The monopoly of foreign office software over Chinese market will be broken, as domestic software developers have jointed hands to start a project of "Chinese version" office software. The Beijing IT Industry Promotion Center announced on Thursday that two programs named "Yangfan" and "Qihang" (both means to "set sail") were kicked off, aiming at working out an operation system equivalent to Win 98 within a year.
The Center said that 18 companies and universities joined the programs and its first desktop operation system "Yangfan 1.0" had been gradually put into use in offices of government departments.
As reported, in the copyright software purchasing at the end of last year, since Software didn't bid, the Beijing municipal government bought software equivalent to Win 95 from Chinese companies such as CS&S and RedFlag. While the newly started two programs would make updates on this basis to improve the software to a level of Win98 and compatible with Office2000 and Word.
(People's Daily July 19, 2002)
