NPR reported this morning that the Cultural Department in Nanching, China, has been requiring that internet cafe owners replace Windows XP with their home grown Red Flag Linux – a “free” operating system that comes with a mandatory $726 maintenance contract.
The move is ostensibly to crack down on piracy, but at least one internet cafe owner has claimed that legitimate copies of Windows and other Linux distributions have been removed too. This lead Xiao Qiang, director of the China Internet Project at the University of California-Berkeley, to conclude that Red Flag Linux was an instrument of online government control.
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You are free to do what we tell you
Wednesday, December 3rd, 2008Red Flag Linux
NPR reported this morning that the Cultural Department in Nanching, China, has been requiring that internet cafe owners replace Windows XP with their home grown Red Flag Linux – a “free” operating system that comes with a mandatory $726 maintenance contract.
The move is ostensibly to crack down on piracy, but at least one internet cafe owner has claimed that legitimate copies of Windows and other Linux distributions have been removed too. This lead Xiao Qiang, director of the China Internet Project at the University of California-Berkeley, to conclude that Red Flag Linux was an instrument of online government control.
Gotta love that free software!
Tags: China Internet, Crack, Flag Linux, Free Operating System, Free Software, Gotta Love, Government Control, Internet Cafe Owner, Internet Cafe Owners, Internet Project, Linux, Linux Distributions, Linux Free, Maintenance Contract, Npr, Piracy, Red Flag, University Berkeley, University Of California, University Of California Berkeley, Windows Linux, Windows Xp
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