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South Korea switching their 3.3M PCs to Linux

fosslinux.com

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Re: South Korea switching their 3.3M PCs to Linux

#121

Post by BlueTemplar »

smabie wrote: post #91
coldtea wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Despite the effort to liberate the nation from a private US firm this wasn't successful so far: first they tried to build their own kernel which froze at the public demo. So? Linux, Windows, Mac OS, have all frozen during all kinds of public demos. > After realizing it was dumb to write kernel from scratch Is it? A nation state, especially one the size of Korea, should have no problem finding resources for writing…

But, like, why?

Hmm, maybe afraid that otherwise someone might have slipped a backdoor in, like with Dual_EC_DRBG ?

Re: South Korea switching their 3.3M PCs to Linux

#122

Post by BlueTemplar »

dntbnmpls wrote: post #109

I commend their effort, but I believe it should be done on an entire ecosystem level. From assembly to libraries to documents to frameworks. All of it should be turned into Korean, French, Mandarin, Russian, etc. If the governments of major nations decided to do it in a systematic manner along with corporate and university help, it shouldn't be that difficult a task. Create it once and then your entire citizenry can…

It's a bit less of an issue in countries that use a Latin alphabet too...

Re: South Korea switching their 3.3M PCs to Linux

#123

Post by qrbLPHiKpiux »

xbmcuser wrote: post #106
totorovirus wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 le…

This is not something unique to Korea most governments do this. Subsidise or promote a homegrown product so that the homegrown product becomes competitive in the future. NASA supporting private rocket firms is an example of this.

In the United States it's called Google.

Re: South Korea switching their 3.3M PCs to Linux

#124

Post by pcr910303 »

totorovirus wrote: post #45
totorovirus wrote: post #20

South korean developer here. I am quite aware of government plans for software since I've done my service as a software developer for army. There is a company called TmaxSoft which advertises itfself as only builders to the 'Korean OS'. Fueled by relatively high patriotism shared by average koreans, the government had been subsidizing this firm for more than 10 years. Despite the effort to liberate the nation from a…

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 le…

Er... I personally feel that this comment is too harsh to TmaxSoft and the government officials.

Yeah, TmaxSoft builds and sells compatible DBMS/parallel computing solutions to the government — but I feel that it’s entirely understandable to use domestic software for things like that. The killer features there wasn’t that it was domestic — it was that it’s cheaper that the alternatives and it’s compatible with the big ones, ensuring no vendor lock-in.

It’s definitely not a plan to make TmaxSoft some global company like Samsung or Hyundai; its not the 70s where the country has no big companies for the global market. The government has no incentives to do that, when Samsung’s software is used over the world. It’s just the preference of domestic software, and that TmaxSoft delivered actually usable software (not great, but is usable) to the government.

Re: South Korea switching their 3.3M PCs to Linux

#125

Post by [deleted] »

dntbnmpls wrote: post #109

I commend their effort, but I believe it should be done on an entire ecosystem level. From assembly to libraries to documents to frameworks. All of it should be turned into Korean, French, Mandarin, Russian, etc. If the governments of major nations decided to do it in a systematic manner along with corporate and university help, it shouldn't be that difficult a task. Create it once and then your entire citizenry can…

[deleted]

Re: South Korea switching their 3.3M PCs to Linux

#126

Post by totorovirus »

deaddodo wrote: post #102
totorovirus wrote: post #20

South korean developer here. I am quite aware of government plans for software since I've done my service as a software developer for army. There is a company called TmaxSoft which advertises itfself as only builders to the 'Korean OS'. Fueled by relatively high patriotism shared by average koreans, the government had been subsidizing this firm for more than 10 years. Despite the effort to liberate the nation from a…

> first they tried to build their own kernel which froze at the public demo Do you have a video of this? I found mention of it, and many videos of TmaxDay and the like; but without more context or speaking Korean, I'm finding it hard to locate.

I actually heard this from ex-tmax engineer.

One of the engineer was debugging the scheduler a day before demo day, poking here and there, inserting sleep(10); to random places. He merged his debug commit without deleting sleeps so the OS froze on demo.

what this implies: they don't have tests, no code review. And they're still developing OS.

