
South Korea switching their 3.3M PCs to Linux - bitxbitxbitcoin
https://www.fosslinux.com/29117/south-korea-switching-their-3-3-million-pcs-to-linux.htm
======
totorovirus
South korean developer here. I am quite aware of government plans for software
since I've done my service as a software developer for army.

There is a company called TmaxSoft which advertises itfself as only builders
to the 'Korean OS'. Fueled by relatively high patriotism shared by average
koreans, the government had been subsidizing this firm for more than 10 years.
Despite the effort to liberate the nation from a private US firm this wasn't
successful so far: first they tried to build their own kernel which froze at
the public demo. After realizing it was dumb to write kernel from scratch,
they began focusing on tuning the visual interface. The result was criticism
that is was just a pathetic clone of MintOS(linux distro).

Due to bureaucratic debt over 10+ years, I think those government officials
are desparately trying to meet an end to this mad project. The money and time
they've spent well deserves a spot in governmental future plan in converting
all american OS: Windows into Homemade korean government friendly OS.

~~~
totorovirus
More on TMaxSoft.

This software firm builds many 'hard' softwares like OS, DBMS or even
MapReduce data processing cluster(like hadoop and spark). One might naturally
ask 'why build a wheel while there are plenty already built by open source
developers?' and economically aware person might also ask 'how are selling
their products while competing against ubuntu, postgresql, spark?'

Cloning something from scratch and learning advanced technology in its process
is a familiar thing in Korea. Enforcing home grown products to average
customers, subsidizing one specific firm to take all domestic market share is
how Samsung and Hyundai made its way to top global firms. So I guess the
mental background for replacing OS by home made OS is similar to that which
successfully grew Samsung. They are willing to pay off a lot of money so that
a Korean firm outgrows Google, Facebook or Apple. An average developer knows
it is a stupid plan to replicate linux or mysql from scratch. But government
officials' heart still remain in the golden age when the very strategy they
are executing with was valid for Samsung or Hyundai.

The way this firm hires its employees is tighly coupled with government. In
our country all men are obliged to military service. However there are couple
of options:

1\. B.S holders: no exemption. 2 years in a random role. 2\. M.S holders: you
get to work for private firm for 3 years. Called 'special research agents'.
Mostly work for engineering related firms. 3\. Ph.D holders: you are exempted
as soon as you become a Ph.D holder.

All these exemption rules according to the level of scholastic degree is to
foster R&D capability of our nation. And here comes a perky question: 'What
happens to Ph.D dropouts?' As some might have guessed: 'You go to TmaxSoft,
get hefty salary, get a girl, get married.'

I wouldn't say much about it if there weren't a fact that really bugs me. They
do hoard M.S holders from best colleges, however the graduate students they
hire aren't limited to CS majors. I've seen multiple chemistry majors or
industrial engineering majors who dropped out of Ph.D course doing software
engineering there. I have no idea how they could 'train' a non CS major to
write code for hard core stuffs like OS or DBMS. And they tell the government
officials that they have the best pool of engineers from prestigious colleges,
which would ease the government to making decision to subsidize this firm.

~~~
Jedd
> Enforcing home grown products to average customers, subsidizing one specific
> firm to take all domestic market share is how Samsung and Hyundai made its
> way to top global firms.

I can see how this would ensure domestic success, but how does that translate
to 'top global firm' status unless the products / features & pricing are
significantly superior?

~~~
hkmurakami
It basically gives domestic firms breathing room to survive and grow, versus
being suffocated by the currently superior products or foreign firms. The hope
then is that in the future, with a stronger financial footing, these firms'
products will improve to be truly competitive with those of the global
competitors.

At least in hardware/manufacturing, both South Korea and China have done this
with great success thus far.

~~~
Jedd
> It basically gives domestic firms breathing room to survive and grow, versus
> being suffocated by the currently superior products or foreign firms.

Yes, I get that. It's basic tariff protectionism. Many countries have done,
and continue to, do this.

Here in Australia we've done it for decades, but with no global success.

> The hope then is that in the future ...

