We Look To China

               

As scary as it sounds, China is vital for Desktop Linux.    

I've been saying for over a year that Australia should stop pandering to the Chinese, that Australian companies shouldn't outsource their work to China, and that crappy Chinese products are a danger to our health (it seems like every day, there's a recall notice in the newspaper for yet another imported plastic toy).    

Unfortunately, I have to be pragmatic. I bought a new mouse today, and that is made in China. The CD pens I also bought are made in Taiwan. The big CD wallet I bought yesterday to house our new collection of DVDs is made in China as well. In my job, I often have to sell cheap Chinese shit ("yeah, it's really good! The display panel is actually made by Samsung"), and then cope with customer complaints when it breaks down.    

Another way I have to be pragmatic is when I say that China holds the key to getting Desktop Linux to the masses.    

The first hardware devices to publicise their Linux compatibility were cheap Chinese crap. Flash drives, memory card readers, etc - things that use the standard Mass Storage driver included in every operating system since 1998. This was done because of China's impending movement toward Red Flag Linux. (FYI, the name alone makes me sick). Then, some of the brand-name devices of the same class also printed Linux compatibility information, because they were made in the same factories as the China-owned stuff, and the factories told them that it's certified to be Linux-compatible.    

The hardware that is made in China will increasingly be made to be compatible with Linux, so it can be used with Chinese systems. The result, of course, means better hardware compatibility even for brand-name devices.    

Even that will not put Linux onto too many more desktops. The reason why we must look to China is this:    

China has a large number of hardware hackers. Right now, they are focussed on making copies of consumer electronics (e.g. they made a cheap, yet supposedly high-quality copy of an LG phone before LG even released it in China). These sorts of people could, and probably will, build an attractive, high-quality-yet-low-cost computer to run with Linux. They will start making them for their own domestic market, and since they'd be cheaper and more attractive than Lenovo and other Chinese brands, they'd be more popular. Obviously, the machines will come preinstalled with a Linux distribution and contain fully-compatible hardware. Microsoft wouldn't be able to use any market forces against them, as the machines would never come with Windows (or could be made-to-order with pirated Windows, which MS doesn't mind in China).    

When that happens, we could get a company to export the machines from China to other parts of the world, replace whatever Chinese distribution with something more popular in the Western world, find a department store that does not currently sell computers and arrange a deal with them. For instance, Big W and Target here in Australia sell cheap computers (Big W's are brand-name ones, Target uses "iCom"). We could try arranging a deal with K-Mart, and really *sell* the machines to them - they'd be able to price their machines lower than the competition due to no Windows licenses, allowing them to compete on this playing field. We could also *ahem* overstate how many people currently use Linux.    

Okay, so there's not a huge liklihood that we can pull all this off. But we're the open-source community, capable of adapting to anything. We could start distributing through electrical stores that currently can't obtain computers at competitive prices (Betta Electrical and Best Buy Electrical, to put in a plug for my workplace :-).  We could distribute through mail-order, using word-of-mouth and personal recommendation to promote the machines.    

But even if this particular plan doesn't work out, I'm still sure that we will, regrettably, look toward China for help with the Linux Desktop.    

 

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Interesting idea I had: Rather than write a GUI frontend for Hfsutils and Hfsplus, why not write a Fuse module in Python that is a very simple wrapper for those command-line programs? I'll see if I can write such a thing (for limited purposes only; you couldn't open a file directly on the HFS drive, for instance, you'd need to copy it off first). If you've written Fuse modules before, please contact me.