Almost certainly accidental. Consider the population of NK (not large — 24 million). Now consider that it's a closed society; access to foreign media and learn

Almost certainly accidental. Consider the population of NK (not large — 24 million). Now consider that it's a closed society; access to foreign media and learning materials is going to be restricted. Now on top of that, consider that learning to program requires (a) learning an enemy language (danger! spy/defector warning klaxon!) and then access to lots of presumed-subversive foreign tracts that are sufficiently abstruse and arcane to give the state censors a really big headache ... I bet that cuts down the developer pool a little, doesn't it? If you can only allow ideologically trustworthy people access to the material they need in order to learn to code, which you need in order to build a guaranteed ideologically sanitized sandbox OS in which you can raise your less-definitely-loyal future cadres of infowar warriors, then you don't have many developers and they are picked for their loyalty rather than their ability by managers who literally can't understand the hacker mindset. (Or even the ordinary working stiff business app developer mindset.) So RedStar was probably thrown together in a hurry by a handful of amateur programmers/professional party cadres in an atmosphere of extreme mistrust and paranoia that rewards sweeping problems under the rug (where the big party bosses won't know to look for them). Hence it being a knock-off of Red Hat 3 from 1998 with added Hangul text handling, or something.