It is envisaged that the operating system, to be called K-OS, will eventually replace all other foreign operating systems, including Microsoft Windows, which according to official figures runs 100.00001% of all Korean web sites.
The government fears that national and economic security is being compromised by the poor security of Windows, an operating system so bad it is said to be easy to create compromised pirate versions which when used by companies and government departments can send confidential data directly to China without the need for prostitutes.
It would be the government's third attempt to become software independent from foreign companies. In the early 1990s, it oversaw the development of the K-DOS project, which sought to create a text-only and inflexible alternative to the recently launched graphically pretty Microsoft Windows 3.0. Launched only one year after the widespread adoption of Windows 3, the Korean companies which had developed K-DOS with government funding refused to use it because it was "untested". The government then launched a plan to test K-DOS in the education sector using the money from change left in public telephones, at which point ordinary Koreans stopped leaving change in public telephones just to avoid spending the next five years playing text-only games on their computers.
The government's second attempt to create an indigenous software industry came with the support for the Hangul Word Processor (HWP) produced by Hancom, who describe themselves as "the home of ambitious dreamers 404 not found". With its pioneering use of quantum programming HWP allows, for example, characters to be both bold and not bold at the same time, which not only provides an outcome for every action and inaction, but also effectively prevents foreign companies producing cheaper compatible products because it is seemingly random outputs make it impossible to reverse engineer. Mandated for use by all government departments, it is widely believed HWP even prevented huge numbers of deaths in 2010 when Seoul sent a declaration of war in HWP format to the Japanese government in Tokyo, which according to sources they have so far been unable to open.
Major Korean IT companies, despite standing to benefit from government investment in connection with the initiative, were privately not enthusiastic about the project. "It's hard to refuse the government's plan, so we will help, but to be honest we don't feel like it" said an official at one company, Seongsan. But if major IT companies eventually develop the system, the government is hoping that K-OS will spread across Korea and eventually sweep the world.
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