China standardizes national OS based on Ubuntu

The Ministry of Industry and Informatization of China decided to make Ubuntu the basis of the national OS. China has been developing a standard operating system called Kylin (the name comes from the mythical animal Qilin ) 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, 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 based on Ubuntu 13.04. It plans to expand support for Chinese input methods and a calendar; Dash will integrate search on popular Chinese services. In the future, localization and integration into the system of national sites and services will deepen. The next releases will include integration with Baidu maps and search, Taobao electronic trading platform, WPS office suite popular in China, national payment and transport systems.

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

Source - Canonical .