I hope that isn't the official strategy. ; |

The stronger financial footing (also achievable via vanilla domestic success
sans tarrifs) doesn't necessarily guarantee global success, _especially_ if
other nation states are adopting similar fiscal & trade policies ... which
it's fair to say they are.

~~~
stirlo
> Here in Australia we've done it for decades, but with no global success.

Examples? We have some of the most open markets in the world. We’re one of the
only countries the US has a trade surplus with...

~~~
Jedd
> Examples? We have some of the most open markets in the world. We’re one of
> the only countries the US has a trade surplus with...

I guess the obvious example would be the car industry - mostly cars were just
assembled in Australia in the most recent past, but previously there were some
designed and built. Tariffs were applied to protect that industry (nominally
the jobs associated with same) but despite the Australian car assembly sector
basically being zero now, the tariffs still exist. It's almost like it's just
a revenue generation scheme.

There's a long history of tariffs and duties within Australia [1] but none of
those (to my knowledge) resulted in a thriving multi-national corporation
(I'll exclude mining companies as they're primary industries, reliant on the
lottery of resource availability rather than any particular commercial skill).

Perhaps Murdoch's News Limited, which undoubtedly obtained government support
during its nascent era, but I'm not sure how comparable it is to the Samsung
and Hyundais of the world (referring back to GP's claims).

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_tariffs_in_Australi...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_tariffs_in_Australia)

~~~
shim__
Australia has it pretty hard be competitive exporting industrial goods since
the supply chain is mostly overseas and the domestic market is small, which
means most things will gehave to be exported again. All this results in high
shipping costs and latency in addition to being a high wage country.

------
rocky1138
Inaccurate headline. They're doing a pilot project to see if they like it.
This is where a lot of these "X Government Switches To Linux!" projects fall
apart. Wake me up when they actually do it.

~~~
dx034
And in the end it's not Windows that governments and companies need, it's
Office. Windows is fairly easy to replace for a lot of jobs nowadays. But
working without MS Office is extremely difficult. It's basically impossible
and certainly not worth it ensuring that all spreadsheets used will still work
with alternatives, it also makes communication with other governments or
companies much harder. That's where Microsoft makes the money and has its
monopoly.

~~~
cm2187
On the OS not being critical, I think that might be the case in 10 years, but
large companies still have loads of internal desktop applications that haven’t
moved to the web yet.

But agree with your point on Office, there are many large organisations which
are literally running on Excel, and which IT budget would have to grow 10
times if they were to replace all these excel based processes.

And I must say that I haven’t seen any good alternative to Excel for a non
programmer to set up a custom set of calculations, or deal with data. I am
trying to get more people to learn SQL in my company, which shouldn’t be too
difficult. But you are not going to write a company valuation model in SQL.
And I had poor results at getting non programmers to pick up coding (I offered
1 week external in class courses, lots of people volunteered but 80% did not
really do anything with it).

~~~
exikyut
I wonder what a landscape would look like where the OS isn't critical but
everyone's still on Excel.

Wine suddenly gets really _really_ good, maybe?

------
esjeon
It seems like the government is pushing VDI to replace dedicated internet PCs,
which are used alongside air-gapped government network PCs. That means, main
office PCs will still be running Windows.

Actually, Korean military had an experimental VDI program years ago, but the
program failed mainly because of the price, most of which had to be spent on
Windows license. IIRC, after creating a small prototype, the program is
eventually scrapped.

So, no, this is not a negotiating move. Also, I believe this will definitely
happen, because Windows 10 is stupidly expensive.

The official announcement from Korean government (Korean):
[https://www.mois.go.kr/frt/bbs/type010/commonSelectBoardArti...](https://www.mois.go.kr/frt/bbs/type010/commonSelectBoardArticle.do?bbsId=BBSMSTR_000000000008&nttId=75607)

------
AYBABTME
As a foreigner who's spending a lot of time in South Korea and had to deal/saw
people deal with the inability to do anything online without the use of a
Windows client, I applaud this. Every time we need to interact with the
government or a bank, we need to search around for a Windows laptop or try
from a VM (doesn't always work). This makes it very hard for anyone to learn a
non-Windows OS.

Next step: remove the silly Korean phone number requirement from your online
services.

~~~
Hydraulix989
I had no issues with running Windows 7 in a VM for everything.

