Anyone who knows the history of Microsoft will know why it is the most used operating system in the world. It is not because it is good, but because Bill Gates donated, for free, his operating system and began to be used in the most famous computers of the time. From then on, virtually any personal computer used Microsoft's system, which also caught the attention of developers. But future versions weren't free anymore, and that's one of the reasons why South Korea to switch to Linux.
So what communicated the Minister of the Interior and Security last Thursday. The decision is not 100% made yet, but they have started testing Linux on their computers. If they find no security issues, Tux will arrive in the South Korean country and will be used in all government computers. Taking into account that we are talking about operating systems whose strong point, one of them, is security, there is little left for the news to be official.
Linux is free, Windows is not
It may come as a surprise that the decision doesn't have much to do with security, but rather with the end of free Windows 7 support in January 2020. The change will cost them a total of $ 655 million, but it is money that would pay off in the future because Linux is free. Any knowledgeable programmer can create their own operating system based on the Linus Torvalds kernel, something that was demonstrated, for example, with Ubuntu Kylin, a distribution that ended up being official of the Canonical family.
Before making the change, the government has to test whether the system can run on private network devices without security risks and whether compatibility can reach existing websites and software that was developed for Windows. Considering that they hope to save costs with the change, they will most likely get around all the obstacles and South Korea adopt Linux from 2020.