Re: The year of the Linux desktop
They already have their own version of Linux, it's called Red Flag, I think. But I think the move is more about the whole infrastructure: now Intel or Qualcomm chips, no MPEG codecs, no embargoed encryption hardware, etc.
This is a huge amount of work for the Chinese to take on and probably doomed to failure if they tried to do it on their own. Not that they don't have sufficient qualified developers for this, because they probably do, but because it would be a classical withdrawal of key resources from the private sector and state-directed development is rarely on-time and on-target. But they now have a large enough private sector that can probably do most of the work needed: Huawei to turn AOSP into something as good as what Google can provide. But they will also need other countries to be prepared to interoperate.
This is where the US has probably got it wrong: the Chinese IT market is now comfortably larger than the US one and is now deeply connected to most of Asia and beyond. The US is still the leader when it comes to software but there isn't much left that couldn't be replaced fairly easily. China could easily do everything as open source to gain trust and, just like everyone else does, set up offices outside China for development. Whereas US is not going to get its mass manufacturing capacity back and its sanctions will become less and less effective over time.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
