Novell has signed a cooperation agreement with China Standard Software Company (CS2C), the leading Linux firm in China. The two companies will promote the development and adoption of Linux in the country, and combine resources on distribution of technology and services for the Chinese market.

Intel is establishing a joint innovation center with Tencent, one of China's largest Internet firms, to develop products and services around the chip maker's MeeGo Linux mobile operating system and devices using its Atom processors.

Several device-oriented products familiar to LinuxDevices readers came away from last week's LinuxWorld Expo with product excellence awards. Winners included Trolltech's Qtopia Greenphone SDK (software development kit), Unicon's System-on-Display hardware reference design, and Coverity's online software quality testing tools.

Last Friday, I attended the Linux World China 2007 conference and exhibition held in the luxury Beijing International Hotel.

Although China's Linux market as a whole doubled from 2003 to 2006 to $20 million per year, sales of Linux desktop software grew more slowly. In fact, the market share of Linux desktop software in China dropped from 16% to 12% in the same period. But according to CCID Consulting, sales of Linux desktop software increased 25.1% in the third quarter of this year, catching up with the quick growth of China's Linux industry as a whole. Several new developments have added fuel to the growth.

China, which has long wished to develop its own computer industry, has chosen to go with Linux on the software side. Loongson is its hope for the hardware side.

China has unanimously voted "no, with comments" on OOXML. As I had noted in an earlier blog entry, China had been signalling some displeasure with Microsoft and OOXML in recent weeks, via Xinhua, the official government news agency, so this is not totally a surprise.

"It's a very different marketplace, and having this very American, centralized view and trying to do things in the old way is not going to work," said Red Hat Vice President Michael Chen on opening up business opportunities for his company in China. "You need to have a longer-term strategy. Try to build your China strategy for five to 10 years."

SourceForge, the world’s largest development and download repository of Open Source code and applications, appears to blocked in Mainland China on the eve of Beijing 2008 Olympic Games. A screen copy of the command “tracert www.sourceforge.net” shows that the problem is a router inside China Telecom.