China draws back the curtain on new Windows
Published: 23 Jul 2002 06:27 BST
News that a consortium of China's universities and commercial interests want to develop a Windows-like desktop operating system could indicate that its government wants to squash software piracy in the country.
CyberSource chief executive, Con Zymaris, believes that China may want to stop looking the other way when it comes to software piracy in order to give its bid to enter the World Trade Organization more credibility.
Zymaris, who has met and spoken with delegations from China's IT sector in the past, believes that Microsoft's Windows product line is simply too expensive for Chinese businesses and government organisations to use legally.
"It would totally drain money out of them if they all went across and actually started paying for all the copies of Windows they're using," said Zymaris.
Zymaris said that China is yet to give clear indications of what it plans to develop, however it has said that it wants to reduce its reliance on foreign-owned intellectual property.
"The monopoly of foreign office software over the Chinese market will be broken," said Chinese officials announcing the move at a trade event in Beijing last week.
Zymaris believes that an operating system based on Linux open-source components and the Wine project would be the fastest and cheapest way for China to achieve its goal.
Wine is the Windows Application Programming Interface that allows Linux to run Windows binaries, such as Lotus Notes and some versions of Microsoft Office, without the need for modification or 'porting'. The first version of Windows is estimated to have taken around two years to develop. Windows 2000 took around 1,000 developers five years to produce.
It is understood that China wants desktop functionality comparable to Windows 98.
"Anything not like Linux and Wine is a massive waste," said Zymaris. "There's no problem at all with just grabbing the whole code and embedding it in specific Chinese versions of Linux."
He added that after developing and packaging the software, Chinese organisations may pay a little more than they would for pirated software (calculated to be little more than the cost of the distribution media), but from there on it could be duplicated endlessly at no cost.
Microsoft Windows XP currently costs around $300. The average yearly salary for a Chinese technology worker in 1998 was around $1,000 according to Singapore-based ALM Public Relations. Microsoft is sticking with reserved but apparently contradictory comments on China's announcement, until more details are revealed about their plans.
Today a spokesperson for the company cautioned against assuming that China would reduce the total cost of ownership for its operating platforms, should it opt for an open-source model. However, he conceded that the open-source model was capable of "doing good things" and that it would be cheaper for China to take its development efforts in-house.
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