South Korea switching their 3.3M PCs to Linux

> Microsoft will just offer Windows for free

Which... doesn’t have a really incentive now in because all of the legacy components that required Windows in the first place are all broken on Win10...

> Office at a steep discount

... and we don’t really rely on Microsoft Office that much (compared to other countries). The dominant word processor is from a local company (side note: Word is just awful... seriously. Maybe it’s due to no competition., and the local company has viable solutions that provide very high compatibility (seriously, l just can’t believe how they did it, it’s super compatible) with Word, Excel & Powerpoint. (AFAIK they export them to other countries governments as well.)

Lucky they aren't the world's biggest abuser of activeX...oh wait.

More on TMaxSoft.

This software firm builds many 'hard' softwares like OS, DBMS or even MapReduce data processing cluster(like hadoop and spark). One might naturally ask 'why build a wheel while there are plenty already built by open source developers?' and economically aware person might also ask 'how are selling their products while competing against ubuntu, postgresql, spark?'

Cloning something from scratch and learning advanced technology in its process is a familiar thing in Korea. Enforcing home grown products to average customers, subsidizing one specific firm to take all domestic market share is how Samsung and Hyundai made its way to top global firms. So I guess the mental background for replacing OS by home made OS is similar to that which successfully grew Samsung. They are willing to pay off a lot of money so that a Korean firm outgrows Google, Facebook or Apple. An average developer knows it is a stupid plan to replicate linux or mysql from scratch. But government officials' heart still remain in the golden age when the very strategy they are executing with was valid for Samsung or Hyundai.

The way this firm hires its employees is tighly coupled with government. In our country all men are obliged to military service. However there are couple of options:

1. B.S holders: no exemption. 2 years in a random role. 2. M.S holders: you get to work for private firm for 3 years. Called 'special research agents'. Mostly work for engineering related firms. 3. Ph.D holders: you are exempted as soon as you become a Ph.D holder.

All these exemption rules according to the level of scholastic degree is to foster R&D capability of our nation. And here comes a perky question: 'What happens to Ph.D dropouts?' As some might have guessed: 'You go to TmaxSoft, get hefty salary, get a girl, get married.'

I wouldn't say much about it if there weren't a fact that really bugs me. They do hoard M.S holders from best colleges, however the graduate students they hire aren't limited to CS majors. I've seen multiple chemistry majors or industrial engineering majors who dropped out of Ph.D course doing software engineering there. I have no idea how they could 'train' a non CS major to write code for hard core stuffs like OS or DBMS. And they tell the government officials that they have the best pool of engineers from prestigious colleges, which would ease the government to making decision to subsidize this firm.

> I would have assumed that the key requirement is Hangul input, which presumably other word processing and spreadsheet programs could do just fine.

Hangul support was a key feature in the 80s where everything was MS-DOS; and it wasn’t prevalent then where a lot of hangul-supporting word processors were on the market.

The killer feature of the Hangul Word Processor to most users is that it allows substantial control on the layout of the document... in a way that westerners don’t really care. (That’s a direct quote from a foreigner I know, maybe an over-generalization.) So the Korean Government and a lot of corporations were very committed on transitioning documents that were written by hand, to computers, and they also wanted to have this exact layout and form that was used before. Most forms are based out of tables — and I can’t really explain this in text, but it gives you the power to layout the text the exact way you want, while in Word, you feel like you’re wrestling with the layout engine. (Kinda like... if Word is old CSS where you had to use all kinds of float hacks to make your fragile layout, HWP gives you flexbox and grids... etc....) Some says that HWP is more like a DTD program like InDesign (I’ve never used it so I can’t really comment) rather than a usual word processor that other countries use... but everybody is just super used to having all that control, so nobody can really transition back to Word.

No idea where you are getting any of this from...

A little hard to complain when we can take dlls that are 10-12 years old shove them into something like server 2019/SQL 2019, and not think about compatibility.

Same goes for client apps, was your app shit 10 years ago? It's not going to change 10 years later. Did it work in word 10 years ago, it will most likely work 10 years later with zero changes.