I thought this was funny :o)

Thursday January 6, 2:01 am Eastern Time

China to ban government use of Windows - paper

BEIJING, Jan 6 (Reuters) - China will ban use of Microsoft Corp's new Windows 2000 operating system throughout the government in a bid to support indigenous software, an official newspaper reported in editions available on Thursday.

Officials at several government ministries said they were unaware of such a policy, which the Yangcheng Evening News said would save the government billions of dollars.

``The country's important government ministries will not permit the use of Microsoft Windows 2000 on their computers,'' the newspaper quoted officials as saying.

The ministries would instead use ``Red Flag - Linux,'' a new software platform developed by Chinese researchers and based on upstart operating system Linux, the newspaper quoted the officials as saying.

Weaning China away from reliance upon Microsoft software would be the Information Age equivalent of China's invention of the atomic bomb and launch of its first ballistic missile and the satellite, it said.

``Maintaining independence and keeping the initiative over our own operating system will be the 'Two Bombs and Satellite' of the new era,'' it quoted the officials as saying.

Windows is still far and away the dominant operating system for personal computers in China. While piracy is rampant -- reaching a rate of more than 90 percent by some estimates -- the Chinese government has said it uses legally registered copies.

Windows 2000, designed to replace Microsoft's popular business-oriented Windows NT operating system, is scheduled to hit markets in China in the first half of this year.

-- Brian (imager@home.com), January 06, 2000

Answers

They developed Linux the same way they developed nuclear weapons.

-- Ron Schwarz (rs@clubvb.com.delete.this), January 06, 2000.

Now, now, I'm sure they'll contribute all of their Red Flag enhancements back to the kernel. ;)

-- Servant (public_service@yahoo.com), January 06, 2000.

Billy-boy must be really upset. He was counting on China to make him the world's first trillionaire.

Could this be the break that many of us have been looking for? Maybe TPTB in China may not willingly give up their kernel enhancements, but they will get out anyway. And if Linux is really open source, then many people will be able to look at it for robustness and viruses, etc.

-- A (A@AisA.com), January 06, 2000.

It is unlikely that any government which adopts an operating system and is able to make modifications will release those modifications back into the main stream effort. So what?

The implications are:

1) They will save (perhaps) billions of dollars, which would have flowed to the west.

2) They will know what is in the OS and why it is there. No special keys with debatable importance will exist.

3) Security enhancements made by the government will remain known only to the government.

4) They will have a better (more robust, no blue screen) operating system with much better performance.

5) They will benefit from the open source software movement and can look at the source code of any application for possible security issues.

6) They will neatly sidestep licensing issues.

7) My personal favorite, they will be contribuiting to the demise of an outdated, bloated, pig of an operating system.

-- Michael Erskine (Osiris@urbanna.net), January 06, 2000.

A billion Chinese making kernel enhancements? As if.

Who knows, maybe they'll work up a competing desktop product for export: "Happy Golden Dragon Operating System" ... heaven help us if they type the documentation in the same lingo that came with my VCR. ;)

-- Just (anotherbuckeye@columbus.org), January 06, 2000.

link please? I have searched a bit on some news sites and do not find this article.

It *does* seem a bit baiting.... troll?

-- Programmer Farmer (LinksAre@proof.com), January 06, 2000.

Just; Not a billion, the cream of the crop of a population of something like two or three billion. Reckon they will be able to find a few geniuses in that population? "As if" as if indeed. You betcha is more like it.

No the documentation will be written in the one of the oldest recorded written languages. Did you realize that with neural networks and pattern matching the Chinese don't have OCR's they have OWR's (optical WORD readers). That is because every character is a WORD, broken down it is actually multiple words from a limited vocabulary called "radicals". Multiple characters are combined to form complex concepts. The Chinese have a long history of civilization, which civilization was brought down, principally by colonization and opium addiction of the people... due in large part to the activities of the "yankee traders" and the British Empire. Had they not been thus tossed to the ground back at the turn of the century, they might be more powerfull than the US today. They have great potential and great natural resources of their own.

Don't under estimate the Chinese, there are a LOT of them. They have a very healthy work ethic, inspite of having been under the thumb of communism for about fifty years. They have a strong healthy sense of honor, dignity, and integrity.

China is the number one threat to the US today and the number one hope for the US tomorrow. It will be interesting to see how their role plays out over the next quater century, but they don't seem to be making many strategic mistakes.

-- Michael Erskine (Osiris@urbanna.net), January 06, 2000.

Ok, I found a link. SOrry for posting rashly.

http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/nm/20000106/tc/china_microsoft_1.html

-- Programmer Farmer (no@where.org), January 06, 2000.

Outstanding...way to go REDS, way to go!

Look...there is a lot of shareware out there, much of it written to be DOS compatible. Now rumors, or worse, have it that Windoze 2000 won't support DOS.

Worse, what about that 'NSAKEY' literal that some security firm found in Win NT last year??? Windoze 2000 is rumored to be a repackage of Win NT. How can the Forbidden City prevent Penetration by the Puzzle Palace if they don't possess the source code?? Backdoors, anyone??

I am installing a hard drive next week to be used exclusively by Linux. My concerns are less NSA related than the REDS. Simply put, there exists now a large body of Freeware and Shareware for both DOS and Unix (therefore Linux), and yet Microsoft can make the use of that DOS software effectively dissappear on a corporate whim.

Thanks, but NO thanks!!

-- K. Stevens (kstevens@ It ALL went away six days ago .com), January 06, 2000.

I think it's becauseof the _NSAkey

-- Hokie (Hokie_@hotmail.com), January 06, 2000.

I have Microsoft and I hate and despise it. Never again--even if it means drawing in the dirt with a sharp stick.

-- gilda (jess@listbot.com), January 06, 2000.

I got called a troll :o) Possibly the only post ever with no hot link from me. It was a pretty good call.

But I closed the story window before getting the link and didn't consider it an issue.

Kind of makes you wonder what kind of problems the Chinese .gov is having with windoze over there eh?

-- Brian (imager@home.com), January 06, 2000.

Yeah utter confusion, kinda like chinatown eh Brian?

Good catch. :)

-- Will (righthere@home.now), January 07, 2000.

"Billy-boy must be really upset. He was counting on China to make him the world's first trillionaire."

Think that one through again.

Then tell me how the sale of *one* copy to that nation of pirates would make him a trillionaire.

-- Ron Schwarz (rs@clubvb.com.delete.this), January 07, 2000.

Ron -- Billy Boy has considered a registration scheme of some sort (no, I don't have details) to prevent piracy.

That could be one reason Intel (part of the WinTel alliance) has put the remote readable/accessible serial numbers in the Pentium III chipsets.

-- A (A@AisA.com), January 07, 2000.

1. Sun has had those (CPU IDs) for years. Where's the outrage?

2. Previous implementations of that registration scheme were only enabled for North American distributions. Hard to expect someone in BFE to do an registration when he can't even call across town, eh?

-- Ron Schwarz (rs@clubvb.com.delete.this), January 08, 2000.