The British Linux company Canonical is teaming with the Chinese Ministry of Industry and Information Technology to create Ubuntu Kylin, a Linux distribution specifically for China.
Kylin will include support for Chinese characters and input methods, and it will integrate with Chinese web services, including music services, online banking tools, and the mapping service operated by local web giant Baidu. The plan is to release the distribution next month.
The reference architecture is being defined by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology's The China Software and Integrated Chip Promotions Centre, or CSIP. Canonical and CSIP will also be working with the CCN Open Source Innovation Joint Lab in Beijing. The project is part of China's most recent Five Year Plan, which includes strengthening the country's information technology industry.
Tim Yeaton -- CEO of the open source management and research company Black Duck Software -- says he's been working with Chinese companies to promote open source since 1997. But things got more serious in 2004 when the China Open Source Software Promotion Union (COPU) -- a non-government organization -- was founded. Yeaton is now an adviser to the group, along with Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth, GNOME Foundation chairman Dave Neary, and many others.
Dell and Canonical have been selling Ubuntu notebooks in China since 2011. But China already had its own distribution of Linux: Red Flag Linux, which was backed by the government-owned ShangHai NewMargin Venture Capital and the Ministry of Information Industry's venture capital arm CCIDNET Investment, according to a 2007 paper titled The Emergence of Open-Source Software in China. Many government agencies have promoted the operating system as an alternative to Windows. Red Flag held 30 percent of the desktop market in China, the paper says.
Meanwhile, developers are slowly starting to get into open source. Ronan Berder -- a French developer living in Shanghai -- wrote last month that open source community building among developers has been slow going, comparing it to the early days of open source in the west. But Lupaworld provides a Chinese language source for open source software news, and OS China is a Sourceforge style code hosting service that houses around 24,000 projects, though most of them are forks of English language projects. And Chinese developers are contributing back to common open source projects as well. The latest release of the Linux kernel includes 11,000 contributions from Chinese developers, according to Black Duck's research.
Red Flag has always been the country's biggest open source project. But it seems that Canonical wants make free software even bigger.
