Raising the Red Flag

Given a combination of Chinese
demographics and government encouragement, that may well be the
case.

Red Flag
Linux first appeared in
August
1999, when it was created by the
Institute of Software at
the Chinese
Academy of Sciences. Financial help came from
government-owned Shanghai NewMargin Venture Capital. In March 2001,
Bloomberg
News reported that CCIDNET Investment, a VC arm of the
Ministry of Information Industry, had become Red Flag's second
largest shareholder.The same Bloomberg report said the purpose of Red Flag was to
reduce domination of the Chinese computer market by Microsoft's
Windows operating systems. The best way to do that, was to require
"full transparency in terms of underlying code", said Matei
Mihalca, Head of Internet Research, Asia-Pacific at Merrill-Lynch.
(Interesting noun, transparency. A little
different than "open" and "free". I have a feeling we'll be hearing
more of it.)Red Flag looks serious. The Chinese government doesn't just
bristle at Microsoft's near-absolute market share of PC operating
systems sold in China. It's as uncomfortable with operating systems
that are opaque to the core. As a matter of routine, it is the
custom of Customs to ask "what's in there?" And the routine answer
from Microsoft is "none of your business." To a government
concerned with security, that isn't always an acceptable
answer.

So Microsoft doesn't only have a "piracy" problem in China,
it has a transparency problem, as well as a determined foe on the
part of the government's own Linux distro. It was a rather smooth
chess move by the Chinese government to avoid copyright
infringement and "software piracy" issues by simply promoting an
operating system that obviates the issues.And there is nothing to stop the government from being a
customer of itself. According to
Gartner,
on December 28, 2001, the Beijing municipal government gave
contracts to six local vendors and rejected the seventh. One of the
six was Red Flag. The rejected seventh was Microsoft.Red Flag is being aggressive too. It came out with an
integrated desktop office suite called Chinese 2000. It
signed
a deal with Trolltech to create an embedded Linux platform
that should be nontrivial, given the quantity of manufacturing
going on in China. It
joined
the GNOME Foundation with the intent to localize GNOME for the
Chinese population (of just 1.2 billion people). It has
training
and certification programs. It has a
pile
of products.As for Linux on the Desktop, it isn't still on the horizon in
China--it's in stores. "On a recent trip to China, I noticed that
many of the Intel-compatible PCs for sale in several major
department stores had a slightly different appearance than usual,
apart from the language differences. I looked closely and realized
they were running GNU/Linux", writes Dan Gillmor of the
San Jose Mercury News. How much of that was
Red Flag matters less than the fact that Linux is going mainstream
in the world's largest country.We first wrote about Red Flag two
years ago, and now we're starting to think we need to pay a
bit more attention. When we try to find out more on the
Red Flag site,
however, our lack of Chinese fluency presents a problem. Although
Google and other sources point to an /english/ directory, it
doesn't appear to be active. Translating the site by
Babel Fish is
an amusing diversion, however inaccurate. A link on the
home
page is titled, "Center the branch Red Flag for China will
insert the type system structure future". On a
page
titled "The Red Flag inserts in the type system omnipresent -
lottery ticket machine operating system the application", we find
this:In the hardware system aspect, Shenzhen thinks
the happy data selects the industry control panel, this labor
controls the board carries the string mouth, and the mouth, the
Ethernet card and so on for the network transmission use,
simultaneously, the external instrumentation was easy to expand,
saves the hardware design cycle; The main engine disposition also
sufficiently meets the need.If anybody wants to give us some help on this whole subject,
let us know.Doc Searls is Senior Editor
of Linux Journal.

email: doc@ssc.com