To fire up its Chinese marketing efforts, Red Hat plans to offer Linux and open source training for free to students at Tsinghua University and Nanjing University to get the ball rolling. Seeding freebies into the university student market is perhaps the best means of advocating a new market.

However, Red Hat will see plenty of competition from Red Flag Linux, the indigenous commercial Linux distributor in China. And as open source takes off, it seems likely that, given the immensity of China, there will be more than one Chinese Linux distro.