Red Hat may have recently hit over a billion dollars in revenue for the time, but Canonical is certainly on track to make a landmarks of their own in the near future as well.
Meet Ubuntu Kylin, a variant of Ubuntu “more suitable for Chinese users”. Especially Chinese users that live in China.
Canonical has struck a deal with the Chinese Ministry of Industry and Information Technology in which an official derivative of Ubuntu for the people of China is being created and supported by Canonical. The implementation of this project is a clear sign given by the Chinese government that they are not only ready and willing to promote open source in a huge way, but now doing it.
One report by Compterweekly suggests that “Kylin” is a play on words for the mythical hooved Chinese chimerical creature, the Qilin. Even if the name wasn’t intended to represent such an imminent arrival of sorts, the fact of the matter is that the arrival of Kylin is certainly a welcomed arrival by both the Chinese and Canonical.
In October of 2011, in a Canonical blog, it was announced that Canonical and Dell would start a “retail program to sell machines pre-loaded with Ubuntu, initially rolling out to 220 retail stores in China.” Well, Microsoft couldn’t possibly have been too happy about that relationship. Recently though Microsoft played a huge roll in bailing Dell out of a dilapidating PC business as the PC takes back seat in sales and tablet make their ascent in consumer popularity. If you’re interested in just how bad it is, feel free to reference this Forbes article, “Dell Outlines The Death Of The PC”. In other words, although Canonical could use such partnerships with companies such as Dell to help promote their Linux “Ubuntu” OS, but such combined efforts with Dell may be hard to come by in the future with Microsoft now stepping in to further assist Dell.
The Chinese governments support and coming use of Ubuntu Kylin for China (which has more than 1 billion residents) at least certainly gives us the appearance of a somewhat imminent rise of Linux. The Chinese love control, as do a large number of people in the world. Through the use of an open source OS made for the people of their country, it gives them the utmost in such control with no hidden proprietary code such as that by Microsoft, whom the entire world once heavily relied on.