the open source or the closed binaries?
I’m not doing anything fancy (I spend enough time compiling kernels for work, there’s no way I’m doing that at home as well hehe)
I did have a power cut while -Suy a couple of weeks back which resulted in corrupted updates and what not. I thought I’d fixed everything but if you’re sure that the closed nvidia binaries installed without issue then I guess there’s a chance that this is a lingering fault from my power cut.
Yes, I’m talking about the closed drivers. It really shouldn’t cause any problems.
Try checking your pacman.conf or your x.org configuration. Nowadays you don’t even need a xorg.conf for most setups. (maybe you have a old enough installation that you haven’t checked on that?)
I don’t need to check my conf files – I know there isn’t a problem.
The error message was quite clear and I’ve spent enough years as a UNIX and Linux systems administrator and developer to know what I’m doing
If this isn’t an Arch issue, then it’s a left over fault from the power cut I had mid-Suy.
Either way, it’s a bit of a none issue as I have a working desktop at the moment and once I’ve finished this big development project I’m in the middle of, I’m going to roll the entire system back a month (for reasons completely unrelated to any of this – I’ve also been testing file systems and really don’t like the current one so I’m going to restore a snapshot before data gets too out of sync) so the driver issue will remedy itself.
Well, good thing China didn’t pick Arch then, eh?
This Linux fan up voted the comment, because it made me laugh. We have more of a sense of humour than you give us credit for.
China beforehand already supported, used and rolled out Red Flag Linux since ~2001. Now they switch to Ubuntu. Was and is Linux.
I would have chosen Debian. With Debian you can do absolutely what you want and there is no “commercial” company behind it.
herro
I voted funneh
Edited 2013-03-22 17:01 UTC
When I think of Ubuntu, working well with the community is definitely not one of the first things that comes to mind. This seems like a strange move.
This is a bit of a coup for Canonical. I wonder why the Chinese govt. went with a foreign company when they could have gone with red flag linux.
because the project is basically dead?
http://distrowatch.com/table.php?distribution=redflag
Ubuntu have the financial backing and infrastructure.
China(which I hate referring to as if its single entity) can allow all the legwork to be done by ubuntu and if ever they dont want to continue working with them directly, fork. Its the ideal situation.
http://www.scribd.com/doc/77795416/14/The-Tortoise-and-the-Hare-Rev…
This is not how I wanted Linux to succeed.
Copyright 1981? I wonder how I’ve missed reading this for over 30 years!
It’s way better than pirated Windows XP, no questions about it. I just hope they use Gnome Classic / MATE. Unity is too funny.
For the life of me, I never understood why any country little alone one the size of China didn’t make full use of any of the opensource OS’s. Then take any of the license money (ok, those that do actually pay) and develop the missing applications needed. Why pay all that money to outside vendors when you could keep all the money and working IP within the country.
I’ve wondered those things many years.
I think that part of the reason is they want the people in their country to know how to use the software the other people in other countries use. So they can sell hardware, software and services to the other countries. Basically they desire interoperability more.
An other part is probably: risk. They might think it hasn’t proven itself.
The biggest problem is probably the people making the decisions don’t know the technology.
Don’t forget bribes.
More than one country that wanted to move to cheaper/free OSes seems to change its policy on which OS to use after a visit from some well-moneyed OS company has sent some visitors.
On the other hand, China is one of the few countries where if you are caught taking large bribes you can end up being executed.
Let’s see where they are two years from now.
Edited 2013-03-23 14:56 UTC
It’s actually one of the downsides to piracy. Why work on creating something when you can get it for free? Why work on Linux when you can get Windows for free?
That is also one of the reasons MS and other proprietary software vendors don’t try too hard to stop piracy in poor countries. They know that if they do it will lead to a shift to opensource.
That is very very bad for them because a) they loose potential future customers b) opensource software becomes that much better *and* c) it leads to a large pool of experienced developers in poor countries who could compete with you in future.
