China standardizes national OS based on Ubuntu

The Ministry of Industry and Information of China has decided to make Ubuntu the basis of a national OS. China has been developing a standard operating system called Kylin (the name comes from the mythical animal Jilin ) since 2007. It was originally based on FreeBSD and was used primarily by the military. Then a Linux version based on RHEL was developed. Now, in order to make it a truly massive nationwide standard, the Chinese government has decided to join forces with Canonical. The new OS will be called Ubuntu Kylin.

The first version will be released in April on the basis of Ubuntu 13.04. It has extensive support for Chinese input methods and calendars, and Dash will integrate search in popular Chinese services. In the future, localization and integration into the system of national sites and services will deepen. The following releases will include integration with Baidu maps and search, Taobao electronic trading platform, WPS office package, popular in China, national payment and transport systems.

This step is part of the five-year program of the Chinese government to promote open source software and the development of open source. Within the framework of cooperation with Canonical, a joint Open Source Innovation Laboratory will be created in Beijing, which will develop the Ubuntu Kylin OS in close cooperation with Canonical. For Mark Shuttleworth, this means entering the huge and rapidly growing Chinese market, and, most importantly, a giant testing ground for developing and running in Ubuntu versions for tablets and smartphones, since the Ubuntu Kylin project will cover all platforms from server to mobile devices.

Source - Canonical .
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