Re: South Korea switching their 3.3M PCs to Linux

#127

Post by dntbnmpls »

Qu3tzal wrote: post #112
dntbnmpls wrote: post #109

I commend their effort, but I believe it should be done on an entire ecosystem level. From assembly to libraries to documents to frameworks. All of it should be turned into Korean, French, Mandarin, Russian, etc. If the governments of major nations decided to do it in a systematic manner along with corporate and university help, it shouldn't be that difficult a task. Create it once and then your entire citizenry can…

Well, why do banks don't port all their code to recent and efficient languages? Pretty much the same here. All the code currently in use is written in English and it will take decades to completely transit from English to French computing (let's take the example of France, since I'm French). Add to that that all classes resources are for English programming languages and that to share knowledge between French, German…

> Pretty much the same here.

It isn't. I'm talking about systematic change, not updating existing code. Like how latin was used to teach everything until nations decided to port religion, science, math, literature, etc to their native languages. Look at how much that changed the world. Rather than a select lucky few having access to knowledge tied to a language, it was ported and made available to all the peoples of a nation.

> Add to that that all classes resources are for English programming languages and that to share knowledge between French, German and Russian programmers English is the only way to go.

The only way to share knowledge is through english? So the french can't translate german and russians can't translate german? What about all the french, german and russians who don't know english? Are they supposed to languish in ignorance?

> Variables are in English because it's the only language that only use the ASCII charset.

Variables, keywords, the standard libraries, runtime, kernel, assembly, etc.

> Only recent languages have the support for Unicode identifiers names.

You make it sound like you can't change it. Like older languages are set in stone.

> English reading comprehension (at the very least) is a mandatory skill to have in our modern world.

This is simply not true as most of the modern world does not have basic english reading comprehension skills. And as I said, this type of thinking is holding back much of the world. And needing to have basic english reading comprehension doesn't mean that computation shouldn't be ported to one's native language.

The selfish few used to keep the masses ignorant through language exclusivity ( latin ). Seems like the same thing is happening here. Maybe it's not selfishness, but laziness or learned helplessness.

I know if I had to learn french in order to code, I wouldn't be a programming. And I'm sure it's the truth for the vast majority of american programmers. I think most people are similar throughout the world and having to learn a foreign language to program is an insurmountable obstacle for many.

Re: South Korea switching their 3.3M PCs to Linux

#128

Post by mistrial9 »

pcr910303 wrote: post #111
boulos wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting! I’m curious why people never moved to say Quark XPress then, but presumably it was “Hancom makes us this super custom thing, and it’s way cheaper than any desktop publishing software”. Is there a lot of diversity in the types of documents people make? (Like, why isn’t this a case of having lots of templates?)

> I’m curious why people never moved to say Quark XPress then, but presumably it was “Hancom makes us this super custom thing, and it’s way cheaper than any desktop publishing software”. First of all, QuarkXPress had shitty, really shitty language support. You might be surprised when you know that most pro apps have really, really poor CJK support — apps like Photoshop currently has really hacky input support bolted…

partial story here -- lots of work was done on CJKV input systems, in each decade, but in many Asian markets (Taiwan, Hong Kong, Vietnam for SURE) piracy was rampant, which does not feed an R&D cycle.

Unicode was standardized, then the utf8 format after that, which *nix took full advantage of, but other legacy software (see paragraph 1) did not evolve in some cases.

Re: South Korea switching their 3.3M PCs to Linux

#130

Post by bananamerica »

newnewpdro wrote: post #4
RoutinePlayer wrote: post #3

Did Germany try this unsuccessfully a few years back?

Munich successfully pivoted to Linux for over a decade, then Microsoft Germany moved their HQ to Munich no doubt greasing many wheels in the process and Munich switched back to Windows a year later IIRC.

Seems like a good strategy. Switch to Linux. Gets Microsoft attention, and returns to the stack of software that you know and love via a bunch of free and cheap licenses while creating a bunch of local jobs and getting hefty kick backs.

With the exception of the hypothetical corruption, I don’t blame them.

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