You’re going to be down-voted to all hell for daring to say this. (I’m about to join you.)
However, this is my experience as well.
I too wonder why the Linux fans get so touchy feely about this. X.org breaks upgrades so much that their friend Nixie Pixel even has a tutorial on how to fix it when it happen. Can’t they, i dunno, adnit it? They remind me of scientologists, focusing on hushing the competition instead of accepting participating in a debate, as the downvoting of this comment will prove.
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While X.org has never broken one of my updates. I’m sure its possible, especially if you use binary graphics drivers.
Its well known that linux does not keep a stable binary kernel abi.
What would you expect as a debate topic, exactly? Why keeping a stable kernel abi would be a good thing?
Although Xorg is getting close to being replaced by Mir and Wayland, these issues will most likely remain, due to the kernel abi.
Yep, pretty much every time my X has broken, it was because of the binary drivers… Usually it is after a kernel update where the binary module doesn’t update.
Correction, the kernel does not keep a stable kernel ABI for the DRIVERS.
The Linux kernel can afford doing this since almost every single driver is built-in right into it and every ABI change can be made in sync with the included drivers. This does makes the life of binary drivers harder, but providing you have good vendors live nVidia always updating, even before the stable kernel and xorg comes out, you don’t feel the pain.
You should only get in trouble when using badly maintained binary blobs like catalyst and a few wi-fi drivers. You might also be in trouble if you keep track of this manually, regardless of how frequently updated the drivers are by the vendor. That’s why you should never manually install it if you aren’t an advanced user, and therefore you should solely rely on the distribution for this task.
And just to make the ABI thing clear, the Linux kernel DOES NOT BREAKS THE PROGRAM ABI/API. It has been solid for over two decades. You can trow in a binary game from about the year 2000 like Unreal Tournament and it will happily run.
This! so much this!, I’m still running games and programs from the mid 90’s on my 64bit Linux box.
This is not true.
If you would be talking about commercial UNIX I would believe you, given how they keep backwards compatibility, but not when talking about Linux distributions.
Unless the application is statically linked, there is a high probability that the required dynamic libraries are no longer the same.
Additionally, around 2000 there were was the egcs/gcc war, so there is a high probability that an application around those days was compiled with egcs instead of gcc, which increases the probability of not executing nowadays.
And of course we also have the issue that not all distributions respect the LSB, specially around 2000, so the probability of an application not finding certain paths is high.
This is all motivated with the excuse that you can always compile from source and commercial closed software is not welcome anyway.
You’re confusing things. The person you responded to was talking about the kernel API/ABI whereas you are talking about userland APIs/ABIs. That is to say that you are both correct: old applications often refuse to run because the userland has become incompatible, but alas, the kernel ABI is still fully-compatible and that isn’t the thing stopping the app from running.
Do say if you need a more in-depth explanation.
Thanks, but I was already coding for UNIX commercial systems before Linus came up with Linux and I use GNU/Linux since the 1.0.9 kernel.
As for my explanation, yeah maybe I should have explained it better, because both kernel and userland ABIs are required for applications to run. Unless you code something using direct kernel calls only, without any runtime library.
So what applications there are, compiled around 2000, which make use of kernel only stable APIs that run in actual distributions without recompilation?
You are somewhat right, applications that are distributed by the distribution and have source code available are packaged in a way that can easily break, not with the kernel program ABI, but with all the supporting libraries themselves. Though, in reality, it does not break because the distribution always updates any application that is about to break by changes made by newer libraries. In return we end up with binaries that are somewhat always compiled with the latest compiler improvements and a very minimal overlap of libraries.
This does not work for commercial applications, so, good packaging by the vendor part is done by statically linking as many libraries as possible, and only relying on system libraries if they have good backwards compatibility. This is somewhat similar to what windows applications tend to do. Admittedly, not all applications do this right, so applications and games might break if they are not updated by the vendor.
