China to standardize on Ubuntu [LWN.net]

Canonical has announced a collaboration with the Chinese government to create a standard operating system reference architecture based on the Ubuntu distribution. "The initial work of the CCN Joint Lab is focused on the development of an enhanced version of the Ubuntu desktop with features specific to the Chinese market. The new version is called Ubuntu Kylin and the first version will be released in April 2013 in conjunction with Ubuntu’s global release schedule. Future work will extend beyond the desktop to other platforms."

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China to standardize on Ubuntu

Posted Mar 22, 2013 14:06 UTC (Fri) by xxiao (subscriber, #9631) [Link]

Where is Redflag...

China to standardize on Ubuntu

Posted Mar 22, 2013 17:10 UTC (Fri) by renox (subscriber, #23785) [Link]

Yup, if it has the same impact on the Linux world (none) than the Red Flag distribution, who cares?

China to standardize on Ubuntu

Posted Mar 22, 2013 15:02 UTC (Fri) by ovitters (subscriber, #27950) [Link]

I wonder if this implies significant more Linux usage or just combining all the existing usage into one platform.

China to standardize on Ubuntu

Posted Mar 22, 2013 20:12 UTC (Fri) by simosx (subscriber, #24338) [Link]

I hope it implies that they will be selling new computers with Ubuntu Kylin pre-installed. And that government procurement will be heavily oriented towards Ubuntu Kylin.

The current stats of free OS usage in China show very small penetration. I hope it makes Ubuntu Kylin as available in products as we currently see with Android.

China to standardize on Ubuntu

Posted Mar 23, 2013 8:33 UTC (Sat) by paulj (subscriber, #341) [Link]

Highly unlikely. Most Chinese have nothing to do with the government, and will just keep using Windows. Even in the improbable event that the Chinese central government ordered everyone to switch to Windows, it'd be unlikely to happen - they have trouble enforcing even basic traffic laws (or more to the point: getting regional authorities to take traffic laws seriously).

Finally, the Chinese government is NOT a monolithic entity - far far from it. This sounds like one department, in one ministry, in central government, thinks Linux is a good idea and wants to help improve it for Chinese needs.

China to standardize on Ubuntu

Posted Mar 29, 2013 6:14 UTC (Fri) by fandingo (subscriber, #67019) [Link]

I think that you are absolutely correct.

The Chinese government is humongous, and this is just some project in who knows what kind of department.

The apparent department is the China Software and Integrated Chip Promotions Centre (CSIP). I cannot find a single link on Google about this organization that is not connected with the Canonical announcement.

This isn't going anywhere.

China to standardize on Ubuntu

Posted Mar 22, 2013 17:31 UTC (Fri) by simosx (subscriber, #24338) [Link]

I believe at least this means much better driver support for all those computers that originate from China. Amazing development!

China to standardize on Ubuntu

Posted Mar 22, 2013 19:04 UTC (Fri) by JoeBuck (subscriber, #2330) [Link]

Doubt it. They may just want to eliminate the threat of NSA-inserted back doors to Windows. They could take the Ubuntu source plus any mods they want to make, and build it from source themselves (and if they are paranoid they can also verify that the Thompson hack is not present). They won't necessarily contribute back all the code they develop, especially if it's in userland. That way they can insert their own back doors (like a keylogger in the Chinese language input method code).

China to standardize on Ubuntu

Posted Mar 22, 2013 20:09 UTC (Fri) by simosx (subscriber, #24338) [Link]

I think it would be silly for the part of China to fork the Ubuntu code and develop independently. Simply because they are doing this with Canonical, and forking the code would simply kill any advantages of free software.

We tend to bad-mouth China just because they are our economic competitors, however talking about key-loggers on free software and specifically the input method (already exists, GPL license) is an overstretch.

China to standardize on Ubuntu

Posted Mar 23, 2013 16:49 UTC (Sat) by dmitrij.ledkov (subscriber, #63320) [Link]

Ubuntu Kylin is official flavour and is built solely using the ubuntu archive, same as used to build ubuntu desktop/server editions and other flavours. Kylin images are now generated in the canonical datacenter along the rest of the images. No outside code is allowed. At the moment many features of Kylin images target desktop market and better l10n (integration with local music stores, data providers, optimizing defaults, etc) See Kylin launchpad blueprints for more details.

Quite a few things to improve for the desktop Linux in China

Posted Mar 23, 2013 12:04 UTC (Sat) by pieleric (guest, #51846) [Link]

That should be good news to the desktop Linux (in general). Anyone who's tried to use Linux from a Chinese perspective knows how much biased are the distributions towards European/American users. In 10 years, it has improved a _lot_, but there are still quite a few obstacles that make Linux less user-friendly to anyone not European or American.

The article mentions a few of a the problems. For example the default online services are quite different (search engine, weather forecast, email provider, IM, music store, online storage...). I personally hope it will lead to support for QQ (the main IM service in China) on Linux :-)

There are other improvement to Linux that I think could really help its adoption in China.
I wish there could be an easy way to show a date in either the Gregorian calendar or the Chinese calendar. And, while the default input method now works pretty well (eg: almost every program work with iBus), alternative methods are still far from working correctly (eg: Tegaki can barely recognize any complex character drawn).

Although at first it might seems that China should be very welcoming to an OS independent from a US company, I think the market is much _harder_ to change than in US or Europe. There are two mains reasons. First, Linux doesn't have any price advantage (Windows is still mostly "free"). In addition, A large part of the typical Linux first-adopters (aka young technophiles) dream of doing like their American big brothers: getting an Apple laptop, or a fancy Windows 8 tablet.

I wish all the best for Ubuntu in China. I'm quite hopeful they can manage to improve at least a bit the OS ecosystem there, and looking forward to the improvements they will bring to the F/OSS community :-)

China to standardize on Ubuntu

Posted Mar 23, 2013 16:01 UTC (Sat) by hadrons123 (guest, #72126) [Link]

Did anyone think if ubuntu will survive that long for a Govt to depend on.
I have not seen the financial numbers of ubuntu. I don't expect the chinese would pay for ubuntu development either, considering they pirate everything.

The best bet would have been Debian, Since no one could influence Debian and its a good thing for any Govt.

China to standardize on Ubuntu

Posted Mar 23, 2013 17:36 UTC (Sat) by mpr22 (subscriber, #60784) [Link]

Since no one could influence Debian

That, to the extent it's true, seems to be a reason why the PRC would choose something else.

China to standardize on Ubuntu

Posted Mar 24, 2013 3:09 UTC (Sun) by HenrikH (guest, #31152) [Link]

Of course they will pay, why else would Ubuntu do this? While the average Chinese would rather pirate Windows, the Chinese Government have other priorities besides price of the software.

China to standardize on Ubuntu

Posted Mar 24, 2013 3:36 UTC (Sun) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link]

They might pay to do the modifications but probably the Chinese developers will be hired to do it since it is bound to be more economically beneficial to them. Ubuntu might simply be a reasonably modern base for them to start with. It doesn't say anything about their willingness to pay a vendor from a different country. I doubt they want to add that kind of dependency.