China will see the release of a home-grown operating system in October, according to a report in Xinhua, the state press agency of the People's Republic of China. The OS will be initially released on desktop systems and later expanded to smartphones and other mobile devices the report said.
The intention is to compete against Microsoft, Apple and Google, the report said quoting Ni Guangnan of the Chinese Academy of Engineering from an article in the People's Post and Telecommunication News. Ni heads up and OS development alliance.
According to the report the ending of support for the Windows XP operating system and a Chinese government ban on the procurement of the Windows 8 operating system has renewed interest among domestic OS developers. "China has more than a dozen mobile OS developers with no independent intellectual property rights because their research is based on Android," Xinhua quoted Ni as saying.
Help us compete with Google, Apple, Microsoft
"Our key to success lies in an environment that can help us compete with Google, Apple and Microsoft," the report quoted Ni, as saying.
What remains unclear is whether the Chinese Academy of Engineering OS is related to a similar initiative at China's Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MII). In March 2013 it was announced that MII had selected Ubuntu from British software company Canonical Ltd. as the basis for standard operating systems in China.
Canonical agreed to join with the China Software and Integrated Chip Promotions Centre (CSIP) and the National University of Defense Technology (Changsha, China) to form the CNN Open Source Innovations Joint Lab in Beijing. The CCN Joint Lab was scheduled to produce a Ubuntu Kylin OS with a number of Chinese customizations, with the first release expected in conjunction with Ubuntu 13.04 in April 2013.
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