Linux unites North and South Korea
Who would have thought that Linux could bring about world peace? As it turns out, North and South Korea are partnering on the development of a common Linux distribution that could ease integration if the two countries ever decided to unite, as The Guardian reports:
Under the banner of "Hana Linux" - literally "One" Linux - the two countries have agreed to work on a groundbreaking IT development project that might shatter the final Cold War boundary.
South Korea is one of Linux's biggest converts. Since discovering the free operating system in 2003, officials have unveiled plans to switch all government-run offices to Linux. Now under the terms of the agreement signed between the two states, South Korea will set up Linux training centres in North Korea.
Peace, love, and Linux? Maybe. Maybe not. But it's very cool to see the two governments collaborating on IT, if little else.
Matt Asay brings a decade of in-the-trenches open-source business and legal experience to The Open Road, with an emphasis on emerging open-source business strategies and opportunities. Matt is vice president of business development at Alfresco, a company that develops open-source software for content management. He is a member of the CNET Blog Network and is not an employee of CNET. Disclosure.
South Korea does not use SSL but their own home brewed encryption cipher, SEED, which only works on Windows with IE. So none of these Linux users in North or South Korea can do any kind of secure transaction on the Internet with other South Korean websites/web services.
I've documented on my blog (the cost of monoculture and update on the cost of monoculture in Korea) the fact that South Koreans cannot do any secure transactions with South Korean websites without Microsoft Windows and Internet Explorer. Look at the non-adoption of Linux on the desktop or even Apple's Macintosh in South Korea- basically no market share whatsoever.
Until we see the South Korean certificate authority (KISA) move away from a Windows-only/IE-only encryption mechanism, there's little reason to believe that Linux will grow in Korea. If you can't do any secure transactions on your Linux machine with any Korean bank, any Korean ecommerce site, any North or South Korean e-government web service, or any Korean financial service, there's scant reason to believe Linux will grow in North or South Korea.