IBM's Interest in Red Flag Linux 97
eldavojohn writes "For those of you unfamiliar with Red Flag Linux, it's an OS for the growing Chinese community of Linux users. Interestingly enough, IBM is looking to support Red Flag Linux as the next distribution of Linux that its more than 300 applications will run on. Support from a huge vendor like IBM certainly raises the rate of adoption of a distribution of Linux so this is certainly good news for Red Flag Linux and also the Chinese open source users. IBM currently supports Red Hat and SUSE Linux, which creates twice as much testing for each of their applications. Will Red Flag Linux cause them to require three times the amount of normal testing?"
Red Flag and Open Source (Score:1, Interesting)
Also interesting in TFA (Score:1, Interesting)
"We thought that if IBM was in the market as an 800-pound gorilla, it would have a negative effect on the Linux market. We won't do something that sets us against the community," he said.
Thoughts?
I havn't seen any Linux in China (Score:5, Interesting)
In the markets I have seen the entire office suite going for 10 Yuan (1 US dollar = 8 Yuan). This was not one of the little markets that we hear of being raided, this was at one of the largest chains in the country.
As far as Apples, I have the only one that I have seen here. In a stor with, literaly, hundreds of MP3 players, I saw one iPod. It was priced out of line with the local economy.
With this being the situation, I find it hard to believe that Microsoft will fail to dominate this market. There may be a small market for Red Flag, much like there is stil a market for SCO Unix; However, look in the stores, it is al Microsoft.
Serious Question -- Why? (Score:2, Interesting)
Can anyone point to any contribution Red Flag has made to open source software? The company has released something like 2 distributions over the last four years or so while being heavily funded by the Chinese government. Neither distribution was usable (I've tried both). Their desktop version of Linux even removed a lot of usable software in order to cram in crippled language demoware.
Most of the Chinese people I know who use Linux use Red Hat and wouldn't touch Red Flag with a ten foot pole. And if IBM thinks that it will start making major enterprise sales in China by partnering with these guys they are simply delusional. This is just another step in Red Flag's strategy of doing nothing, but doing it extremely loudly to the cheers of overseas linux fanboys.
More Red Flag info (and why IBM supports it) (Score:2, Interesting)
I can't speak for "IBM", but back when I was product manger for WAS Community Edition (WASCE) [ibm.com], I know that we decided to support Red Flag Data Center (RFDC) with WASCE right from v1.0 because our Asian customers were asking for RFDC (in addition to RHEL).
Savio [wordpress.com]
Re:This is a good thing. (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:This is a good thing. (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:Also interesting in TFA (Score:1, Interesting)
One might have expected IBM to put its resources behind a distro with a better-than-average "internationalisation"
if it wants to be able to grow in international markets. Too bad they haven't been paying attention to Mandriva.
"When one door closes another one opens (but maybe not for you
Re:I havn't seen any Linux in China (Score:4, Interesting)