Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

South Korea switching their 3.3M PCs to Linux

fosslinux.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

161–170 of 209 posts

Re: South Korea switching their 3.3M PCs to Linux

#161

Post by jimmydorry »

zhaoweny wrote: post #139
ThinkBeat wrote: post #89

It will be interesting to see how it will work. If they have been Windows for so long and all the way up to Windows 7, they must have a lot of software and more interestingly hardware that Win7 manages to get working. All sorts of bits and bobs hardware will potentially make trouble. I also see in the article: "The South Korean government also plans to implement a Desktop as a Service (DaaS) that uses a virtual PC en…

But when I was working daily via a DaaS platform, it's not a great experience for software development. Input latency is high enough to be noticed, the virtual desktop can not put under load (e.g. using a IDE for C++ other than Source Insight). My company had to switch back to desktop PC for most developers.

Yep, my experience exactly too.

Re: South Korea switching their 3.3M PCs to Linux

#162

Post by honestoHeminway »

I wonder if the open source world could saddle on - what is obviously just a price lowering attempt. Grow something like the mozilla foundation, just from the attempts to reign license costs in- which then implements a directx compatible gfx api layer and a comon driver pool - that really always works.

Re: South Korea switching their 3.3M PCs to Linux

#163

Post by honestoHeminway »

hkmurakami wrote: post #83
Jedd wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. I can see how this would ensure domestic success, but how does that translate to 'top global firm' status unless the products / features & pricing are significantly superior?

It basically gives domestic firms breathing room to survive and grow, versus being suffocated by the currently superior products or foreign firms. The hope then is that in the future, with a stronger financial footing, these firms' products will improve to be truly competitive with those of the global competitors. At least in hardware/manufacturing, both South Korea and China have done this with great success thus fa…

Europe, all in market-liberal spirits, has not done this. And it shows.

Re: South Korea switching their 3.3M PCs to Linux

#164

Post by jimmydorry »

yongjik wrote: post #23
microcolonel wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Last time they trusted Microsoft, they got their entire country stuck with ActiveX; that said, possibly a bit of column A, a bit of column B.

It's not exactly SK trusted Microsoft. Rather, some idiots had this brilliant idea that if you create a piece of code that hooks directly into Windows kernel and messes around with device drivers, your users will be secure, because how would those evil hackers run keyloggers when your security plugin already hijacked keyboard events. So far so good, but then how do you disseminate this wonderful piece of security tec…

Well... going back further, SK was forced to do something when the US banned all crypto export above 48bit or something stupid. SK wanted 128bit and the only way they could do that was via ActiveX. A few weeks later and every bank and eStore was using the Korean rolled crypto instead of the weaksauce crypto that the browser / OS was rolled out with.

You can trace all of this directly back to the combination of Microsoft and the US Government. Microsoft should have pushed back on the government's stupid demand or educated them on why it was stupid, and the government shouldn't have made that demand in the first place.

Re: South Korea switching their 3.3M PCs to Linux

#165

Post by totorovirus »

pcr910303 wrote: post #25

South Korean here, explanation for some context: South Korea has a deep legacy of MS-DOS/Windows, and it’s reliance of Microsoft’s OS is very high. This mostly is due to two reasons: the high use of the unique word processor(Hangul Word Processor) and the legacy ActiveX plugins used for cryptography when banking. In the 90s, multiple internet service providers used ActiveX technology (for people who doesn’t know, it’…

Tmax is basically a refugee camp for Ph.D dropouts. I won't criticize much if they were doing their job right. But they are not. They hire engineers from non CS majors from top engineering colleges to impress government officials to invest tax money to their firm.

Re: South Korea switching their 3.3M PCs to Linux

#166

Post by AnthonyMouse »

rrdharan wrote: post #99
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which is, of course, the canonical example of why all governments should do it. The project didn't fail, it was on pace to succeed, which made Microsoft swoop in and basically bribe them to switch back. The lesson being, switch to Linux. Either you'll switch and save money, or Microsoft will bribe you not to and you'll save money.

That only makes sense if the total bribe outweighs the investment in building the credible alternative.

> That only makes sense if the total bribe outweighs the investment in building the credible alternative.

It only makes sense to take the bribe in that case. It always makes sense to prepare for the switch, because if they won't bribe you enough to stop then you can always actually do the switch, which is still better than the status quo.

Re: South Korea switching their 3.3M PCs to Linux

#167

Post by StreamBright »

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…

Out of curiosity: why is it dumb to build a kernel from scratch? There are several such projects on Github with decent progress. Many of them are featured on HN time to time. Google also thinks that writing a new kernel is a great idea. I share their vision in this particular matter. We need a new kernel that was designed and implemented taking into consideration the last dew decades worth os research, especially into security and reliability.

Re: South Korea switching their 3.3M PCs to Linux

#168

Post by roenxi »

erklik wrote: post #141
qilo wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess the parent poster meant that despite doing the same in Australia, this didn't produce global companies like Samsung, Hyundai, LG, etc.

and I think that's the question, which companies did Australia do that with? I can't ocme up with any.

Australia has a smaller population, very high wages and a technology-phobic government with policies that have filtered all investment into the property market for decades - rather than letting investment go into high-risk-high-reward projects. Not much to report on the megacorp front.

There are major Australian companies out there; the Atlassians, BHPs and CSL's of the world. They aren't Samsung by any stretch.

Re: South Korea switching their 3.3M PCs to Linux

#170

Post by rswail »

erklik wrote: post #141
qilo wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess the parent poster meant that despite doing the same in Australia, this didn't produce global companies like Samsung, Hyundai, LG, etc.

and I think that's the question, which companies did Australia do that with? I can't ocme up with any.

Back in the 70s and 80s there were many tariffs that were directly related to the manufacturing in Australia.

However, our tariffs were more about protecting jobs than protecting and developing industries. Australia has always been a "taker" when it comes to investment and we are shite at developing our own industries that aren't purely primary (ie extractive like mining or agricultural).

We have some companies today that are global but have nothing to do with tariffs. Atlassian in software, some mining related engineering and services companies.

There are others like CSL which was spun out of government, Brambles/CHEP that again, was spun out of government (CHEP stood for Commonwealth Handling Equipment Pool in WW2).

But our governments are terrible at promoting secondary industry or supporting them. Our R&D grants are complicated and are focused on compliance, not on results.

Australia is the "lucky country" but the full quote is:

"Australia is a lucky country run mainly by second rate people who share its luck. It lives on other people's ideas, and, although its ordinary people are adaptable, most of its leaders (in all fields) so lack curiosity about the events that surround them that they are often taken by surprise."

Post reply on HN