Ubuntu tapped by China for national operating system • Hacker News Board

Re: Ubuntu tapped by China for national operating system

#71

Post by douglasisshiny » Fri, Mar 22, 2013, 5:01 PM UTC

coldtea wrote: post #60

staticfish wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Absolutely. * Tiananmen square. Murders against any form of civil disobedience. * Secret and non-secret alliances with North Korea. * Occasional acts of aggression on Japan. * Great firewall, general suppression of information from citizens. * Massive amounts of political corruption. * Human rights violations aplenty. * Causing an environmental catastrophe. Fucking up the entire planet in the process. * Tibet, Taiwan…

> Tiananmen square. Murders against any form of civil disobedience. Kent state shootings. And lots of similar actions, from the Wounded Knee incident to the Wako siege. > Secret and non-secret alliances with North Korea. Secret and non-secret alliances with Pinochet, Videla, Saudi Arabia and pretty much every corrupted government and dictatorship on earth. > Occasional acts of aggression on Japan. Constant acts of ag…

This is your defense in the 'China is not repressive' argument?

Re: Ubuntu tapped by China for national operating system

#72

Post by pm90 » Fri, Mar 22, 2013, 5:07 PM UTC

staticfish wrote: post #65

coldtea wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Yeah, Britain hasn't been repressive in this sense for at least the last ~250 years 250 years? They had colonies all over the world until merely 50 years ago. Doing stuff from direct slavery to mass executions, to fighting natives asking for freedom with submachine guns. And they still interfere in their ex-colonies politics (not to mention being the US lackeys and partners in all kinds of invasions). They even che…

There is no comparison to China's Taiwan: "That should be China's attitude". Also Tibet. Clearly not a Chinese country but of course that doesn't stop them.

It's hard for people who don't know about the history of China (sorry staticfish for making this assumption) to understand why it behaves the way it does now. The century of humiliation and the civil war (not to mention Japanese invasion) has left its mark on the Chinese psyche. The one thing they learned from all that mess was that China had to be 'one', dissidence could not be allowed; otherwise there would be constant bickering and infighting. Although surely they're repressive, there's a reason for that which is not pure malice and evil

Re: Ubuntu tapped by China for national operating system

#73

Post by kyllo » Fri, Mar 22, 2013, 5:14 PM UTC

blisterpeanuts wrote: post #52

kyllo wrote: post #22

This is a great idea. Now one and a half billion Chinese can get their free OS'es completely legally instead of using pirated, possibly malware-tainted copies of Windows XP. And Microsoft can stop crying about the hypothetical lost revenue due to piracy when everyone switches to a better, free product. Not that they couldn't switch before, but perhaps the official government endorsement of Ubuntu will jump-start the…

This assumes that the new OS will be better than WinXP/Win7/Win8. (Well, let's just not talk about Win8.) If "better" means more compatible with existing apps, more stable, easier to use, more standard... not sure you can make an argument for that. Maybe in a few years when the desktop is just a portal for web apps. Plus... China's currently only 1.34 billion. They've got a ways to go to get to 1.5B.

I was rounding off, but in reality they might never reach 1.5 billion thanks to their falling birth rate.

In order for an OS to get adopted by Chinese users, it has to easily run the applications that Chinese users use. Period.

That is exactly what they are trying to make happen. The article says they are going to bundle versions of popular Chinese applications (think QQ, Weibo clients) with the distro.

This is why OS X doesn't work for China--it doesn't run enough Chinese applications. Canonical is apparently working with some Chinese government ministry to fix that issue ahead of time.

A potential issue, though, will be the thousands of Chinese websites that use ActiveX plugins and therefore cannot run on anything other than IE in Windows.

South Korea has the same problem of browser lock-in, only much worse because they actually passed a law saying that all online monetary transactions in the country have to use a specific ActiveX encryption plugin.

