Reuters reports that Japan, South Korea, and China are likely to develop a new operating system as an alternative to Windows. The proposal was made by Japanese Trade Minister Takeo Hiranuma at an economic summit in Cambodia.

The article says its likely that the three governments will develop the new OS on top of Linux. I hope so. It would be silly for them to not take advantage of the work that's been done in the open source community already. Besides, without a development community like the one offered by Linux, they're likely to end up with the same problems they're trying to escape: a virus-prone, close and proprietary system.