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South Korea switching their 3.3M PCs to Linux

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Re: South Korea switching their 3.3M PCs to Linux

#171

Post by rswail »

roenxi wrote: post #168
erklik wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Australia has second rate government and second rate management. We're good at digging up dirt and shipping it, or ploughing dirt and shipping it in the form of food.

Our management and government are incredibly risk-averse and we follow trends and popular management theories instead of creating them.

Re: South Korea switching their 3.3M PCs to Linux

#172

Post by lmm »

StreamBright wrote: post #167
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 int…

It's pretty dumb for a consumer OS intended to run on commodity PCs, because the hard part is device drivers for all the hardware out there, and existing kernel projects are way ahead of you on that one. It might make sense in an environment where you have much more control over your hardware platform.

Re: South Korea switching their 3.3M PCs to Linux

#173

Post by dgellow »

throwaway1777 wrote: post #169

No one mentioned video games? An extremely high percentage of South Koreans play video games and they have many of the top competitive players and esports leagues. I find it hard to believe these will transition to Linux any time soon.

The article is about South Korea government PCs.

Re: South Korea switching their 3.3M PCs to Linux

#174

Post by dgellow »

rocky1138 wrote: post #54

Inaccurate headline. They're doing a pilot project to see if they like it. This is where a lot of these "X Government Switches To Linux!" projects fall apart. Wake me up when they actually do it.

It's a quite common way to negotiate lower licenses fees.

Re: South Korea switching their 3.3M PCs to Linux

#175

Post by guidedlight »

dgellow wrote: post #174
rocky1138 wrote: post #54

Inaccurate headline. They're doing a pilot project to see if they like it. This is where a lot of these "X Government Switches To Linux!" projects fall apart. Wake me up when they actually do it.

It's a quite common way to negotiate lower licenses fees.

Bingo. I've seen this strategy time and time again.

It's part of the reason Microsoft is playing to their strength with Office 365, it's almost impossible to replace at this point.

Re: South Korea switching their 3.3M PCs to Linux

#176

Post by shim__ »

Jedd wrote: post #144
stirlo wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Here in Australia we've done it for decades, but with no global success. Examples? We have some of the most open markets in the world. We’re one of the only countries the US has a trade surplus with...

> Examples? We have some of the most open markets in the world. We’re one of the only countries the US has a trade surplus with... I guess the obvious example would be the car industry - mostly cars were just assembled in Australia in the most recent past, but previously there were some designed and built. Tariffs were applied to protect that industry (nominally the jobs associated with same) but despite the Australi…

Australia has it pretty hard be competitive exporting industrial goods since the supply chain is mostly overseas and the domestic market is small, which means most things will gehave to be exported again. All this results in high shipping costs and latency in addition to being a high wage country.

Re: South Korea switching their 3.3M PCs to Linux

#177

Post by threatofrain »

totorovirus wrote: post #133
pcr910303 wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 bi…

You know how crucial software gains reliability through large user community. I don't want to fall into some random bs while using their 'usable' DB. condolence to programmers involved to government projects which will enforce them to use 'usable' piece of framework from domestic firm.

If at some point a nationally important company wishes to pivot or at least threaten to pivot on some important tech, their statements will carry less weight unless they've already been developing the tech with some visible gusto. I think there is some strategic value to holding something like Bing, assuming its costs are reasonable.

Re: South Korea switching their 3.3M PCs to Linux

#178

Post by oblio »

pcr910303 wrote: post #105
oblio wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you telling me no one in South Korea uses Photoshop, InDesign, professional video editing software or generally any kind of pro software that doesn't run on Linux?

> no one in South Korea uses Photoshop, InDesign, professional video editing software or generally any kind of pro software that doesn't run on Linux Of course not! :-) I don’t run Linux myself for these reasons... but the government agency PCs has no requirement to run these. The officials shouldn’t run useless programs on work, right? :-)

You mean that no one in the South Korean government does any kind of professional photo editing (or any other kind of high level professional desktop work)? It could make sense if they outsource all of that. But I doubt that out of millions of people, 100% are just low level clerks typing in forms receive from the public.

Re: South Korea switching their 3.3M PCs to Linux

#179

Post by cm2187 »

dx034 wrote: post #160
rocky1138 wrote: post #54

Inaccurate headline. They're doing a pilot project to see if they like it. This is where a lot of these "X Government Switches To Linux!" projects fall apart. Wake me up when they actually do it.

And in the end it's not Windows that governments and companies need, it's Office. Windows is fairly easy to replace for a lot of jobs nowadays. But working without MS Office is extremely difficult. It's basically impossible and certainly not worth it ensuring that all spreadsheets used will still work with alternatives, it also makes communication with other governments or companies much harder. That's where Microsof…

On the OS not being critical, I think that might be the case in 10 years, but large companies still have loads of internal desktop applications that haven’t moved to the web yet.

But agree with your point on Office, there are many large organisations which are literally running on Excel, and which IT budget would have to grow 10 times if they were to replace all these excel based processes.

And I must say that I haven’t seen any good alternative to Excel for a non programmer to set up a custom set of calculations, or deal with data. I am trying to get more people to learn SQL in my company, which shouldn’t be too difficult. But you are not going to write a company valuation model in SQL. And I had poor results at getting non programmers to pick up coding (I offered 1 week external in class courses, lots of people volunteered but 80% did not really do anything with it).

Re: South Korea switching their 3.3M PCs to Linux

#180

Post by improbable22 »

rswail wrote: post #171
roenxi wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Australia has second rate government and second rate management. We're good at digging up dirt and shipping it, or ploughing dirt and shipping it in the form of food. Our management and government are incredibly risk-averse and we follow trends and popular management theories instead of creating them.

No insight into Australian management, but having lots of valuable dirt to dig up does make it much harder to get going in other lines of business.

I think this is called "dutch disease" by economists: the high wages paid by the dirt-digging (early on) mean that you can't simultaneously be competitive in metal-bashing, which makes it hard to develop other industries.

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