mercurycenter.com
THURSDAY, 1/6
Well, it looks like our best chance to achieve software hegemony over the Chinese bureaucracy has gone out the window, so to speak.
According to a late-breaking wire story out of Beijing, an official newspaper is reporting that China will ban the use of the new Windows 2000 operating system throughout the government as part of an effort to support indigenous software. The platform they have in mind is a local variant of a popular alternative OS, dubbed "Red Flag - Linux" (obviously "red flag" has different connotations in East and West).
I can barely get my head around all the ironic and paradoxical implications of this move. On one hand, you'd think the one bit of common ground that Microsoft and the Chinese government would have would be the shared belief in a central authority that can dictate to the masses. And the idea that China would join a software movement whose bywords are "open" and "free" is pretty curious. On the other hand, Linux is sort of a communal product, and you can hardly blame the Chinese for using their absolute authority to achieve the kind of result our own Justice Department would love to see here.
Personally, I'd feel a lot better if I knew the Chinese were using Windows 2000. Now businesses and governments in the West will have to finish debugging the sucker by themselves, and it would have been a comfort knowing the Chinese were going through the same hassles. Then again, maybe that's their plan -- to hold out until Microsoft is past version 1.0. Or maybe they're just big fans of Slashdot
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