This is big news for China watchers as well as computer people. IBM has announced that it will support Red Flag Linux, the version of the open source operating system being developed by and for the mainland Chinese market.
The article is here: http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=printArticleBasic&articleId=9003552 A nice wikipedia entry on Red Flag Linux can be found here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Flag_Linux I particularly like the logo. The social, technical, and financial implications of this are profound. While there is some awareness of the power of open source in our government and a bit (a precious small bit) in the American business community, most people who decide American policy are presently in denial that there is and OS except Microsoft. This is actually evolving into a second, more malignant (and doomed) phase of trying to force Microsoft hegemony on the rest of the world. See the present fight in the EU over software patents for how this battle is going. But even if the EU is snookered into shooting itself in that foot, the idea that Latin America or Asia will suddenly reverse thousands of years of culture and start observing any patents, let alone patents on coding techniques, makes me want to curl up on the floor in laughter. And what is our threat to China? "If you don't start honoring all our Mickey Mouse and Microsoft copyrights and patents, we'll ... we'll ... we'll STOP SELLING YOU OUR BONDS! Yeah, that'll show you!" So what we're seeing here is an inevitable movement of market force to mainland Asia, while our country seizes yet another opportunity to miss a very important boat. -- Lan Barnes Linux Guy, SCM Specialist Tcl/Tk Enthusiast If California were a country, it would be the sixth craziest nation in the world. - Al Frankin -- [email protected] http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-list
