[lug] Yangfan 1.0

[John E. Koontz]

ACM TechNews Volume 4, Issue 377: Wednesday, July 24, 2002

"China Plans Software to Rival Windows"
New Scientist Online (07/19/02); Knight, Will
The Chinese newspaper People's Daily reports that a consortium of Chinese 
companies and universities have embarked on a project to build a computer 
desktop operating system that could compete with Microsoft's Windows 98 
platform. The project, unveiled on July 18 at the IT Industry Promotion 
Center in Beijing, should be ready in about a year and will be capable of 
running Microsoft's office software. "The monopoly of foreign office 
software over the Chinese market will be broken" with the advent of such a 
system, according to the report. Dan Kusnetzky of International Data (IDC) 
believes that the developers could easily build such an operating system 
using already available open source software--Linux, for instance. Another 
open source project dubbed Wine allows Windows applications to run on 
platforms such as Linux, and Kusnetzky thinks that integrating these two 
projects could result in a system ideal for running Microsoft office 
programs. "This is a way to take a giant leap forward almost immediately," 
he declares. Certain Chinese government offices are reportedly using an 
early version of the operating system called Yangfan 1.0.
http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99992573


John E. Koontz
303-497-5180