Posted on 11/20/2002 7:40:28 PM PST by amigatec
Japan to study Linux operating system for government
REUTERS ?[ WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 20, 2002 11:41:31 AM ]
TOKYO: Eager to catch up with nations that are switching to computer systems other than Microsoft Windows, Japan will study the possibility of using open-source software such as Linux at the government level.
The public management ministry is earmarking 50 million yen ($410,000) for a panel of scholars and computer experts, including Microsoft officials, to finish the study by March 2004, Tatsuya Kawachi, a ministry deputy director, said Wednesday.
Japan lags behind Germany, the United States, China and other nations looking into or using open-source software such as Linux, which can be used and modified for free.
Although Tokyo does not disclose a breakdown, government computer systems mostly use Windows, a closed system.
The makeup of the government panel has not yet been decided, but members will travel to see how other countries chose and use operating systems, Kawachi said.
Concerns about costs and security from over reliance on Windows have been growing here. Ruling party politicians have been urging the government to consider other operating systems, which may offer lower costs and better security.
But Kawachi said the Japanese government cannot decide on hearsay and wants 'an objective study' on the options. The study will not recommend a system, leaving the decision up to ministries and local governments.
From Scandinavia the only remaining bastian of Socialism in the world comes the Socialist Operating System known as LINUX.
So voila! Linux in and rampant Japanese individualism overfloweth, right?
Goooooood luck....
You mean like those Marxists at IBM that market it, support it and help develop it? You mean those Marxists at RedHat that make a commercial product out of it? You mean those Marxists at HP, Dell and Intel that openly support it?
If you haven't noticed, you can run commercial software on Linux and sell commercial support for Linux and use Linux to support commercial enterprises. That seems to make it quite a bit different than what the Russian Marxists allowed.
The operating system is "infrastructure" and, as such, there isn't really room for more than one set of standards, any more than there is room for roads where you drive on the right and roads where you drive on the left in the same country. Sometimes, it just makes sense to standardize and, unless you want to grant a company government-like powers of control over that infrastructure, the standards need to be open. Personally, I think that the danger of government is that it uses the threat of force to make you do things that you wouldn't otherwise choose to do. The threat of an infrastructure monopoly isn't all that different except in the details.
While Microsoft isn't technically a monopoly, it does exert monopolistic powers over customers and competitors to a degree that few on Free Republic would accept if were the government and not Microsoft. See:
MS muscled IBM after deal for Lotus
Redmond reinvents whip
Schools cry bully over Microsoft licensing fees
IT managers under pressure to audit software
If the following quote from the last article doesn't concern you, it should:
"Many companies are used to paying their taxes, and obeying EPA (Environmental Protection Agency) and OSHA (Occupational Safety and Health Administration) laws. We're saying, 'make sure you've got a system in place to manage software.'"
They want you to treat them just like any other government agency demanding arbitrary compliance because they can get away with it. That they are in the private sector and not the public sector doesn't really matter.
Yes, I know. "You don't have to use Microsoft products." Yup. That's exactly the choice that people have because of Linux, FreeBSD, and even Mac OSX. Laugh all you want about socialist ideals but this is one issue where the socialists and touchy-feely liberals are on the side of liberty.
You could sell and lease commercial equipment and support to and from the Soviet Union and can still can to Castro. And I'll bet that you think that makes them non Marxist nations. And the communist Chinese engage in commerce too. Look at any Dollar General store for proof. That does noy make them non marxist nations.
The LINUX people think they can compete with Windows in the US market. They can't for the simple reason the training costs on LINUX exceed the savings of Free LINUX. It is cheaper to buy windows wich every employee knows how to run, than to use free LINUX and train them. Linux will not be able to keep up. It is really a 35 year old operating system.... the very best when it was designed, but still 35 eyars out of date.
Back in the 90's I wrote part of LINUX. Some of my code is still in the distributions. Like many LINUX contributors I did it as a learning expense. It was, I tell people, my home work. I would not describe it as commercial work. It was home work worth about a B-. Sometime later a guy who had orginally coded the same area of LINUX that I had contributed to, contacted me. He wanted to see if I was interested in a joint commercial software venture. We had both written code for LINUX.
Our emails crossed on the net. He was asked me not to judge his coding ablitiy by the garbage (His Term) he wrote for LINUX. I at the same time asked him not to judge me by the crap (my term), I had written for LINUX.
When you write code, and then witness the distributions making bucks off of your work you tend to quit doing it as other than a learning experience. You certainly don't fix it.
Imagine you take care of peoples lawns for free, and I follow along behind, collect the money for your work. I keep all the money. Occasionaly I call you up with a list of Lawns I would like you to do. And if you do them, I get paid. I'll bet you would go for that big time. That is what coding for LINUX is all about. You code. Red Hat and SuSe sell your work and keep the money.
