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South Korean government to switch to Linux: ministry

koreaherald.com

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Re: South Korean government to switch to Linux: ministry

#61

Post by innocenat »

kijin wrote: post #23
thewhitetulip wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That will be too much work. Why not use well maintained existing distros?

Because this is Korea, and there's always someone trying to milk the taxpayers' money by offering to develop a "Koreanized" product that is "specialized" for government tasks. Even if it's just Ubuntu with a custom theme and slightly different Wine defaults. I'd bet 5,000 won that they won't even contribute their translation fixes (i.e. their only positive contribution to the world) upstream. They will also rather go…

Betting 5,000 won is kinda...

Re: South Korean government to switch to Linux: ministry

#63

Post by bachmeier »

Yeri wrote: post #8

I used to support our office in S. Korea. It's true they depend super heavily on ActiveX and other weird applets/software that runs only on Windows and/or IE. A lot of the communication with the government (yearly tax submission) as well as banking software would not run on our Linux or OSX devices, and so we had these 'loaner' windows 'tax machines' that got reimaged every few days that people could use to do their…

It was actually worse than that when I lived in Korea. It wasn't just Windows that you needed, it was Korean Windows. I thought I'd be okay because I was running dual boot machines with Linux and Windows. Nope. Windows purchased in the US simply did not work with many of the sites. (My understanding is that most software written for commerce/government sites had Korean people that purchased a Windows computer in Korea as the only audience they thought about.)

Re: South Korean government to switch to Linux: ministry

#64

Post by _emacsomancer_ »

thewhitetulip wrote: post #7

I hope that Indian govt switches to Linux

I think the way forward here is getting more Linux support at lower levels, including the state-level. There has been some progress on this front, especially in Kerala, and also in Assam: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adoption_of_free_and_open-sour...

Re: South Korean government to switch to Linux: ministry

#65

Post by sonnyblarney »

zzzcpan wrote: post #20
thewhitetulip wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That will be too much work. Why not use well maintained existing distros?

Why would that be too much work? I expect total cost of ownership for the government distro to be way less, than using those "well maintained" ones.

Why would a government maintain their own distro in the first place? Other than some minor modifications, what is it about S. Korea gov. officials that's fundamentally different from Office workers that they need specific Linux functionality?

Surely at the level of app/drivers or something, but probably not core functionality.

The whole point of the process was to save money, and one of the ways they can do that is by standardization.

Any deviation for de-facto standards can be costly in many ways, especially in terms of risk.

Re: South Korean government to switch to Linux: ministry

#66

Post by snowwindwaves »

a-afterglow wrote: post #37
kijin wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The word processor by Hancom is actually pretty nice, especially for composing Korean-only and mixed Korean-and-English documents. I've been using it since before I even knew that MS Word existed, and I still prefer it to MS Word for anything that contains CJK characters. The proprietary file format is a PITA, though. Hancom did release a Linux version of their office suite a few years ago, and regularly updates the…

Have you been using it since its first release? I find it surprising you hadn't heard about MS Office if you were already using Hancom.

WordPerfect had a large early market share

Re: South Korean government to switch to Linux: ministry

#67

Post by giancarlostoro »

NortySpock wrote: post #13

As I recall, this sort of public statement is used as a lever to squeeze some discounts out of Microsoft's Enterprise Sales team before the government "decides" to stay with Windows.

Whats worse is they could all pull it off if they invest in existing Distros and hire people to build out the main infrastructure they need. If they rely on legacy Windowd OS' the licenses for new OS' wont matter. They need secure systems to avoid being hacked by external malicious state actors.

I would love to see some countries adopting Linux for government systems and funding research and development e.g. maybe fund Libre Office or the KDE one more and then build out other tools to be cross platform.

Re: South Korean government to switch to Linux: ministry

#68

Post by 1f60c »

giancarlostoro wrote: post #67
NortySpock wrote: post #13

As I recall, this sort of public statement is used as a lever to squeeze some discounts out of Microsoft's Enterprise Sales team before the government "decides" to stay with Windows.

Whats worse is they could all pull it off if they invest in existing Distros and hire people to build out the main infrastructure they need. If they rely on legacy Windowd OS' the licenses for new OS' wont matter. They need secure systems to avoid being hacked by external malicious state actors. I would love to see some countries adopting Linux for government systems and funding research and development e.g. maybe fu…

The French police uses a custom distro based on Ubuntu 16.04: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GendBuntu

Re: South Korean government to switch to Linux: ministry

#69

Post by edtechstrats »

dbmueller wrote: post #50

Recently there was a votation in my town, to decide whether to accept a budget for renewing the schools IT infrasture. It included office365 accounts and new computers and tablets (presumably ipads) I wonder how different it would be were they using an OSS stack. Any stories?

Best example I am aware of is from Penn Manor SD in PA, but others exist.

[1] https://opensource.com/education/14/9/interview-charlie-reis...

[2] https://lancasteronline.com/opinion/editorials/penn-manor-s-...

[3] https://technology.pennmanor.net/open-source-in-school/

Re: South Korean government to switch to Linux: ministry

#70

Post by jcelerier »

thiago_fm wrote: post #30

I doubt this will work out. They also tried that in many countries, they all go back to using Windows. I hate Windows, but I can envision how much money AND time it's gonna cost them to move out, and I'm sure that they will either run out of money before they do the transition, or machines would have already dominated the earth before they are done with this "transition"l I would believe it much more if they said tha…

> They also tried that in many countries, they all go back to using Windows.

uhh... no, here in France a lot of public infrastructure runs on linux.

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