A friend of mine sent me a news clip which says that the Taiwan gov has
mandated a requirement that all government IT purchases now must be
certified for Windows/Linux dual boot. Currently Red Hat, Novell/SuSE,
and two local Linux companies have passed the certification:
http://tw.news.yahoo.com/060526/19/36g3m.html (in Chinese)
It is estimated that more than $300M USD of hardware/software
procurements will fall under this newly implemented requirement this year.
The main ramification is that Taiwanese hardware makers now will have to
diligently work with Linux vendors if they want to do business with the
government. Since Taiwan literally controls the design and manufacture
(directly or through their investments in China) of all the PC
components, this news should be no less significant than Massachusetts'
decision to move its official office format to ODF. Also as a "direct"
consequence, Adobe unofficially announced that they will port the
upcoming Flash 9 to Linux. See Emmy Huang's (Adobe's product manager
for Flash Player) blog:
http://weblogs.macromedia.com/emmy/archives/2006/05/yes_virginia_th.cfm
Things appear to move along quite nicely. Wayne