It really makes your day when the people selling suport for your work want your advise on how to do that. And they want that advise for free.
LINUX is mostly a port of BSD UNIX coded which was coded with your tax dollars and mine. That is fine but it is very outdated technology done at Bell labs in the 1960s. Linux is still a procedure based operating system done in the style invented for an operating system called Mulitcs from 35 years ago.
Windows is being totally re-done for the 3rd time as a totally object oriented operating system. It will be an object oriented system built from classes with properties, methods and events. Everything incuding base types like integer will be objects not variables. There are no pesky bug creating global vars. It will have a degree of robustness, maintainability, expandabiltiy that no function and var based operating system can hope to approach. That version to be ready in 5 years will make LINUX look and perform like a 1913 Model T going against this years best sports car.
The worlds best programmers are with Microsoft. There is no way the suits at Red Hat, SuSe or any of the others can keep up.
I think this metophors are being stretched to the point of absurdity. An operating system isn't a country and I'm going to pass on trying to find enough commonality between the two to make a useful comparison. I don't see Linux actively impeding capitalism since it is self-contained. The same thing with gcc, emacs, Perl, sendmail, bind, and a host of otehr open source programs. A great many internet services that people count on, including DNS, happen because of free software. I just don't see it as an impediment to capitalism like, say, seizing property to create collective farms or re-education camps. Your milage may vary. (Though I would agree that the GPL goes too far.)
The LINUX people think they can compete with Windows in the US market. They can't for the simple reason the training costs on LINUX exceed the savings of Free LINUX. It is cheaper to buy windows wich every employee knows how to run, than to use free LINUX and train them. Linux will not be able to keep up. It is really a 35 year old operating system.... the very best when it was designed, but still 35 eyars out of date.
I think you greaty overestimate how much "every employee" knows about the software they are using and how strongly they are tied to it. You'll note that working a "help desk" is an career that has been in some demand. "Every employee" seemed to do just fine with WordPerfect 5.0 and with green screens before that. People adapted to Windows 3.1 and then the various flavors that Microsoft has since released. They can adapt to an X-Windows based Windows manager and Open Office if they have to. Why would they have to? Because most employees don't have a choice about which software to use. They use what their employer gives them.
Back in the 90's I wrote part of LINUX. Some of my code is still in the distributions. Like many LINUX contributors I did it as a learning expense. It was, I tell people, my home work. I would not describe it as commercial work. It was home work worth about a B-. Sometime later a guy who had orginally coded the same area of LINUX that I had contributed to, contacted me. He wanted to see if I was interested in a joint commercial software venture. We had both written code for LINUX.
OK. I'll bite. What did you write?
Our emails crossed on the net. He was asked me not to judge his coding ablitiy by the garbage (His Term) he wrote for LINUX. I at the same time asked him not to judge me by the crap (my term), I had written for LINUX.
Can I play the "anecdotal evidence" game? I have a friend who works on the GCC project. He was getting paid to do commercial software work. In his free time, he worked on GCC optimizations as a hobby. I don't think he'd describe his effort as B- work.
I'm sure there is junk in Linux. There is junk in Windows, too. You should read some of the anecdotal stories in the Microsoft development books like Code Complete.
When you write code, and then witness the distributions making bucks off of your work you tend to quit doing it as other than a learning experience. You certainly don't fix it.
I think that depends on your motivations. As I said, I have a friend how hacks on gcc as a hobby. Just because you don't do it doesn't mean that other people won't. And in some cases, such as IBM with Linux, corporations are footing the bill.
Imagine you take care of peoples lawns for free, and I follow along behind, collect the money for your work. I keep all the money. Occasionaly I call you up with a list of Lawns I would like you to do. And if you do them, I get paid. I'll bet you would go for that big time. That is what coding for LINUX is all about. You code. Red Hat and SuSe sell your work and keep the money.
If I find mowing lawns relaxing, I just might. I certainly didn't spend money planting and growing a garden, for example, because it was cost effective or because I needed the produce. Another example is that many Habitat for Humanity houses fared better in Hurricane Andrew than many commercially built homes because they were of higher quality.
It really makes your day when the people selling suport for your work want your advise on how to do that. And they want that advise for free.
If you think you can make money selling support for your work, go for it. You are also missing the sybiotic relationships such as O'Reilly and Perl (O'Reilly foots the bill to keep Perl going and gets money selling books) or IBM and Linux or SAS and their now open-source database.