Microsoft already killed ActiveX (and Silverlight) but its legacy is that web developers all over East Asia have an enormous technical debt, and users remain locked in until they settle it.

Re: Ubuntu tapped by China for national operating system

#74

Post by kyllo » Fri, Mar 22, 2013, 5:19 PM UTC

cheapsteak wrote: post #49

w1ntermute wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It has nothing to do with the Chinese international students being bright (which they generally are) or malleable (which they're not - they're just studying machines). It has to do with the fact that there are a ton of Chinese websites that only work in IE.

That is a good point, although I think it's more of Windows-only programs like PPS, a TV and movie streaming app that fills the Netflix void, except it's free so everyone and their mother uses it

Desktop programs are an issue, but they can be ported.

The biggest problem is all the websites that serve ActiveX plugins. Web apps are supposed to be platform-independent, that's one of their biggest advantages, but Microsoft sabotaged that with ActiveX. Microsoft did a tremendous amount of harm to internet users by producing so much platform-dependent web software.

Re: Ubuntu tapped by China for national operating system

#75

Post by [deleted] » Fri, Mar 22, 2013, 5:27 PM UTC

coldtea wrote: post #37

I take offense with the following part of the article: "Other repressive nations that have developed local versions of Linux include North Korea, which built the KDE-based Red Star OS to help wean it as a nation off of an unfortunate dependence on Windows made by the capitalists over at Microsoft." China is a "repressive nation"? Says who? Britain, the leader in colonialist aggressions, mass slavery and blatant inter…

[deleted]

Re: Ubuntu tapped by China for national operating system

#76

Post by disgruntledphd2 » Fri, Mar 22, 2013, 5:52 PM UTC

staticfish wrote: post #63

coldtea wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Tiananmen square. Murders against any form of civil disobedience. Kent state shootings. And lots of similar actions, from the Wounded Knee incident to the Wako siege. > Secret and non-secret alliances with North Korea. Secret and non-secret alliances with Pinochet, Videla, Saudi Arabia and pretty much every corrupted government and dictatorship on earth. > Occasional acts of aggression on Japan. Constant acts of ag…

Wait, I'm British. You were talking about Britain. Why did we suddenly switch to the USA? Also, half of your rebuttals are inaccurate and half are not comparable in the slightest. No, there is no western version of the horrors of "Tank Man". A lot of the Chinese i've spoken to do not even know this happened, and the other half refuse to see it as a problem. You're a textbook example. The USA isn't the greatest countr…

Yes, you make some good points. Its not that long ago that you couldn't see further than 100 metres in London though, which last time I checked was part of Britain (different and all as it is from the rest of the island).

I suppose the issue is that most major powers do a lot of shady stuff, and it can be difficult for any of us to think objectively on these matters. With regard to famine and poverty, it wasn't all that long ago that people starved in the islands of Great Britain and Ireland while the smaller island was still a net food exporter.

I don't think that Britain is particularly repressive right now (except for all the CCTV's) while I do think China is, but it takes a complete ignorance of history not to realise that once upon a time, these roles were reversed.

Also, hooray for Ubuntu!

Re: Ubuntu tapped by China for national operating system

#77

Post by bediger4000 » Fri, Mar 22, 2013, 5:56 PM UTC

tomrod wrote: post #23

I thought Linux avoids malware by both unpopularity and security features? If it suddenly has a global market share of 20%, what then?

We get to see a an interesting experiment, that was previously only a thought-experiment. The classic "market share" argument gets put to the test: "Windows only attracts malware because Windows runs on the most computers."

If Microsoft and Windows stalwarts believe in that strongly enough, they should be in favor of seeing PRC adopt Linux.

Re: Ubuntu tapped by China for national operating system

#78

Post by riobard » Fri, Mar 22, 2013, 6:02 PM UTC

Seriously? NUDT (National University of Defense Technology) still names it Kylin? How shameless… A little bit of the old story for those who don't know:

Around 2001~2002, NUDT, Lenovo Group, and a few other organizations took a government grant of 70 million RMB and claimed to independently created a new operating system with their own copyright/IP for defense use called Galaxy Kylin.