Luckly Loki Games had the decency of crating the freaking SDL library that interfaces with most things a game needs, and with a very solid abi/api that is still in use today by new games. The result is that you can run some of their really old games with no trouble in new systems. You still get stuff like sound missing due to no OSS support anymore, but you can fix it by installing a OSS backend for pulseaudio.
There is also the fact that binary applications do not tap into the distribution package manager, so they can’t check if the necessary system libraries are all installed. This ends up as a unfortunate burden to the user…
Edited 2013-03-24 02:17 UTC
These issues disappear if you simply use the open source graphics drivers that come with the Linux kernel.
Which such if you are doing serious graphics programming.
One of the reasons I keep Windows as my main laptop OS.
I would have never expected anyone to even know who Nixie Pixel is and mention her on this site.
Someone with less than 20 million views on YouTube is hardly a worldwide celebrity.
Sometimes I wish she would ask someone what would be the best way to teach people certain tasks, because she doesn’t always choose the easiest/best method.
Anyway I already spent to many words on her.
Generalize much? Not every Linux fan has the same ideas about everything.
Who is Nixie Pixel btw?
Nixie Pixel is a woman who does Youtube videos of tutorials on Linux.
Every time I try to watch her videos, all I hear is ‘boobs boobs boobs’. Damn my male brain.
Well, I wouldn’t try to hax the box of any woman doing youtube videos. I would take a look on her hardware and her operating system first.
Dude, it’s the interwebs. If you can’t make a factual argument that sticks, generalizing (and personal attacks) is your best bet.
Edited 2013-03-23 02:31 UTC
As the OP said, friend of linux fans.
Wow really? That must be why I can’t even remember the last time an upgrade broke X (in either Linux or OpenBSD).
Sometimes I wonder if Eric S Raymond didn’t make hundreds of accounts on some websites, trying to pose as different users.
If memory serves there was already a “mandated” OS based on Linux: Red Flag Linux, AFAIK this has not helped Linux in any way, so..
Why are people angry at Canonical for this? Are they going to execute the political opposition with Ubuntu? No, not at all! China and other U.S.-opponents like Russia have been realising that proprietary American software contains a lot of spyware usable by the U.S. government. They want full control over who has access to their computers, which is their honest right. And don’t come up with freedom of choice. I live in a country with one of the most deregulated markets in the world, yet honestly I have no choice but to run Windows in my daily life because nobody wants to make a cross-platform API for desktop applications.
Can you point me to the forums where “people are angry at Canonical for this”?
I see no comments on Ubuntu forums, two generally supportive comments on OmgUbuntu, nothing on Planet Ubuntu, @Ubuntu’s tweet has 18 retweets and a fav and all but one comment positive, and the CEO’s (@silbs) tweet has 11 retweets and 5 favourites and no comments.
Where should I be looking for this angry mob, exactly?
BTW, I run virtually the same apps on my Windows and SUSE boxes at work and my Ubuntu box at home. Writing cross-platform is freaking trivial – I’d personally recommend Qt and Python, but the list of quality options is far too long to provide here.
When a developer writes for a specific platform, it’s because she wants to wring the absolute best experience for that platform. If you want multi-platform, use a somewhat more generic competitor that also supports Windows (ahem).
Two comments in opposition on Ubuntu Forums were “jailed”, mine was one of them. I’ve posted a new item at the end of the thread, hopefully it will stay there.
What I find utterly unbelievable is that the angry mobs come out in force when Ubuntu sends search queries to Amazon, but not when it sends search queries to a Chinese video sharing site. The angry mobs come out when Ubuntu writes a new display server, but not when Canonical jumps into bed with the Chinese government. This China deal has the potential for much bigger privacy violations – and not just in China – than any US shopping site can cause.
I like Unity, so I think I’m moving to Linux Mint where presumably I can still install Unity. I know Mint’s founder is anti-Israel and doesn’t want anyone to use his distro unless they share his political opinions, but I figure he’s less of a threat to me than Ubuntu.
People are angry because search queries are sent to third parties, not amazon in particular.
