MCLC: China Operating System unveiled

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: kirk (denton.2 at osu.edu)
Subject: China Operating System unveiled
***********************************************************

Source: Sinosphere, NYT (1/17/14):
http://sinosphere.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/01/17/china-unveils-new-native-ope
rating-system/

China Unveils New Native Operating System
By BREE FENG 

Chinese researchers have developed a new mobile operating system intended
to break the dominance in China of systems produced by Google, Apple and
Microsoft.

At a ceremony in Beijing on Wednesday, the Chinese Academy of Sciences and
the Shanghai-based Liantong Network Communications Technology unveiled the
domestically produced China Operating System, or COS, designed for use on
many devices including smartphones and personal computers.

The Chinese Academy of Sciences called COS a strategic product for
national security, urgently needed following revelations regarding United
States surveillance and Microsoft Windows ending further support of its XP
system, the state-run Global Times newspaper reported
<http://www.globaltimes.cn/content/837978.shtml#.UtjpRhCSxSJ>.

The COS is “completely” independently developed, from the basic coding to
the user interface, said an article
<http://www.cas.cn/xw/cmsm/201401/t20140116_4023650.shtml> posted on the
Chinese Academy of Sciences website.

It said existing open-source operating systems pose security risks, and
foreign-made systems have “acclimatization” difficulties in China,
problems that COS addresses.

Li Mingshu, director of the Institute of Software at the Chinese Academy
of Sciences, said Wednesday that the researchers intend to continue making
improvements to COS and match or even overtake other systems that dominate
the Chinese market today.

Chen Feili, the deputy general manager of Liantong Network Communications
Technology, told <http://www.c114.net/news/16/a816889.html> C114, a
Chinese communications news website, that the Chinese telecom giants China
Mobile and China Telecom have been testing phones based on COS over the
past three months.

There’s already “a certain consensus” about bringing a commercial version
of COS to market, Mr. Chen said. He said that discussions about business
models and compatibility issues were already underway.

Though he declined to mention the names of the manufacturers, Mr. Chen
said that there are already four smartphone models that use COS.

COS can run Java applications, and supports HTML 5 web applications and
games, the C114 article said. It is currently compatible with over 100,000
applications, it said.

The state broadcaster CCTV showed COS in action on Thursday, in a news
segment in which a reporter demonstrated that people could play popular
games, including “Cut the Rope” and “Angry Birds” on an unbranded black
mobile phone.

Mr. Chen said he has high ambitions for COS, saying the “ultimate goal” is
to make it the main operating system in China. This is a lofty goal.
According to the American market researcher International Data Corporation
<http://www.idc.com/getdoc.jsp?containerId=prCN24344613>, China’s
smartphone market is dominated by Android with nearly 90 percent of phones
in 2013 running on the Google system.

COS is not the only domestically produced operating system to make
headlines recently. On Jan. 9, the Chinese technology company Coship
Electronics announced
<http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/china/2014-01/09/c_133032451.htm> that
it had produced the country’s first smartphone operating system with
independent intellectual property rights. The company’s chairman, Yuan
Ming, said that the system, called 960 OS, took 15 years to develop.

How long COS was under development and the costs of research and
development were not disclosed.

Although the state-run People’s Daily praised
<http://tc.people.com.cn/n/2014/0116/c183206-24133631.html> COS on
Thursday as the “realization of the Chinese Dream in the field of
operating systems,” the online reaction from Chinese consumers was more
scathing.

“Its full name should be Copy Other System,” said one user
<http://weibo.com/signup/signup.php?inviteCode=1862461722> with the handle
“byxu,” in one of the most upvoted comments on Sina weibo. “It’s not open
source because they’re terrified that others will see that the source code
is the same as Android, and accuse them of cheating the government out of
money.”