Countries

Whole countries are experimenting with Linux and several have started efforts that will result in their own distributions. China, South Korea, and Japan [14] have agreed to build a Linux distribution that will be used by the people of that region. This amounts to about one-half the population of the world. It appears that the Red Flag Linux distribution will be the basis for this effort.

This kinds of support makes it possible to standardize across large regions of the world without paying a ``Microsoft tax''; that is, without forcing people to buy Microsoft in order to talk to the world.