~~~
ThatGeoGuy
The point seems to be about finding a computer at all. Suppose you want to do
some banking and all you have is your Android phone? According to what I'm
reading from other comments, you may just need to find a Windows PC rather
than handle things with your own device.

~~~
Hydraulix989
Nearly all of the banks in Korea have Android apps.

------
pcr910303
South Korean here, explanation for some context:

South Korea has a deep legacy of MS-DOS/Windows, and it’s reliance of
Microsoft’s OS is very high. This mostly is due to two reasons: the high use
of the unique word processor(Hangul Word Processor) and the legacy ActiveX
plugins used for cryptography when banking.

In the 90s, multiple internet service providers used ActiveX technology (for
people who doesn’t know, it’s basically binary plugin technology to provide
unlimited access to the local environment) to provide services. They were used
to provide VOD services, etc... and when online shopping & banking started in
the mid 90s the government mandated use of a 128bit crypto algorithm. At that
time, the dominant browser IE only had 40 bit crypto due to US’s export
restrictions — so the 128 bit algorithm they decided to use was a
independently developed algorithm called SEED, which was then implemented in
ActiveX by the banks and shopping malls. This became a legacy, and for a long
time even after the restriction was removed, people were forced to use ActiveX
plugins until the smartphones came and the banks were forced to rewrite the
system. There are still a lot of banks mandating the use of Windows for
desktops — that’s one reason why the Windows was so popular.

Windows 10 AFAIK (I’ve never used it, so I’m not really sure) is much more
strict to the binary plugins, and Internet Explorer is almost going to die —
so a lot of people were staying on Windows 7, including most of the
government. By the deprecation of Windows 7, the government thought that this
was a good time to remove much of the legacy that enforces Windows, and is
considering Linux for one of its options.

One of the reasons why I have some hope on this project is because the
government’s use of Windows is basically for two things — the ActiveX plugins
in the web (which are mostly disappeared thanks to smartphones) and the Hangul
Word Processor, which was exclusively only on Windows until about 2008, when a
Linux version was released for a short period of time (and was removed due to
the lack of interest). If the government decides to transition to Linux,
Hancom(HWP’s developer) can prioritize the Linux port — which, in 2008 was
already fully featured and has almost zero compatibility problems! (People
using Linux still use the 2008 version by dockerizing the whole environment.)

Some context on the operating systems that were mentioned:

The Harmonica OS is a Linux Mint-based distribution that is localized
thoroughly and has a lot of baseline programs (like the input methods)
installed, and is pretty great for daily use.

The Tmax OS is... basically a scam OS that... well uses a big mix of Linux,
BSD, and Wine’s code, a homemade custom DE that is a poor ripoff of the
windows interface and tries to integrate them (unsuccessfully)... and
advertise as a ‘pure Korean OS’ to the officials.

~~~
boulos
Since you’re here, can you explain what’s special about the Hancom/Hangul
office software?

The Wikipedia articles all just say things like “specialized support” or
“special needs”. I would have assumed that the key requirement is Hangul
input, which presumably other word processing and spreadsheet programs could
do just fine.

~~~
pcr910303
> I would have assumed that the key requirement is Hangul input, which
> presumably other word processing and spreadsheet programs could do just
> fine.

Hangul support was a key feature in the 80s where everything was MS-DOS; and
it wasn’t prevalent then where a lot of hangul-supporting word processors were
on the market.

The killer feature of the Hangul Word Processor to most users is that it
allows substantial control on the layout of the document... in a way that
westerners don’t really care. (That’s a direct quote from a foreigner I know,
maybe an over-generalization.) So the Korean Government and a lot of
corporations were very committed on transitioning documents that were written
by hand, to computers, and they also wanted to have this exact layout and form
that was used before. Most forms are based out of tables — and I can’t really
explain this in text, but it gives you the power to layout the text the exact
way you want, while in Word, you feel like you’re wrestling with the layout
engine. (Kinda like... if Word is old CSS where you had to use all kinds of
float hacks to make your fragile layout, HWP gives you flexbox and grids...
etc....) Some says that HWP is more like a DTD program like InDesign (I’ve
never used it so I can’t really comment) rather than a usual word processor
that other countries use... but everybody is just super used to having all
that control, so nobody can really transition back to Word.

