South Korean web giant Naver creates its own Linux distro
'Navix' follows OpenELA rules, comes with ten years support, and is already used in production at scale
Korean web giant Naver has gone into the operating system business, releasing its very own Linux distribution.
Naver is often compared to Google, as started providing search and a web portal then sprawled into email, payment services, e-commerce, blogging, and public cloud services. Its search offering remains South Korea's favorite, with market share that eclipses even the big G.
The giant corp operates at least two of its own datacenters. A facility opened in 2023 is said to have 270 MW capacity, and possess rackspace capable of housing 600,000U of kit.
On Monday Naver emulated another of Google's expansive ventures, announcing the release of its own Linux distribution dubbed Navix. Not to be confused with an unrelated enterprise software suite with a vaguely similar name.
Trademark lawyers, start your engines.
The distro draws from the Open Enterprise Linux Association's (OpenELA) resources and is RHEL-compatible.
Naver promises to support the distro at no cost for ten years – five of them with full updates and then another five years during which only security and critical updates will be offered.
The multifaceted firm hopes that decade of support will see Navix stand out from other distros – especially for developers who haven't been able to settle on a cut of Linux for their needs, or fear the provider of their chosen distro changes its business model and requires payments. Enterprise users and HPC types are also targets.
Naver already uses Navix to power plenty of its own workloads – a proof point for would-be users – and will make it available as an option for VMs in its public cloud.
Release notes for the distro suggest it's based on version 5.14 of the Linux kernel, and includes familiar collection of packages. A GitHub page currently offers only a bug-tracker – it's unclear where the source code of the distro can be found, or the license under which it is offered. Downloads can be found here.
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Visitors to those links will quickly notice that the text is all in Korean – which may be the point of Navix, given Naver's success is in part due to proud patriotic parochialism among South Korean citizens who like that the country has produced local champions. The Hancom Office suite, which has around 30 percent domestic market share, is another example of home-grown software achieving levels of popularity that few vendors have been able to secure as they compete against the likes of Microsoft.
South Korean government websites often post documents created using Hancom Office and its proprietary file formats alongside PDFs – another indication of the suite's local relevance and the nation's fondness for local developers' wares. ®