Sunwah – PearL Linux (previously spelled as Sun Wah – PearL Linux, abbreviation SWP) is a joint venture of the

Hong Kong Polytechnic University The Hong Kong Polytechnic University (PolyU) is a public research university located in Hung Hom, Hong Kong near Hung Hom station. The University is one of the eight government-funded degree-granting tertiary institutions in Hong Kong. Founded ...

and the Sunwah Group (previously spelled as Sun Wah Group). Sunwah – PearL Linux established the (SWP) Sunwah – PearL Linux Training & Development Centre on the university campus in January 2001. SWP promotes

open source Open source is source code that is made freely available for possible modification and redistribution. Products include permission to use the source code, design documents, or content of the product. The open-source model is a decentralized sof ...

software Software is a set of computer programs and associated documentation and data. This is in contrast to hardware, from which the system is built and which actually performs the work. At the lowest programming level, executable code consists ...

(OSS) technology.

Evolution

Since its incorporation, SWP has positioned itself as the open source technology transfer centre of its region. It developed skill transfer programs based on open source. In the early years, SWP's own developed programs were module by module based on specific applications for

operating system An operating system (OS) is system software that manages computer hardware, software resources, and provides common services for computer programs. Time-sharing operating systems schedule tasks for efficient use of the system and may also in ...

s or

programming language A programming language is a system of notation for writing computer programs. Most programming languages are text-based formal languages, but they may also be graphical. They are a kind of computer language. The description of a programming ...

s. In 2005, SWP started to become more focussed on information security. Besides short training programs, SWP started to work on Higher Education (HE) programs. SWP cooperated with the

University of Glamorgan , image_name = University of Glamorgan arms.png , image_size = 220px , caption = University of Glamorgan coat of arms , motto = Success Through Endeavour , established = , closed = , administrative_staff = , chancellor = John Morris ...

and the

University of Sunderland , mottoeng = Sweetly absorbing knowledge , established = 1901 - Sunderland Technical College1969 - Sunderland Polytechnic1992 - University of Sunderland (gained university status) , staff = , chancellor = Emeli ...

in the

United Kingdom The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, commonly known as the United Kingdom (UK) or Britain, is a country in Europe, off the north-western coast of the continental mainland. It comprises England, Scotland, Wales and North ...

, to offer programs in Hong Kong. SWP and the University of Glamorgan cooperate to offer postgraduate education in

computer forensics Computer forensics (also known as computer forensic science) is a branch of digital forensic science pertaining to evidence found in computers and digital storage media. The goal of computer forensics is to examine digital media in a forensical ...

forensic accounting Forensic accounting, forensic accountancy or financial forensics is the specialty practice area of accounting that investigates whether firms engage in financial reporting misconduct. Forensic accountants apply a range of skills and methods to d ...

and information security. SWP and the University of Sunderland cooperate to offer BA (Hons) Top-up Graphic Design program in Hong Kong. In the summer of 2009, SWP became an accredited centre of

Edexcel Edexcel (also known since 2013 as Pearson Edexcel) is a British Multinational corporation, multinational education and examination body formed in 1996 and wholly owned by Pearson plc since 2005. It is the only privately owned examination board ...

and

NCC Education NCC Education Ltd. is a global provider and awarding body
UK Government Recognition as an aw ...

. The accreditation lets SWP offer Foundation Studies and Higher National Diploma (HND) courses.

Difficult times

* In 2003,

SARS Severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) is a viral respiratory disease of zoonotic origin caused by the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus (SARS-CoV or SARS-CoV-1), the first identified strain of the SARS coronavirus species, ''sever ...

attacked the region and training activity stopped. Positioned as a skill transfer centre, the major revenue source is delivering skill transfer training classes. This put SWP in a financial crisis. * Linux and OSS business has proven challenging. The revenue model was not based on grants, while pure Linux and OSS business might not generate enough revenue to keep SWP going. SWP had to rethink a way to survive, or its own generated funding would be ended by mid-2004.

Skill transfer training courses

Since its establishment in January 2001, SWP has been working with the open source community on developing skill transfer training. SWP has developed courses on

s including

Linux Linux ( or ) is a family of open-source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged as a Linux distribution, which ...

and

BSD The Berkeley Software Distribution or Berkeley Standard Distribution (BSD) is a discontinued operating system based on Research Unix, developed and distributed by the Computer Systems Research Group (CSRG) at the University of California, Berk ...

Unix Unix (; trademarked as UNIX) is a family of multitasking, multiuser computer operating systems that derive from the original AT&T Unix, whose development started in 1969 at the Bell Labs research center by Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, and ot ...

, and on programming including

PHP PHP is a general-purpose scripting language geared toward web development. It was originally created by Danish-Canadian programmer Rasmus Lerdorf in 1993 and released in 1995. The PHP reference implementation is now produced by The PHP Group ...

Java Java (; id, Jawa, ; jv, ꦗꦮ; su, ) is one of the Greater Sunda Islands in Indonesia. It is bordered by the Indian Ocean to the south and the Java Sea to the north. With a population of 151.6 million people, Java is the world's List ...