~~~
boulos
Interesting! I’m curious why people never moved to say Quark XPress then, but
presumably it was “Hancom makes us this super custom thing, and it’s way
cheaper than any desktop publishing software”.

Is there a lot of diversity in the types of documents people make? (Like, why
isn’t this a case of having lots of templates?)

~~~
pcr910303
> I’m curious why people never moved to say Quark XPress then, but presumably
> it was “Hancom makes us this super custom thing, and it’s way cheaper than
> any desktop publishing software”.

First of all, QuarkXPress had shitty, really shitty language support. You
might be surprised when you know that most pro apps have really, really poor
CJK support — apps like Photoshop currently has really hacky input support
bolted on later, and frequently a problem. Even big, user facing apps like
Microsoft Excel still has lots of problems with input. So back in the days
where the word processor market was more diverse, QuarkXPress was not an
option.

Then also, there is the popularity problem where people have not used or even
heard about DTD software like this, and it’s not really a friendly interface
for users to create and modify documents.

This is a side story but... publishers that needed DTD software used
QuarkXPress back in the day. The company backing the software had frequent
conflicts with the local publishers with license pricing, and the publishers
decided to protest by not upgrading to the latest version — and AFAIK lots of
small publishers that didn’t have the manpower to convert all of it’s files to
InDesign still buys used PowerMacs to run the version(I’m not sure but
something like 3.3 — released in 1996!) that they use.

> Is there a lot of diversity in the types of documents people make? (Like,
> why isn’t this a case of having lots of templates?)

> presumably it was “Hancom makes us this super custom thing, and it’s way
> cheaper than any desktop publishing software”.

Yeah, pretty much true too.

Having lots of templates in HWP is one of the reason why HWP isn’t
disappearing; there is vendor lock-in due to custom file formats, and people
don’t feel any reason to move to another one.

~~~
mistrial9
partial story here -- lots of work was done on CJKV input systems, in each
decade, but in many Asian markets (Taiwan, Hong Kong, Vietnam for SURE) piracy
was rampant, which does not feed an R&D cycle.

Unicode was standardized, then the utf8 format after that, which *nix took
full advantage of, but other legacy software (see paragraph 1) did not evolve
in some cases.

~~~
pcr910303
Piracy is rampant to all popular software; I’m not sure how the conclusion
that Asian markets have a higher pircy rate than the western market was
reached. I’m pretty sure that MS Office is pirated in the US at least as much
as Korea.

------
dmurray
Is this actually likely to happen, or a negotiating manoeuvre with Microsoft?

~~~
microcolonel
Last time they trusted Microsoft, they got their entire country stuck with
ActiveX; that said, possibly a bit of column A, a bit of column B.

~~~
hsivonen
That was more South Korea’s own bad crypto policy’s fault than Microsoft’s
fault, though.

~~~
pcr910303
> That was more South Korea’s own bad crypto policy’s fault

South Korean here, I wouldn’t say it was the government’s fault to enforce
better security/crypto tech on the web when banking, right? To be strict,
everything really started because of the US’s IMO useless export restrictions.
Then it became a legacy that couldn’t be third of for ~20 yrs. I don’t think
the policy was great, but it was reasonable at the time.

~~~
pitaj
I think the point is that it wasn't better security. And nowadays it likely
has no improvement or actually decreases security.

------
morpheuskafka
Their friends to the North have been using Linux for many years know, although
pirated copies of Windows are still prevalent as well.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Star_OS](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Star_OS)

~~~
mistrial9
Their relatives to the North... (fixed it for you!)

------
ThinkBeat
It will be interesting to see how it will work.

If they have been Windows for so long and all the way up to Windows 7, they
must have a lot of software and more interestingly hardware that Win7 manages
to get working.

All sorts of bits and bobs hardware will potentially make trouble.

I also see in the article: "The South Korean government also plans to
implement a Desktop as a Service (DaaS) that uses a virtual PC environment
that runs on a cloud by the second half of 2020. The South Korean ministry
expects a 72% savings in cost with the DaaS move. Security standards and DaaS
models are currently in development, and pilot tests are scheduled to start in
October of this year."

