We all know Big Blue is spending a billion dollars on Linux, because a visible hunk of that money is being spent on advertising and promotion.
Less obvious is how the Chinese government, representing more than 1.2 billion people, is expressing its own love of Linux: by encouraging adoption of its own distribution: Red Flag Linux.
Red Flag was created in 1999 by the Academy of Science, which is headed by Jiang Mianheng, son of President Jiang Zemin, with financial assistance from the government-owned Shanghai NewMargin Venture Capital.
Red Flag's purpose is to prevent increased domination of the Chinese computer market by Microsoft's Windows operating systems. The best way to do that, as the Chinese government sees it, is to promulgate an already popular alternative with "full transparency in terms of underlying code", as one commentator described it. They are doing this by encouraging state institutions and state-owned companies to adopt Red Flag Linux.
And that's just one strategy. Another is to avoid copyright infringement and "software piracy" issues by promoting use of software that obviates the issue. Another is by purchasing software from domestic companies that build on Linux rather than Windows.
According to Gartner, the Beijing municipal government gave contracts to six local vendors, and rejected the seventh: Microsoft. One of the six was Red Flag.
Not surprisingly, Linux is now showing up in quantity on desktops, at least in retail stores.
"On a recent trip to China, I noticed that many of the Intel-compatible PCs for sale in several major department stores had a slightly different appearance than usual, apart from the language differences. I looked closely and realized they were running GNU/Linux," writes Dan Gillmor of the San Jose Mercury News.
- Doc Searls
[Note: it would be cool if we could pick up some of the imagery here: <http://www.redflag-linux.com/> <http://www.redflag-linux.com/xiaoshou/index.php>]. They're also in the directory here.