Chinese Linux Distributor Red Flag Software Disappears Overnight

Chinese company Red Flag Software, once the second largest Linux distributor in the world, has ceased to exist virtually overnight following allegations of mismanagement and corruption.

According to a report by TechWeb, published in English by TechAsia, after more than a decade of serving the Chinese market, Red Flag has terminated all of its employees’ contracts, liquidated assets, and closed headquarters in Beijing.

TechWeb says Red Flag still owes as much as $2.5 million (£1.5m) to its employees in unpaid wages, in addition to other debts it might have.

Red is dead

Red Flag is an open source Linux distribution backed by the Chinese government which has been in development since August 1999. It was once thought that this OS could reduce the country’s dependency on Microsoft Windows.

Even though Red Flag sports an intentionally similar interface, it was mostly confined to the offices of China’s various government agencies. Meanwhile, more than half of Chinese desktops continue to run soon-to-be-dead Windows XP. Windows 8 accounts for less than three percent of the Chinese OS market.

According to TechAsia, Red Flag Software has been experiencing financial difficulties since April 2013, and by the end, the situation got so desperate it wasn’t even able pay its electricity bills. The company still owes its employees around 15 million Yuan – money which they are now attempting to recover from Red Flag’s largest shareholder – the Institute of Software at the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

Luckily, Chinese users have plenty of open source alternatives, like the Linux-based ‘China Operating System’, designed by the very same Chinese Academy of Sciences, which was ‘soft launched’ in January.

Ubuntu Kylin, developed by Canonical, a company based in the Isle of Man, is another popular choice in China. This distribution, released in April 2013, features content and apps specific to the Chinese market.

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