This does make a lot of sense in a two-stage program, switch out the desktop
to become thin-clients that connects to the DaaS. Then they can allow end user
to connect to a Daas of Windows7, Windows10, Linux, DOS, I mean whatever.

~~~
zhaoweny
But when I was working daily via a DaaS platform, it's not a great experience
for software development. Input latency is high enough to be noticed, the
virtual desktop can not put under load (e.g. using a IDE for C++ other than
Source Insight). My company had to switch back to desktop PC for most
developers.

~~~
jimmydorry
Yep, my experience exactly too.

------
yingw787
As someone who very much uses and likes FOSS, I'm not sure I'd actually
recommend people use Linux in end-user, day to day work. I can definitely see
BSD or Linux in core infrastructure, but end users don't really care too much
about which OS to use, they care about driver compatibility, UX usability, and
app availability, among other things like security and what-not. Windows has
apps, it has vendor-built drivers, it has auto-update and nice GUIs and all
that. Linux doesn't.

I use Ubuntu 19.10 eoan for my daily driver replacing Windows 10 Professional
for Workstations, and I can tell you that the drivers are _definitely_ worse,
updates are manual, apps are updated last of the major OSes, and if I wasn't a
SWE but I needed to use a computer for my job it wouldn't be as pleasant as
Windows.

~~~
est31
> Windows has apps, it has vendor-built drivers, it has auto-update and nice
> GUIs and all that. Linux doesn't.

Linux has tons of auto update solutions. E.g. on Debian you can configure the
unattended-upgrades package to do it for you. There are plenty of nice GUIs
for most tasks if you use the right distro. Ultimately, it's up to the admins
of the deployments to take care of updates, not up to the end users.

As for the vendor maintained drivers that Windows has, it's often the same in
Linux actually. Often, the maintainers of the mainline drivers are employees
of the vendors. As it should be.

~~~
rvz
> Linux has tons of auto update solutions. E.g. on Debian you can configure
> the unattended-upgrades package to do it for you. There are plenty of nice
> GUIs for most tasks if you use the right distro.

These suggestions are still problems for many Linux distros these days and for
general users there should be one sane default solution for 'auto-updating',
just like Windows and macOS. No user should have to configure packagename-1.0
to do automatic upgrades for the user, it should be in the default install and
configurable via the settings GUI with a simple checkbox. Finally, to further
confuse the end-user to switch to a Linux distro is when they have to choose
'the right distro'. Windows and macOS come in one recognisable desktop form,
Linux still suffers from an identity crisis on the desktop for end-users.

Unfortunately, it isn't possible for me to recommend a Linux distro to an end-
user only for them to end up being frustrated with the switching process and
eventually going back to Windows or macOS. Ubuntu and ChromeOS may suffice for
some users but the other distros will confuse them further.

~~~
smabie
> Windows and macOS come in one recognisable desktop form

Like Win10 home, pro, server, or enterprise?

~~~
AdrianB1
The difference for the end user is zero.

------
tus88
Lucky they aren't the world's biggest abuser of activeX...oh wait.

------
29athrowaway
The office suite part is the most painful. I am now using Softmaker Freeoffice
(free version of Softmaker Office). It is an excellent alternative to
Libreoffice, except that it is not opensource.

~~~
Hydraulix989
Most Koreans use a custom word processor called Hancom Office.

------
OldGuyInTheClub
Interesting development. I wonder if Excel/VBA are a big part of their work.
If so, there could be large costs in converting, testing, and deploying the
alternatives.

------
RoutinePlayer
Did Germany try this unsuccessfully a few years back?

~~~
newnewpdro
Munich _successfully_ pivoted to Linux for over a decade, then Microsoft
Germany moved their HQ to Munich no doubt greasing many wheels in the process
and Munich switched back to Windows a year later IIRC.

~~~
Fronzie
Currently Cern is having a go at replacing all microsoft products, due to high
cost.

[https://home.cern/news/news/computing/migrating-open-
source-...](https://home.cern/news/news/computing/migrating-open-source-
technologies)

The institute is big enough that it might be a source of inspiration or
knowledge for local governments in Europe.

~~~
tasogare
The average CERN user is way more tech savvy than random government workers.

~~~
brnt
The average CERN user already does not use Windows or any MS products. All
research infra is Linux (Cern Linux, a CentOS derivative), and apart from a
stray Macbook, I've never seen anyone use anything but Linux.

Windows was for a few desktops, administrative staff and optionally email
(some Exchange or OWA stuff or sth).

