Aloha everyone. This news came from Linuxtoday: http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2002/6/3/55433/41738
There are a bunch of other similar or related news articles in my archive, but most of them are written in Chinese.
One of the most noteworthy part is that the Taiwanese government is going to immediately train 120,000 Linux users and 9,600 Linux experts ("seeds").
I don't think anyone in the US knows the true story behind this relatively surprising (to an insider) development. ("Surprising", because politicians, those who have the power to make the needed changes, don't really think the same ways as we do. Yes, Linux has all the advantages--especially for Hawaii's schools, but try to sell those ideas to Cayetano. Will he really care? Or to Joe Blanco, he'll think you're an idiot. I don't think we will have better luck with Linda Lingle, either.)
This move is indeed very political, and initially had nothing to do with technology and/or economic reasons whatsoever. In a nutshell, Chen Shui-Bei, President of Taiwan, is running for his political life now after his government began a Microsoft-sponsored (yes, Microsoft-sponsored) crackdown on software piracy, causing huge public outcries, resentments, and rowdy protests (30,000 in one protest alone) in Taiwan campuses. Opposition parties have seized this opportunity. And President Chen got the message.
President Chen was a classmate of mine at the National Taiwan University. He is a very smart guy, and I knew he will not stop at just slowing down the software piracy crack-down (which will show that he had made a mistake, no politician would admit that). The only way for him to move out of this totally unexpected deep political trouble is to hitch onto Linux and move into it.
For those in the know, Taiwan not only controls a good part of PC hardware manufacturing, it now also controls hardware design. With AMD now moving the manufacturing of Athlon XPs to Taiwan's UMC (I am sure Warren knows this story better than I do), they can make and design everything in a PC except harddrive. But I always consider harddrive a nuisance for desktop PCs. There will be more exciting developments.
A client of mine showed me a fully blown Linux PC which can be booted up and ready to work in less than 10 seconds. Can Windows do that?
