Bitter political foes South and North Korea are to jointly develop a version of Linux.

With just weeks to go before South Korea's presidential election at the end of last year, Seoul's newspapers were full of stories about historic North-South cooperation.

North Korea has reportedly developed its own version of the Linux operating with a graphical user interface that closely resembles Microsoft Windows.

North Korea has been discovered developing its own Linux distro named Red Star OS. To make it even more interesting, it is said to be commissioned by the infamous Kim Jong-il.

I've written before about the curious case of South Korea, where the use of Internet Explorer and ActiveX is almost mandatory. I rather despaired of anything changing this situation, since there didn't seem to be any way to get around it from outside. And yet, remarkably, change is coming...

SOME DETAILS about North Korea's much rumoured Red Star operating system are slowly starting to emerge.

There was an announcement a while back that North Korea had come out with its own version of Linux (called Red Star OS). I wasn’t able to get a download link…until today.

In short: there's an incredible free software movement happening in Latin America. To support this movement, North-by-South is a San Francisco-based business whose goal is to give businesses in Silicon Valley access to this pool of talent and to materially support the open source developers in Latin America.

Lhe second annual LinuxWorld Korea took place in Seoul's Coex Convention and Exhibition Center June 20 through June 23.