MySQL MySQL () is an open-source relational database management system (RDBMS). Its name is a combination of "My", the name of co-founder Michael Widenius's daughter My, and "SQL", the acronym for Structured Query Language. A relational database o ...

database,

Ajax Ajax may refer to: Greek mythology and tragedy * Ajax the Great, a Greek mythological hero, son of King Telamon and Periboea * Ajax the Lesser, a Greek mythological hero, son of Oileus, the king of Locris * ''Ajax'' (play), by the ancient Greek ...

XML Extensible Markup Language (XML) is a markup language and file format for storing, transmitting, and reconstructing arbitrary data. It defines a set of rules for encoding documents in a format that is both human-readable and machine-readable. T ...

JavaScript JavaScript (), often abbreviated as JS, is a programming language that is one of the core technologies of the World Wide Web, alongside HTML and CSS. As of 2022, 98% of Website, websites use JavaScript on the Client (computing), client side ...

, and

Extreme programming Extreme programming (XP) is a software development methodology intended to improve software quality and responsiveness to changing customer requirements. As a type of agile software development,"Human Centred Technology Workshop 2006 ", 2006, PD ...

OSS events

SWP has conducted technical seminars on open source technology. Some open source leaders like

Zeev Suraski Zeev Suraski ( he, זאב סורסקי ) is an Israeli programmer, PHP developer and co-founder of Zend Technologies. A graduate of the Technion in Haifa, Israel, Suraski and Andi Gutmans created PHP 3 in 1997. In 1999 they wrote the Zend En ...

Jeremy Allison Jeremy Allison is a computer programmer known for his contributions to the free software community, notably to Samba, a re-implementation of SMB/CIFS networking protocol, released under the GNU General Public License. Other contributions in ...

Andrew Tridgell Andrew "Tridge" Tridgell (born 28 February 1967) is an Australian computer programmer. He is the author of and a contributor to the Samba file server, and co-inventor of the rsync algorithm. He has analysed complex proprietary protocols and a ...

, Jon Hall, and others were guest speakers at its seminars. SWP organized the first

Software Freedom Day Software Freedom Day (SFD) is an annual worldwide celebration of Free Software organized by the Digital Freedom Foundation (DFF). SFD is a public education effort with the aim of increasing awareness of Free Software and its virtues, and enc ...

in Hong Kong in 2007.

Community links

SWP has contributed to international and local open communities. Some of them include the International Information and Communication Technology Council Certification Program, The Hong Kong Linux User Group, The Opensource Application Knowledge Association, The

Linux Professional Institute The Linux Professional Institute (LPI) is a Canadian non-profit organisation and oriented towards certifications for Linux, BSD and open-source software-based technologies. It was founded in October 1999. Linux Professional Institute Certific ...

Certification Program, The Hong Kong Samba Association, and Software Freedom Day.

The team

Board of Directors: * Dr. Lui Sun Wing * Professor Jonathan Choi * Mr. Andrew Young * Mr. Alwin Wong * Professor Keith Chan * Mr. Alex Banh * Mr. Daniel Lee * Mr. Albert Chung Many members of the operational team come from the local OSS community. They contribute columns, articles and publication at local IT or OSS related magazines.

History

At one time there were three Hong Kong based Debian developers and a local community members being employed at the Sunwah Group. The Group has developed a special Linux distribution called

Sunwah Linux (rays Linux Distribution) RAYS Linux (previously Sun Wah Linux) was a Chinese Debian-based Linux distribution. Development and distribution Sunwah Linux was a Debian-based distribution. It was the first Chinese Linux distribution to receive Linux Standard Base (LSB) cer ...

, which is a Linux desktop distribution that addresses the

Chinese Chinese can refer to: * Something related to China * Chinese people, people of Chinese nationality, citizenship, and/or ethnicity **''Zhonghua minzu'', the supra-ethnic concept of the Chinese nation ** List of ethnic groups in China, people of va ...

localization need, i.e. the handling and translation between the

Unicode Unicode, formally The Unicode Standard,The formal version reference is is an information technology Technical standard, standard for the consistent character encoding, encoding, representation, and handling of Character (computing), text expre ...

Big5 Big-5 or Big5 is a Chinese character encoding method used in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Macau for traditional Chinese characters. The People's Republic of China (PRC), which uses simplified Chinese characters, uses the GB 18030 character set inst ...

, and various versions of GB character encodings. Members of the group represented China at international events, namely North-East Asia OSS Promotion Forum and Asian Open Source Software Symposium. The Sunwah Linux (rays Linux Distribution) won the Best Linux Desktop Application at the 2006

LinuxWorld Conference and Expo LinuxWorld Conference and Expo (renamed to OpenSource World in its final year) was a conference and trade show that focused on open source and Linux solutions in the information technology sector. It ran from 1998 to 2009, in venues around the ...

, Boston.

External links

(SWP) Sunwah PearL Linux
{{DEFAULTSORT:Sunwah - Pearl Linux Linux companies Software companies of Hong Kong Companies established in 2001