MII: Chinese Government To Back Linux Development
MII (Ministry of Information Industry) Vice Minister
Gou Zhongwen made it official that the Chinese government
would give formal development support to Linux. He said,
in a speech posted on the MII website, that this was necessary
because Linux needed government support in order to get
market traction.
China's MII often plays a lead role in defining technical
solutions, standards and policy, which are then adopted
nationwide. Lately, it has shown interest in pushing Chinese
native-developed standards, after they become standards
in China, into global markets as new standards. For some
less-developed markets, the support of the Chinese government-backed
standard means another choice for them
Linux is an open-source operating system software, which
allows software developers full access to change and modify
the underlying source code. The license for Linux requires
that developers make all changes made to the software
source code freely available to anyone who wants it. This
is in contrast to most commercial software, which does
not allow developers to view or modify the source code.
So far, Linux has been most popular as a server operating
system; it has been less successful on the client side,
where Microsoft's Windows continues to be the leader.
But, Linux has continued to pick up steam, and there has
been some consolidation among Linux distributors. IBM
has been pushing the value of Linux and Linux applications,
and yesterday, Novell, formerly a networking software
leader, purchased SuSE Linux of Germany, which owns one
of the Linux distributions.
In China, the most popular version of Linux is Red Flag
Linux, which has received considerable support from the
government, and is the standard operating system on government
computers. Vice Minister Gou's statement seems to indicate
that the government wants wider adoption of Linux as a
commercial software operating system, and would like to
see more applications written for the Linux operating
system. Although specifics were not mentioned, his statement
indicates that the government is open to providing funding
for software companies which meet certain criteria.
In a short time, China has turned into a major development
and production battleground between Microsoft and Linux.
Microsoft Research's head Rick Rashid recently announced
that the company's global research center in Beijing would
be adding more developers to its staff in the coming year.
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