LINUX is mostly a port of BSD UNIX coded which was coded with your tax dollars and mine. That is fine but it is very outdated technology done at Bell labs in the 1960s. Linux is still a procedure based operating system done in the style invented for an operating system called Mulitcs from 35 years ago.
Linux isn't based on the BSD kernel, though many of the *applications* are ports of BSD and Solaris projects. If anything, it was based on Minux. Yes, a lot of "free" software is paid for by tax dollars and by parents paying the tuition of students that work on it. That's fine with me. It's OK for taxes to pay for infrastructure, in my opinion, since it can benefit everyone. I certainly get more from the taxes that went to Linux than I get from playgrounds in Kansas City or Food Stamps.
As for Linux being outdated, I don't buy it. And it is hardly a new argument.
Windows is being totally re-done for the 3rd time as a totally object oriented operating system.
Rewriting complex systems over and over again isn't necessarily a good thing. When I worked in publishing, they'd often "shoot" old copies of books to publish a new edition (make new negatives by taking a picture of an old edition) rather than typeset a new edition because you'd wind up introducing a whole new batch of errors if you retypeset the work. Something similar happens with software. You'll notice that many software vendors use the length of time that their software has been in service as a testiment to how well tested and proven it is.
It will be an object oriented system built from classes with properties, methods and events.
...that will have to maintain backward compatabilty with older systems and make trade-offs for the sake of performance. Will Microsoft keep using three letter file extensions to type files? There's an idea that goes back to the '70s that is so tenacious that Apple has been abandoning a more reasonable system in order to adopt it because it is the "standard". If Microsoft cuts loose and abandons compatability with bad legacy systems (much as Apple is otherwise trying to do with OSX, for better or worse), kudos to them. But no one will buy it.
Everything incuding base types like integer will be objects not variables.
At what cost to performance? Why does an integer need to be an object?
There are no pesky bug creating global vars.
Does Linux have this problem?
It will have a degree of robustness, maintainability, expandabiltiy that no function and var based operating system can hope to approach. That version to be ready in 5 years will make LINUX look and perform like a 1913 Model T going against this years best sports car.
I'll believe it when I see it. The truth is that Microsoft has a big problem. Their current operating system is "good enough" for what most people need it to do (power users and enterprise computing aside). They can't really add anything else that people need to Word, Excel, PowerPoint, or Access. They are mature products. And they've stopped making the file formats of upgrades incompatible because people started balking at forced upgrades. Why do most people need this future OO version of Windows?
The worlds best programmers are with Microsoft. There is no way the suits at Red Hat, SuSe or any of the others can keep up.
You obviously haven't heard about some of the employee retention problems Microsoft has had (at least when the economy was good). You can find some more articles here, here, and here. Here is a good quote for you from the last one:
After 24 years as a talent magnet, Microsoft is grappling with a brain drain. Even though the software behemoth has one of the lowest turnover rates in the computer industry, some experts believe the loss of key people at all levels in the organization could threaten Microsoft's ability to stay on top of the computer world. For years, company executives have preached that smart employees are their most crucial asset. ''This loss of talent is a serious problem, if not the most serious problem Microsoft is facing,'' says a programmer who left Microsoft this past spring.
Yes, I'm sure they don't have a problem keeping employees at the moment, given the bad economy (especially in Seattle), but they are not the draw that they once were.
Especially with distributons whose business plan is "You code for free, and send the payments to me."
Red Hat isn't Linux. Suse isn't Linux. They sell CDs, manuals, and boxes. I can easily download Red Hat without paying for it and I can install it on as many machines as I want, legally. Just as there are people willing to starve for their art and just as there are people willing to volunteer all their free time for this cause or that, there are people willing to code for free. That may not work for you but it works for other poeple.
By the way, I wrote this reply in emacs, through an SSH connection, from a Mac OSX iBook (running a form of FreeBSD) connected to an ISP running Linux, via lynx, a free text browser. Note what is missing from this equation.
By the way, I do have Word installed on this iBook. There is a full copy of Office on our other Mac and a copy on our Windows machine. I paid for them all and have the boxes and license codes to prove it. I've also read and enjoyed Microsoft's coding and project management books. I've also been using IE on the iBook since Mozilla just doesn't work as well. I don't object to Microsoft when they produce good products. I object to them when they act like a Monopoly and I don't think they deserve my devotion unless they earn it. That companies and governments are switching to Linux suggests that Microsoft products are no longer considered worthy of the price (and compliance troubles) that Microsoft is asking for them.
I'm still trying to understand the world view of the various anarcho-capitalists and anarcho-socialists found on the Internet. I think they could all use a long month in a place with no government to get aquainted with the "necessary" element of governments being a "necessary evil". (Liberals, of course, have problems grasping the "evil" part of that equation.)
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