In 2006, an analysis [1] of the “new” OS revealed that Kylin was most likely a fork of FreeBSD, which voided the previous independent creation and copyright/IP claims. Worse, they did not follow FreeBSD license when distributing the software.

When the scandal was published and went crazy in the media the same year, another interesting incident happened: access to www.freebsd.org was blocked from mainland China. In fact, the term “FreeBSD” became a sensitive keyword that if you mention it anywhere on any page, your connection will be cut-off and subsequently blocked, not just www.freebsd.org [2]. Of course there was no official statement regarding the connection between the two (what do you expect anyway…), given the deep involvement of NUDT and the Great Firewall, one has to wonder…

Looks like they learned something from that scandal and this time they acknowledged the adoption of Ubuntu/Linux upfront. Let's see what will happen next.

[1]: http://www.dancefire.org/article/Kernel_Similarity_Analysis.... (in Simplified Chinese)

[2]: http://www.williamlong.info/archives/406.html (in Simplified Chinese)

Re: Ubuntu tapped by China for national operating system

#79

Post by sukuriant » Fri, Mar 22, 2013, 6:21 PM UTC

kyllo wrote: post #74

cheapsteak wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is a good point, although I think it's more of Windows-only programs like PPS, a TV and movie streaming app that fills the Netflix void, except it's free so everyone and their mother uses it

Desktop programs are an issue, but they can be ported. The biggest problem is all the websites that serve ActiveX plugins. Web apps are supposed to be platform-independent, that's one of their biggest advantages, but Microsoft sabotaged that with ActiveX. Microsoft did a tremendous amount of harm to internet users by producing so much platform-dependent web software.

Did you really just say that it's easier to write a large number of windows-only programs than it is to either:

   a) fix the websites that have ActiveX dependencies
   b) modify a single web-browser to support ActiveX like IE6 used to

If true, ... wow.

Re: Ubuntu tapped by China for national operating system

#80

Post by gtr32x » Fri, Mar 22, 2013, 6:23 PM UTC

mtgx wrote: post #54

staticfish wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Absolutely. * Tiananmen square. Murders against any form of civil disobedience. * Secret and non-secret alliances with North Korea. * Occasional acts of aggression on Japan. * Great firewall, general suppression of information from citizens. * Massive amounts of political corruption. * Human rights violations aplenty. * Causing an environmental catastrophe. Fucking up the entire planet in the process. * Tibet, Taiwan…

Unfortunately, I think most Chinese living there have bought the government's argument that if any of the stuff you mentioned above would not exist, it would "disrupt" the "unity" of their society. So everyone must stay in line for the "greater good", even if violent action is necessary against some individuals. What's the scariest thing in such situations is not one tyrant or another. If only that was the case, it w…

Hmmm, how about we try to stay together so China will not be broken apart by the West like the former Soviet Union? Yes, maybe the average citizens don't necessarily think this way and they are brainwashed by the government. But it's not like we don't understand the government has bad deeds. We think to ourselves, what more can we do to make better if we were to reign China instead of the communist party? Yes they are the ones that are corrupted, and they are also the one that did the Tiananmen massacre, no need to flat out deny that. But it's ok, they are the one that also made China stronger. Don't argue saying that but all those things we are ok with are wrong on principle, when US was becoming stronger or any other country for that matter, did they do nothing wrong? Don't get me wrong though, from individual levels, I do not agree with the government's doing. However, from a national and cultural level, the party's interest is to see China grow stronger so they have more power, while we don't necessarily want to see them having more power, but we are on the same line of thinking that we want to see China stronger. Even though they may do things that harm individuality in process, I'll refrain from speaking for all of Chinese population, but at least I buy it.