Chinese Linux snub to Microsoft: The countdown is on

While the Oracle-supported Asianux project trundles away in the background, the Chinese government is pushing ahead with its collaboration with South Korea and Japan to adapt the Linux kernel for the Asian market. The first commercial offerings are expected within six months, according to a Chinese official.

Lu Shouqun is the president of the China Open Source Software Promotion Union (Cosspu), a public body supported by business. It's charged with supervising the Chinese part of the three-country project.

"You wouldn't want to wear the same style of clothing every day of your life, would you?" he told Reuters. "Government users need security, and business users need cheap software. Linux meets both those needs."

On the Chinese side, Party officials and big business alike have made no secret that their pro-Linux stance is a way of limiting their technological "dependence" on Western products and particularly those of Microsoft.

The idea is to create software between the three countries that will be licensed for free to local developers. They would then be free to change and sell their own software packages to users in the respective countries, the Chinese official said, resulting in the first packages available in the next six months.

The alliance headed by Lu Shouqun hasn't decided if software companies with a pro-Linux flavour, such as Oracle or Sun, who have a strong presence in China, will also be allowed to profit from the jointly developed software or if their licensing conditions will be the same.

Cosspu already counts BEA Systems, HP, IBM, Intel, Novell and SAP among its members.

The Chinese official believes the Asianux project, developing separately with database giant Oracle at the helm, along with Red Flag Software, a semi-private company which looks a bit like a "Chinese Red Hat", is confusing matters.

"We support an international standard for Linux, not a whole other Asian standard. It's not feasible anyway," he told Reuters.

Jerome Thorel writes for ZDNet France