<propose to set up a community specifically for users in China especially those
in Chinese universities. As China is a fastest growing market for Sun, there
should be a lot of opportunites for Sun in general and Opensolaris in
particular.>
Fedora Core, arguably the most popular Linux distro, was started by a college
student Warren Togami when he was a sophomore at University of Hawaii. I have
been following RedHat/Fedora Core for quite a few years, and Fedora Core is a
prime reason why Redhat can maintain its status as a standout among all the
Linux distros. (As we all know, the great Billy Joy wrote BSD when he was a
grad student at Berkeley.)
All things considered, SOS (Solaris/OpenSolaris) provides a computing platform
that may happen to be most uniquely suited for the huge Chinese market. But
this message needs to be quickly and effectively promulgated. Chinese
universities seem to be a perfect battle ground.
We have quite a few clients in Taiwan, mostly in the high-tech area. I
personally have been very diligent trying to interest them with Linux desktops,
but nothing happened. Then suddenly, late last year, a major Taiwan company,
CTS, China Television Station, one of the three major TV networks in Taiwan,
decided to switch away from Microsoft Windows. But it did not choose one of
the Linux distros; rather, it went with the JDS/Sunray combo.
What attracted CTS to JDS probably has a lot to do with cost relative to
Windows (& support relative to Linux) . But, IMHO, SOS can be particularly
appealing to Chinese university students due to two interrelated factors: (1)
Unlike Windows but similar to Linux, anyone can (supposedly and eventually)
build, distribute, and sell an SOS-based system; (2) Unlike Linux but similar
to Windows, SOS has a very resourceful creator/benefactor—most people are not
aware that at one time Sun was indeed bigger than Microsoft.
A delegation from China’s Ministry of Science and Technology visited us last
year. They mentioned that if someone can develop a low-cost Linux-based system
and charge, say, $10 US a year per person, in Shanghai alone this would come to
in access of $100M per year. Substitute Linux with the more probable SOS, and
that probably will make Sir Scott very happy. Freeloaders like myself will be
very happy, too. :-)
Hallucinations aside, SOS also has a strong advantage that I have not seen
mentioned in this forum. In Windows, you need multiple computers to do
multiple locales ("languages"). This is a royal pain in the 8th. Many Linux
distros allow a user to log into various locales, but at least as far as the
Chinese language is concerned, the JDS version of multilingual capabilitty is
far more polished than those in Linux. But Linux (especially Fedora Core and
Debian) is catching up very rapidly.
Anyway, I am very interested in your proposal, please let us know how we can
participate.
This message posted from opensolaris.org
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