~~~
pjmlp
So the whole Windows infrastructure from 2000 - 2005, including the use of
Office to write documents in some is gone?

And everyone at HLT has ditched their Apple laptops?

I thought Scientific Linux was no longer a thing (I was a beta user back in
the initial release).

------
The_rationalist
If I recall correctly, in the early 2000s, Japan wanted to migrate by default
to Linux. That never happened for an unknown to me reason.

------
dntbnmpls
I commend their effort, but I believe it should be done on an entire ecosystem
level. From assembly to libraries to documents to frameworks. All of it should
be turned into Korean, French, Mandarin, Russian, etc. If the governments of
major nations decided to do it in a systematic manner along with corporate and
university help, it shouldn't be that difficult a task. Create it once and
then your entire citizenry can use it. It's rather surprising that there isn't
much effort to port "computing" to people's native language. Why should the
french or arabs have to learn english to code? Imagine having to learn russian
to study physics or learn korean to watch Parasite. By making english the
default language of computing, every non-anglo nation disadvantages their own
citizens by placing an unnecessary hurdle in front of them.

How many people around the world are simply discouraged from programming
because of added burden of having to learn english? How much are we losing out
because of that?

This might be difficult for smaller and poorer nations, but what is the excuse
for germany, france, spain, japan, brazil, etc with large enough populations
to justify porting "computing" for their people?

~~~
Qu3tzal
Well, why do banks don't port all their code to recent and efficient
languages? Pretty much the same here. All the code currently in use is written
in English and it will take decades to completely transit from English to
French computing (let's take the example of France, since I'm French). Add to
that that all classes resources are for English programming languages and that
to share knowledge between French, German and Russian programmers English is
the only way to go.

But don't be fooled, in most companies all the comments and documentation are
written in French. Variables are in English because it's the only language
that only use the ASCII charset. Only recent languages have the support for
Unicode identifiers names.

English reading comprehension (at the very least) is a mandatory skill to have
in our modern world.

~~~
dntbnmpls
> Pretty much the same here.

It isn't. I'm talking about systematic change, not updating existing code.
Like how latin was used to teach everything until nations decided to port
religion, science, math, literature, etc to their native languages. Look at
how much that changed the world. Rather than a select lucky few having access
to knowledge tied to a language, it was ported and made available to all the
peoples of a nation.

> Add to that that all classes resources are for English programming languages
> and that to share knowledge between French, German and Russian programmers
> English is the only way to go.

The only way to share knowledge is through english? So the french can't
translate german and russians can't translate german? What about all the
french, german and russians who don't know english? Are they supposed to
languish in ignorance?

> Variables are in English because it's the only language that only use the
> ASCII charset.

Variables, keywords, the standard libraries, runtime, kernel, assembly, etc.

> Only recent languages have the support for Unicode identifiers names.

You make it sound like you can't change it. Like older languages are set in
stone.

> English reading comprehension (at the very least) is a mandatory skill to
> have in our modern world.

This is simply not true as most of the modern world does not have basic
english reading comprehension skills. And as I said, this type of thinking is
holding back much of the world. And needing to have basic english reading
comprehension doesn't mean that computation shouldn't be ported to one's
native language.

The selfish few used to keep the masses ignorant through language exclusivity
( latin ). Seems like the same thing is happening here. Maybe it's not
selfishness, but laziness or learned helplessness.

I know if I had to learn french in order to code, I wouldn't be a programming.
And I'm sure it's the truth for the vast majority of american programmers. I
think most people are similar throughout the world and having to learn a
foreign language to program is an insurmountable obstacle for many.

~~~
Qu3tzal
> So the french can't translate german and russians can't translate german?

You can but then it's a work to do for each language. That's how science got
reinvented in multiple places before virtually all papers start to be written
in English and shared in international journals.

> You make it sound like you can't change it. Like older languages are set in
> stone.

Do you suggest adding a layer of dependencies and complexity to the build
systems to preprocess the source code to make it compilable by
GCC/clang/Visual?

And it would make sharing open-source project limited to their language
speakers, until you have someone translating the project. And what happens
when that person can't keep up with the pace of the original project? Just
look at all the material in Chinese on Github that is just inaccessible to
non-chinese speakers.

All engineering schools in France require a minimum score on tests like
TOEIC/TOEFL (in my school it was TOEIC 785 / 990, got raised to 800). High
school graduation requires a CEFR level of B2 (even if not all students reach
it) in English.

> I know if I had to learn french in order to code, I wouldn't be a
> programming. And I'm sure it's the truth for the vast majority of american
> programmers.

Except that a lot of the world is already exposed to English in movies,
series, books, websites, memes, YouTube, work. American are not exposed to
French, German, Japanese, Chinese.