And about Mir and the chinese government? Those are completely unrelated issues.
…what? That’s certainly something I’ve never heard before.
Clem has apologised repeatedly for his 2009 rant against Israel, stepped back from the black/white view he expressed in it, and reaffirmed the apolitical nature of Linux Mint. Given that the Mint Box his project started producing last year are made by an Israeli company, I think it’s pretty clear that he no longer holds the position he expressed in that post. See his response to a commentator here:
http://blog.linuxmint.com/?p=2055#comment-67225
One key detail is that it’s not just for the desktop/laptop, but also for phones & tablets, which will vastly outnumber regular PCs, are already a major gateway to the internet & web, and will be the main way ordinary Chinese people access the net.
The Chinese Communist Party/Govt has been uneasy about Android’s dominance of China’s smartphone/tablet markets. Google has preferred to avoid collaborating with their censorship & monitoring programs.
Now the Party has found a willing partner: if Google won’t play ball, Canonical will… for the right price.
A couple of points I forgot to mention.
It doesn’t really matter if monitoring software stands out to people who can see that sort of thing. Those people are a tiny fraction of the intended user base.
This will probably come pre-installed on devices. The number of people who even know it’s possible to change operating systems on a device (let alone actually do it) is again a tiny fraction of the intended user base.
So if/when such monitoring software is found, it might raise a hullabaloo among a few foreign geeks and activists (who the Party/Govt couldn’t care less about). A tiny number of Chinese users will say something (but they’re the kind who probably wouldn’t have used it in the first place). And the vast majority will just carry on, business as usual, with the occasional grumble and the occasional arrest.
At which point Canonical will trot out the standard line of “complying with local laws & regulations”.
PS as for the open source love-in claims, why is it being bundled with proprietary apps like Kingsoft WPS Office?
Edited 2013-03-22 19:13 UTC
Not. The news explicit names desktop and desktop only. If some chinese manufactors will offer Ubuntu Phone devices earliest in 2014 is still open. There is lots of opensource Android competition including Firefox, Sailfish, Tizen. Later even from an asian global player.
Errr… did you read it all the way to the end?
Her name is Green Dam Youth Escort and if you live in China, she wants to party with you. In fact, she insists on partying with you. You can meet her here <a href=”http://www.google.com/search?q=green+dam+youth+escort&hl=en&client=…
Edited 2013-03-22 18:53 UTC
I live in Taiwan, and this development gives me some hope that Linux can be revived here. We wouldn’t be able to use the exact same system as mainland China because they use simplified characters and we stick the traditional ones (as does Hong Kong, by the way). But translating menus into traditional characters is very easy, it can even be done by machine.
About 10 years ago the Taiwanese government made some noises about going with Linux, even opened a few Linux training classes in the universities, and there was a Chinese-language “Linux Magazine.” Then suddenly – nothing. Whatever the reason, Linux has been so thoroughly eradicated from Taiwan that most young people here have never even heard of it. If you buy a computer here from a big chain store and say you don’t want Windows, they’ll sell you one with FreeDos pre-installed, but not Linux. It’s as if Microsoft called up the president and demanded they kill Linux or else Taiwan-made computers would be banned from the USA.
This could all change if China gives Ubuntu a big push. Even though politically we aren’t really part of China (not yet, anyway), we are very influenced by it.
Edited 2013-03-22 19:22 UTC
Ah, the beauty of Chinese characters. When I studied Japanese, learning the darn things was hard enough, but I can’t imagine how hard it must be for Chinese people to operate in such an environment all the time… I mean, in Japanese, there are phonetic alphabets (hiragana/katakana) that can be used as a functional substitute most of the time, so in case one doesn’t know how to read a bunch of characters, there’s a helper method to write down the pronunciation. But in Chinese, what methods are there? Last time I was in China, everything was in Chinese characters – and I mean every single thing (besides western names, obviously).
How do you guys figure things out when you don’t recognize a character?
