[Gllug] Open Source Hardware User Group meeting on Thursday.

[Christopher Hunter]

On Wed, 2010-04-28 at 15:43 -0700, Walter Stanish wrote:
>           No, not sarcasm. He was looking at the operating systems
>         actually in use,
>         not what was on sale. He went to Shenzhen as a buyer.
> 
> 
> I can only assume your friend was buying in a very specific sector.
> 
> 
> As a general rule, Linux in China (as everywhere) is huge in embedded
> and
> servers.  In my experience in the country (~8 years, many cities,
> ~2001-2009),
> you really don't see it anywhere else at all, that is: outside of
> universities and
> hackers.  As an employer, I found it very hard to find solid Linux
> talent outside
> of major universities / software development parks.

That's peculiar - the first three companies I contacted there for
software development work all touted their Linux prowess and didn't even
mention Windows at all.  Just one other company that was bidding offered
ports of their software to Windows, but all the stuff I saw was Linux.

I saw Linux in schools, colleges and private homes. There had been some
kind of political crackdown on pirated Windows-ware in the months before
my last visit, and many people had "seen the light".  All the commercial
systems I saw - process controllers (often for PC104 format), PLCs,
little ITX machines and so on were all running one flavour of Linux or
another.

It was the same on a recent visit to Korea - Linux everywhere I
looked.  

My brother just returned from Japan, and he was astonished by the amount
of FOSS stuff he saw.  He migrated his commercial translation business
to FOSS last year, and was amazed to discover that the vast majority of
his translators, wherever they were,  around the world, had already made
the move.  He uses exclusively "in country" translators, the majority of
whom are academics of one sort or another, so it's probably not too
surprising that they already used FOSS!

Chris 


-- 
Gllug mailing list  -  Gllug at gllug.org.uk
http://lists.gllug.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/gllug