~~~
dntbnmpls
> You can but then it's a work to do for each language.

You make it sound like that's a bad thing. Once again, I'm not sure whether it
is laziness or just learned helplessness.

> That's how science got reinvented in multiple places before virtually all
> papers start to be written in English and shared in international journals.

That's not why. It's because communication wasn't as global as it is today.
And you seem to think that just because each nation/language has their own
ecosystem that somehow the world will stop communicating with each other. You
think english will cease to be the lingua franca of science. Nothing will
really change except a lot of french people who wouldn't program in english
would program in french. You can still program in english if you want. You can
communicate in english. Your country would just have more options.

> Do you suggest adding a layer of dependencies and complexity to the build
> systems to preprocess the source code to make it compilable by
> GCC/clang/Visual?

No. Is there an added layer of dependencies and complexity to compiling
languages in english?

> Just look at all the material in Chinese on Github that is just inaccessible
> to non-chinese speakers.

So translate it. What is with the helpless attitude? Do you feel helpless that
russian literature is in russian and you can't read russian? No, you'd find a
french translation of russian literature right? Would you rather 1.4 billion
chinese be able to use the chinese material or would you rather the 1.4
billion learn english first?

> American are not exposed to French, German, Japanese, Chinese.

Sure, not as much, but that doesn't take away from my point. There would be
far less american programmers if we had to learn another language to program.
It's common sense.

Do you think more americans would watch Parasite or Amelie if we had to learn
korean or french first? Or more watch the movies once those movies were
subtitled/dubbed in english first?

All I'm saying is that porting the ecosystem into people's native languages
would boost the numbers of programmers and advance technology. It won't take
away from those like you who want to program in english and it certainly won't
take away from dominance of the english language in international
communication.

Just like you can watch an american movie without subs/dubs. But most of your
countrymen can't. Would you be against subbing/dubbing of english language
movies to disadvantage your countrymen? I doubt it.

~~~
Qu3tzal
> It's because communication wasn't as global as it is today. And you seem to
> think that just because each nation/language has their own ecosystem that
> somehow the world will stop communicating with each other.

True, it would not but the communication surface would be much smaller, we
would depend on a few bilinguals.

> Nothing will really change except a lot of french people who wouldn't
> program in english would program in french. You can still program in english
> if you want.

People barely speak English already so if you remove the need for some English
keyword to do development, you can be sure you are heading toward a generation
that doesn't know how and doesn't care about speaking English.

> No. Is there an added layer of dependencies and complexity to compiling
> languages in english?

No because they are built from the ground up to use English. So if I
understand your idea, by creating languages that are based on each local
language we would not be able to share source code without having to translate
it into our own language?

> So translate it.

So I need to learn Chinese. And English. And Russian. Or, more realistically,
I need to depend on someone to do the translation for me. Automatic
translation is not really that good for books and websites from the experience
I have. Just taking cppreference which translates automatically, most of the
time it's non-sense.

> Do you feel helpless that russian literature is in russian and you can't
> read russian? No, you'd find a french translation of russian literature
> right?

Yes but I miss on a lot of Russian literature.

I agree with you that if we had a programming language in French of the
quality of Java or C or Python it would allow some individuals, that see
English as a barrier, to get into programming. But the cons and the issues it
brins largely outweight, in my opinion, this benefit.

~~~
dntbnmpls
> People barely speak English already so if you remove the need for some
> English keyword to do development, you can be sure you are heading toward a
> generation that doesn't know how and doesn't care about speaking English.

So be it if it means more programmers in france, china, russia, etc.

> No because they are built from the ground up to use English.

Yeah, and you can do the same in other major languages. It should be easier
since we already did most of the work for you.