[quote]
How do you guys figure things out when you don’t recognize a character?
[/quote]
Well there is nothing you can do. If you don’t know a character, you don’t know the character.
However, this usually doesn’t occur. The good news is although there are well over 10,000 chinese chars in existence, only 3,000 of them are in frequent use, and another 3,000 of them are in occasional use. So effectively you only need to learn ~6,000 chars.
And if you learn these 6,000 chars, you learn all chinese words: there is no need to separately learn the vocabulary, which is huge. This is because the chinese is an ideographic language. Say if you don’t know the English word `rocket’, all you can do is to look it up in a dictionary. But if you don’t know the Chinese word `rocket’ (but you do know the common 6,000 chars), you can make sense of the word because it’s made of two characters which stand for `fire’ and `flying arrow’ separately, and at least you can picture that the word means something arrow-like and is propelled by fire.
Edited 2013-03-23 02:20 UTC
If you just learn the characters that doesn’t mean you learn chinese or chinese words. You’ll still be writing and reading in your own language but with chinese characters.
Don’t be silly. The Chinese characters do not correspond to syllables, vowels or consonants, they correspond to full words or idioms and therefore every time you write a chinese character down you’ve written a Chinese word.
Here in the western world, yes, the latin character set corresponds to individual vowels and consonants and therefore when you string together many characters to form a word you have to specifically pay attention to what language you’re writing in.
Word is an element of a language, not of writing. You have cantonese words, mandarin words, english words but no “chinese” words.
No, he has a point – one can know the meaning of a Chinese character, without knowing how to pronounce it / how it sounds in Chinese.
I’d say this is a fairly big issue, as e.g. Japanese people forget characters constantly. This has become especially problematic since much/most writing nowadays occurs on keyboards. People would recognize a character, but for the life of them can’t produce it by hand. This sort of problem doesn’t occur with alphabets – if you know the word, you can read and write it.
And here I was thinking the Japanese had it bad with having to learn roughly 1/2 of what you said…
Except this is not how humans naturally learn languages. We learn our mother language as small children with no writing and then have to laboriously relearn it using the writing system (e.g. Chinese characters).
Naturally, if you have no concept of the thing being described, regardless of the writing system used, you’re screwed. But that’s not how most people operate. We know words before we know how to write them down.
In languages using Chinese characters, you effectively need to re-learn your own language in written form. This may not be such an issue in native Chinese languages, but it is certainly an issue in languages into which Chinese characters have been imported (aka “shoehorned”), such as Japanese. Japanese is about as similar to Chinese as English is…
Except when not, which is not uncommon. Think ‘logic’ and ‘theory’: same two characters, but different order — different word. Or when there are 3 characters with similar meaning, and almost any combination of them makes a word, each with slighly different meaning.
Also, not everything is as straightforward as fire + arrow: what about, for example, ‘hand’ + ‘paper’? Who would ever guess that it means ‘toilet paper’? Not the Japanese, I’m sure, for whom those that sequence reads as ‘letter’.
So yes: logograms help, but do not acquit you from learning vocabulary.
True, but the problem you described here is not mainly about the language, it is about the culture and history. It is common to all civilizations. For example, in English, “Black sheep” carries more information that its literals. That is one of the reasons why foreign students can do a PHD in English but still find entertainment magazines hard to understand.
That’s true; however, I think we should probably draw a line between “regular” non-compositional compounds and idioms. Linguistically speaking, this line may be non-existant, and in any case very blurry; but I believe anyone, who speaks a foreign language, feels the difference between these types of words when learning them. When you learn that hand+paper means letter, you go “OK, it’s not fully compositional (but what is, really)”; but when you are told that spear+shield means contradiction, you know there’s something more going on — and you won’t even understand it until someone explains you the story behind this word.
Same with “black sheep”: you have to think metaphorically to arrive at the meaning — something you don’t need to do with words like “airship” or “rabbit hole”.
True but context plays a larger role in my experience in terms of the ability of Chinese characters to communicate meaning.
