It literally is, if you run a Chinese internet cafe. They’re being forced to run ‘Red Flag Linux’.
Most suprising tidbit, the license for this goverment-sourced Linux is way, way costlier than that of one of the various flavours of Windows. Seems like a crackdown on the internet cafes, rather than a way to deal with the massive software piracy problem.
One wonders what this move will do to the economy of the World of Warcraft?
I don’t think they’ve violated the GPL, at least not from anything I’ve read on this. The GPL doesn’t have anything in it that restricts selling the software. You do have to release the source code to anyone you sell it to, which means they can then recompile it and give it away if they want, but you can’t use their trademarked name or images. See CentOS for example. But that wouldn’t be an option if the government is saying that they specifically need that Red Flag Linux. Now I wouldn’t want to be the Internet cafe owner who asks for a copy of the source code, but I haven’t seen anything about anyone asking foe it and being refused, so as far as I can see they haven’t violated the letter of the GPL, much as they may be stomping all over the spirit of it.
Red Flag Linux is GPL. You can download both binary and source from their FTP site: ftp://ftp.redflag-linux.com/pub/redflag/
