Japan-based Miracle Linux is teaming up with China’s Red Flag to form a Linux development environment called ‘Asianux’ that has far reaching implications for the open-source operating system in both Japan and China.
“By collaborating with each other, the two leading Linux vendors can share technology to build a Linux standard to respond to business demands and deliver the best solutions for customers including government,” Takashi KODAMA Vice President, Strategic Alliance & Promotion for Miracle Linux told internetnews.com. “It will also be easier to engage major individual software vendors (ISVs) and individual hardware vendors (IHVs) for Linux migration.”
Miracle Linux is one of the dominant players in the Japanese Linux Server OS market providing enterprise Linux and support services to customers and system integrators. China’s Red Flag Linux is a major Linux OS vendor in that lucrative market and stated that it has strong support from the government wishing to adopt a standard Linux OS across China. Red Flag’s customers include China Post and Xiaolanzhen Town. Both companies were founded in June of 2000 with partner support from Oracle (Miracle Linux is actually a subsidiary of Oracle, which has a 54 percent stake).
“Oracle is fully committed to supporting the Linux operating system. Our strategy has been to build strategic partnerships with leading Linux vendors to provide direct technical support of key Linux operating systems,” said Kevin Walsh, vice president of Internet technologies at Oracle and head of the Oracle China Development Center in a statement.
The Red Flag-Miracle Linux partnership will focus on all the major components required for Linux deployment including server operating environment, joint support and desktop operating systems.
The two companies will set up a joint team to develop Asianux at Oracle’s China Development Center in Beijing. The Asianux system is essentially an effort to develop and standardize a common Asian Linux kernel, libraries and packages. The Asianux partnership will also act as a certification body for hardware and software that is intended to run on the new Asian Linux kernel. New Red Flag and Miracle Linux distributions will be based on the Asianux core and will be bundled with localized features for each particular market.
Though the initial plan for the partnership is to focus on China and Japan, the new initiative may have significantly broader implications for Linux in the entire Asia/Pacific region.
“In the future we intend to expand to the entire Asia Pacific region and be the leader,” Kodama told internetnews.com. “We will communicate to the Linux/Open source community in Asia and contribute to the community.”
