The business of Linux in China
Published: 11 Apr 2006 17:55 BST
At LinuxWorld last week in Boston, representatives from a Chinese government-sponsored organisation enthusiastically handed out bags proudly emblazoned with "Beijing: Asia's Linux Capital". So strong was the contingent of Chinese companies at the event that a special "Linux in Beijing" day was held, where representatives from different companies discussed how to boost the use of Linux on the server, desktop and mobile environments.
Although the Chinese government openly supports open source and has funded a number of open source initiatives, there have been few large scale migrations to open source in the government sector. However, this is expected to change now that the Chinese government has mandated the use of locally-produced software in government departments, and as government agencies must replace unlicensed copies of Microsoft software following China's accession to the World Trade Organisation.
While at LinuxWorld, ZDNet UK spoke to Albert Chung, the chief marketing officer for Sun Wah Linux, one of the major desktop Linux vendors in China. The interview covered a range of topics including why he thinks Linux isn't ready for the consumer desktop market, some of its customer success stories and the challenges Sun Wah faced in creating its own Linux distribution.
ZDNet UK also interviewed Qinghua Hu, the general director of the Beijing Software Industry Productivity Centre — the government-sponsored organisation behind the branded bags.
Hu spoke about the work the Centre is doing, the factors limiting the use of Linux on the desktop, and predicted where the Linux desktop market will be in five years time.
Sun Wah Linux: From the top
Albert Chung, chief marketing officer for Sun Wah Linux.
Q: What's the history of Sun Wah Linux?
Albert Chung: We are part of the Sun Wah group, which has businesses in different areas including private banking, infrastructure and technology. We were not targeting to do a Linux distribution at the beginning as maintaining a distribution is a lot of work.
In 2000, we were working on a project on how to handle the Chinese language on the Linux desktop. Using Chinese on Linux is different to using English on Linux as there are three Chinese character encodings, compared to the one English character-encoding system. In mainland China they use Guobiao, internationally we use Unicode, and in Taiwan we use Big5. If you have a Chinese document that is going around the world it can easily be scrambled because of the incompatibility of different Chinese encodings.
In Hong Kong [where Sun Wah is based], because it is an international city, we have to handle all three character encodings. We launched a project to sort out this problem, but even after we had created a Unihan system [one that maps different character sets into a single set of unified character encodings] we still had to integrate this with different desktop Linux distributions. This involved a tremendous amount of work.
As our business grew and we expanded into China, we learned more about mainland China and realised there is a desperate need for Linux in China, not only on servers, but also on desktops. The former Prime Minister of China, Zhu Rongji, said it was vital that we develop our own software industry and the operating system is a fundamental part of that goal.
What Linux distribution did you base your new distribution on?
At the time we investigated what distribution we could base it on — we compared Red Hat, which is based around the RPM packaging system, and Debian. Eventually we decided to use Debian.
Firstly because most of our developers loved Debian — at the time we had three official Debian developers. Secondly, we believe in open source and think that Debian offers more freedom and is more community based. If we are working on a Debian distribution, we can contribute more back to the community. There was also a business reason for doing this — with an RPM system, Red Hat offers the best technology and will always be the first with the technology, while with Debian it is easier to innovate.
How easy did Sun Wah find developing and maintaining an independent Linux desktop distribution? How many developers have you had working on it over the years?
We originally developed the system in Hong Kong, but our team was not very big — we initially had six developers. To maintain such a distribution...
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