A New Homegrown OS For China Could Arrive By October

According to a Reuters report, China could have a new homegrown operating system by October to take on imported rivals such as Microsoft Corp, Google Inc and Apple Inc, Xinhua news agency said on Sunday. Computer technology became an area of tension between China and the United States after a number of run-ins over cyber security. China is now looking to help its domestic industry catch up with imported systems such as Microsoft's Windows and Google's mobile operating system Android. The operating system would first appear on desktop devices and later extend to smartphone and other mobile devices, Xinhua said, citing Ni Guangnan who heads an official OS development alliance established in March. It would make sense for even a "homegrown" operating system to be based on existing ones, in the way Red Flag Linux is. Conceptually related: Earlier this year, Chinese company Coship Electronics announced (and demonstrated) a mobile OS called 960 OS.

Many new OS from East Asian Nations

[Anonymous Coward]

You will be surprised to know how many new OS are being brewed in East Asian Nations such as Japan, Korea and China

Some of them are based on Linux, yes, but there are others which are not based on Linux

In Korea and in Japan there are separate efforts to upgrade and extend the Plan-9 OS, for example

China Has Been Trying To Dump Windows for Years

[rssrss]

Information Warfare: Running For Linux January 9, 2011 [strategypage.com]

For a decade now, China has been trying to get business and government users to adopt Unix (and later Linux) as their operating system. Yet most Chinese businesses, and many government departments, continue to use Microsoft operating systems. They do this because Microsoft Windows is widely pirated in China, and there's a large amount of pirated software you can use only on Windows systems. Another critical reason is that more games run on Windows machines, and that is important, even in China. Finally, the Chinese government is more resistant to complaints from Microsoft than Russia.

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China has tried to get around this by subsidizing Linux training for Chinese engineers and computer technicians. The government also subsidized the development of the Kylin Unix based server software. Kylin is shareware, and anyone can download it. Kylin is also designed to be very secure, much more secure than Microsoft server software, and most other similar products. China has had more success in getting users to adopt non-Microsoft server software, but the real battleground is PCs.

Just another Linux distrubution

[mjwalshe]

In no way Is this a home grown operating system

GNU/Linux needs investment, auditing, etc

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not enough to simply put out a distribution. We need useful code that runs on it, new features (or better yet- improvements on the code itself, ie bugs fixes, etc).

However the problem isn't entirely the OS, but a lack of auditing. While insanely expensive every piece of non-complex code aught to have two eyes on it at all times and more complex code should have dozens.

Then we need good solid default security policies for different audiences that are easy to apply and separation of concerns. If we're concluding that a small group of users needs access to macros (lets make a huge category called business), then you can apply that security policy which will enable macros, but in the mean time everybody else is going to get a 'home' security policy by default. Then those users who have that 'business' security policy applied will still have the application restricted and separated such that a vulnerability doesn't automatically impact the whole system – or provide an intruder access to every file on the system.

Then we need hardware and software where the code is available. Nothing should be held back, not the 3d accelerated graphics firmware, not the BIOS, not the hard drive controller firmware, or keyboard micro code. Everything including the CPU micro code should be published under a free software license.

Then you have to worry about the hardware itself. The design of hardware today is scary. We shouldn't be using USB flash drives for instance. In an ideal world plugging in a standard device like this shouldn't be able to compromise my machine. We need a complete redesign to reduce the surface area of attack. Computers don't need built-in microphones or webcams, etc.

China is the largest market

[minstrelmike]

When looking into video game consoles, I was stunned to realize that Xbox and PS3/4 are _not_ even close to being the most popular video game consoles in the world. The top three are all Chinese consoles you've never heard of. Population-wise, the US is to China as VietNam is to the US and I suspect the Chinese worry about Americans about as much as we Americans worry about the Vietnamese.

Our economic might blinds us to the realities of the actual world and that perhaps is the most dangerous flaw in American culture. Remember the ancient Egyptians, the ancient Greeks (both civilizations), the Romans, the Ottomans? (There is a similar litany for homegrown emperors in China, also, but no one talks about it.)

Chinese control from center is fatal flaw

[ebusinessmedia1]

China has been controlled from the center for millennia; this is China's fatal flaw. Attempts to control population in a wired world is going to limit exposure to social and intellectual capital. Long run, it's a dead-end strategy. China should be most famous for wasting more social and intellectual capital than any culture in the history of humanity, entirely due to closing off possibility via control from the center.