> So if I understand your idea, by creating languages that are based on each
> local language we would not be able to share source code without having to
> translate it into our own language?

Yes. You'd be able to share the libraries and executables, but not the source
unless you know the language.

> So I need to learn Chinese. And English. And Russian.

No. The chinese, english, russian, etc has to be translated into french. Have
you ever read a book by a non-french author?

> Automatic translation is not really that good for books and websites from
> the experience I have.

That's my point. You are a worse programmer than you could be because you are
coding in a foreign language. If you coded in french, you'd be a better
programmer. After all, programming is an art, like literature.

> I agree with you that if we had a programming language in French of the
> quality of Java or C or Python it would allow some individuals

You completely missed my point. You could convert Java, C, Python, etc into
french or any other language. It's simply updating the grammar where you could
do a simple 1 to 1 conversion of the keywords. It's so simple that an
ambitious and competent person could do it over a weekend. The hard part is
translating the libraries and the executables - the actual code in the wild.
But it's doable if given enough resources.

Like you said, people translate documents in many languages already. Why not
take the extra step and translate the source as well?

------
throwaway1777
No one mentioned video games? An extremely high percentage of South Koreans
play video games and they have many of the top competitive players and esports
leagues. I find it hard to believe these will transition to Linux any time
soon.

~~~
dgellow
The article is about South Korea __government __PCs.

------
remir
I said this 10 years ago: if government from many developed nations pool their
resources together, we could have a serious alternative to Windows and Windows
Server. Most of the base elements are already there.

~~~
hrjd
We already have a better alternative to Windows Server. It's Linux.

~~~
AdrianB1
For server, definitely. For desktops, no: you have a thousand Linux variations
that are a nightmare to support on large scale. It is hard enough to support
2-3 Windows versions in the same time, it is impossible to have an entire
country on the same Linux distro and version unless you make it mandatory as
in "North Korea mandatory".

~~~
detaro
Why is the government mandating one or two versions of Windows for _government
computers_ fine, but requiring one or two selected versions of Linux distros
"North Korea"?

~~~
AdrianB1
TLDR: there are only 2 Windows versions with large market share, Linux on
desktop is much more fragmented.

No, the government is mandating nothing, users can pick from the most popular
OS and that are now Windows 10 and Windows 7. If you let users pick a Linux,
any Linux, they will pick them all, unless the government really forces
everyone to pick a single version - probably that is the point of the the
version in the spotlight.

~~~
detaro
Government workers pick the OS on their work PCs, really? I'm quite sure "this
is your PC, IT has installed Windows X on it" is the common case. It doesn't
become suddenly bad if that instead is "... has installed Ubuntu 18.04 on it".

------
runxel
Wait, the country which stills uses Internet Explorer 6 for online banking?

~~~
pcr910303
As a South Korean, I can definitely assure you that’s not the case. We
definitely didn’t mandate the use of IE ‘6’... and while it’s true that until
early to mid 2010s banking did mandate use of IE, it stopped as soon as the
smartphones became mainstream. Almost all banks and shopping malls work on
Chrome and mobiles as well.

------
honestoHeminway
I wonder if the open source world could saddle on - what is obviously just a
price lowering attempt. Grow something like the mozilla foundation, just from
the attempts to reign license costs in- which then implements a directx
compatible gfx api layer and a comon driver pool - that really always works.

------
OrgNet
Windows 10 was the last nail in the coffin for Windows....

~~~
HeWhoLurksLate
Windows 10 seems to run _faster_ on older computers than even 7 did.

Not saying it's my favorite thing, but rolling updates and decent built-in
anti-malware make it a fairly good option these days, and with WSL (Windows
Subsystem for Linux) and Multipass, there's a lot of _Linux_ stuff that can be
done on Windows.

IMO, Windows 10, the separated kernel stuff they're doing, and their current
support for Open Source software is the _best_ thing Microsoft has done in a
long time.

Hopefully they don't get to _Extinguish_ this time.

~~~
chiefalchemist
I've a long time Windows user. Lately, I've been considering a switch to MBP
but the cost is ridiculous. I'm now thinking my best choice is to upgrade my
hardware and do a deep dive in Windows Subsystem of Linux. That would give me
the best of both world, yes?

