Re: Anti-Reds at Red Hat?

[Jonathan Q <jq@example.com>]

Dennis McMurchy (denismcm@example.com) wrote:

>   I hope I'm missing something here and this isn't what I imagine.
> Maybe there's a special PRC version of RedHat?  But if this is just
> more anti-Chinese Yankee crap, RedHat will disappear from my HDDs
> before you can say, "Dongfang Hong!"  

This is pure speculation on my my part, but I doubt it's
any such thing, since the spat about the plane is a pretty 
recent thing (pre-dated by Red Hat 7.1).  While it's always
possible that there's some technical reason (problem or 
glitch?), let's look at these two points:

1) TurboLinux has been in China for a couple years or so
   and is fairly well-entrenched, I would suppose;

2) There is a native Chinese distro, Red Flag Linux, produced
   with the blessings (and, I believe, financial assistance)
   of the Chinese government.

Looking at those, it may be the case that Red Hat just
thinks it isn't worth their while to pour time and money
into Chinese support in their distro at this time, especially
when they'd probably sell roughly one legit boxed set
there, and all others would be copies (a lot like in Vietnam,
where you have to really work to find a CD or DVD of anything 
at all that isn't a pirate copy).

Again, this is pure speculation, but from a business perspective
it seems to make sense.

I'm rather interested in Vietnamese on Linux these days, and
recently ran across VLUG (much like TLUG, VLUG members are
all over the world); they run a (mostly) Vietnamese-language
mailing list and have a web site (again, largely in VN).
The domain owner is in Texas, so I guess VLUG is nominally
US-based, but pretty international in character.  A few of
them are in Japan (one in Hakodate, one in Chiba, that I know
about so far), so perhaps they will drop in on TLUG sometime,
either in person or virtually.

Jonathan