Jan 30 2008
china embracing linux?
Bill Dodson posted yesterday on his blog that RedHat, the undaunted distributor of RedHat Linux (which must remain undaunted because Ubuntu and Kubuntu walked away with a very significant chunk of its market share over the past few years), has decided to sink roots and investment into Chengdu. From the “This is China!” blog:
I’m presuming RedHat has chosen to stay in Chengdu, based on an earlier story in ChinaTechNews ( 24 August 2007): “RedHat, one of the world’s largest open source and Linux software providers, has landed in Chengdu through Sofmit, the largest outsourcing software company in Sichuan Province.” RedHat and Sofmit had established a RedHat Southwest SOA Solution Center and China SOA Service Center in Chengdu.
One of Redhat’s grand plans is to partner up with the excellent technical universities in the area to create armies of Linux programmers, while they’re still vunerable to options outside the Microsoft universe.
Watch out Microsoft… resistance is futile!
I continue to have my doubts that Linux will be much of a threat outside of the server world. It is not a China issue. Linux, for all its proponents (myself being one of them), has never really caught on. Ubuntu has done about as good a job as anyone, but I still find people running Mac OS, Win XP, and Vista on their personal machines. On a server level, Linux is popular, but there are also other versions of UNIX running around as well.
My personal thought is that Linux will never take over China or the rest of the world until it is actually user friendly. Have you tried Gnome or KDE? They are not. Apple has built its UI over a UNIX core, and that is wildly successful. (though I caveat that Linux can do many things better than MacOS with the right customization) Windows, much as it is bloated, is very user friendly. RedHat can invest as much money as it wants, but until someone in the Linux world creates a user friendly interface, RedHat’s venture in Chengdu is really just about cheaper, well-educated labor.
Perhaps resistance is futile…
Tom;
I do agree that Red Hat is not user-friendly in the way the vox populi would prefer. However, I do believe the powers that be in Beijing would like an Operating System with Chinese characteristics, in much the same way it wants its own 3G standard, TD-SCDMA. Now that all government agencies have to pay royalties to the Capitalist Roaders at Microsoft - which must be galling, to say the least - Beijing voiced interest a couple years ago in Linux as a Replacement Killer OS. So, though the rest of the world may not tremble to Red Hat’s investment in armies of Chinese Linux engineers, the streets of Chinese cities may throw parades for these cyber-soldiers who have released them from the tyranny of royalties to the Microsofties.
Bill
I see your point. Though I cannot imagine that China will have its own gov’t sponsored linux flavor in the near future, I suppose it could become a possibility many years down the road.
I still can’t imagine that this linux distro would become very popular outside of Chinese gov’t agencies, and that as much as China may feel irked by paying MS, Windows will still have a following: (1) normal ppl can license MS products relatively cheaply, (2) many ppl will continue to pirate MS products and (3) MNC’s will pirate and/or license MS products. (This assumes of course that the central gov’t can’t force everyone to use China linux)