I once had a conversation with two middle-aged Koreans who spoke very little English and a younger Japanese person who spoke good English but knew no Korean apart from ‘hello’ and ‘goodbye’ (I had no knowledge of any of these East-Asian languages). I do not doubt that some things were miscommunicated according to the nuanced intentions of my interlocutors but we held a functional dialogue through spoken English between me and my Japanese friend, and Chinese characters between her and our Korean hosts.
Nobody got insulted and there was much laughter.
It was certainly a fascinating episode for me.
I love these kind of interactions as well. But actually it’s not that surprising: the meaning of the (lexical) individual characters remained the same across these languages — that was the original reasing for using a logographic script. Also, a very large part of the Japanese (and I guess Korean) vocabulary came from Chinese. The ‘letter’ example above is a well-known exception, and I brought it up mainly not to illustrate the difference between Chinese and Japanese, but as a proof that even in languages that use a logographic writing system, you are not exempt from the chore of learning the vocabulary.
I thought ‘Red Flag’ Linux was China’s darling. Given that its last version came out in 2009 I’d have to conclude it has gone the way of the Dodo bird.
What the government wants and what the citizens do are two entirely different things; the government wants home grown technology so that Chinese consumer firms can rise and compete on the world stage but local Chinese consumers still prefer buying iPhones and other gadgets. End of the day though the idea of ‘national champions’ aka economic nationalism (popularised in France by Jacques Chirac) is looking pretty anachronistic when one considers a world where companies are global and the headquarters are located in XYZ either because of historical or taxation reasonings and borders are disappear fast via economic co-operation organisations. It is cute that Ubuntu is being added to a list of operating systems ‘receiving the blessing’ of the Chinese authorities but the influence on the Chinese economy is going to be pretty minor.
Actually, protectionism works pretty well in IT.
China (and russia) have its own search engines, social and online stores…
Likewise the USA has a very strong NIH syndrom and shamelessly protects its big firms.
I guess one could argue that from a national security perspective the idea of running an operating system from a potential enemy or competitor doesn’t bode to well when it comes to full disclosure of its codebase when one considers espionage. With that being said it is interesting how willing the west has been to push much of its hardware assembly and manufacturing into China.
IMHO, great news for Ubuntu and Linux in general.
I hope it will orbit Ubuntu in much higher altitude.
Linux desktop has potential, but if you leave things to people, all you get generally is bunch of code that tries to reach where big players were years ago.
Hope for best to Ubuntu and Linux.
Lol, an open system for a closed government, yep, seems legit…
You heard it here first ๐
The idea of a standard OS for a whole country is of course ludicrous.
At first I was horrified, but then realized that if the Chinese do adopt open platforms and socialization processes to build open software, it may be a profound eye opener to change the countries political direction. The reason? Secrets. Secrets, are the basis for tyranny in all governments. Open source can’t work when secrets are employed.
Furthermore, it becomes extremely obvious when those secrets are employed and the communities reaction is usually “F*ck You”.
Although as it is right now, companies are using open source in military applications to execute people in the most heinous and cowardly ways through the use of drone warfare.
So maybe I am mistaken, after all I live in a country which already executes its citizens without due process and is widely accepted by its citizenry, with no demonstrations and very little fan fare.
In response, I have frequently proposed all open source technology in hardware and software, as a terms of license, forbidding its use in any sort of military organization.
With perhaps the exception of Alien invasion. (Nuke’em from orbit. It is the only way to be sure.)
๐
-Hackus
If your company dares to include any sort of censorship or wiretapping code in Ubuntu (Chinese version), I promise to punch you in the face for complete betrayal of morals and freedom, whenever I get the chance
on the other hand, money is good.
Edited 2013-03-24 12:30 UTC
China has a big population.And several billion people who eventually grow up with using Ubuntu(linux) on the desktop and or servers is not trivial.And wether or not a NSA key exists in MS windows, this move will decrease the costs of licenses dramatically.
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