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Linux To Be Installed In Every Russian School
J_Omega writes "According to an article from last week at the Russian IT site CNews, Linux is slated to be installed in every Russian school by 2009. The article makes it appear that it will be going by the (unimaginative) name 'Russian OS.' As stated in the article: 'The main aim of the given work is to reduce dependence on foreign commercial software and provide education institutions with the possibility to choose whether to pay for commercial items or to use the software, provided by the government.' Initial testing installations are supposed to begin next year in select districts. Is 2008/09 the year of Linux on the (Russian) desktop?"
Ok, every other week now for the past couple of years we read on slashdot "Government XYZ in country ABC is converting to Linux","Country XYZ schools in XYZ country mandate Linux be in classrooms", "Company DFG has migrated to Linux desktops", etc
It'd be interesting to see some world maps showing which countries have massive deployments and when you mouse-over, it shows you the # population that is using Linux.
Then we can turn to our bosses and say... "See!"
Anybody up for the challenge?
Adeptus
No trees were killed in the making of this post; however, many trillions of electrons were horribly inconvenienced.
Let's teach all the russian kids how to hack. This is what we should be doing in the USA.
Back when I was teaching, I did exactly that.
I had a standing challenge that any kid who managed to pop any of my servers, and show/prove exactly how he or she did it, got a their overall grade bumped by one letter for that semester. The ground rules were simple: they could only break into a server that I controlled. I did it because 1) kids try for it out of curiousity anyway, and 2) they may as well be challenged to study than admonished into ignorance. I went out of my way to include security into the curricula whenever and wherever I could.
Out of six years of teaching, only one student had managed it... he organized the local (Salt Lake City) 2600 chapter. Last I heard he was running his own security consulting firm.
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
At this point the Russians did the very Russian thing of making a point in principle. Is the OS suited or not no longer matters in the slightest. They will simply no longer do educational business with Microsoft in principle and this is it.
You may have a very good point. However, there's likely something else at work here: the widespread belief in Russia (and a lot of the world) about American software's role in that big explosion of a Siberian pipeline in the summer of 1982.
Add to this the recent stories about Microsoft software that updates itself silently, even when you turn off the auto-update, and MS's explanation of why this is the right thing for them to do. A Russian administrator would have to be really stupid (or really on the take) to approve of anything from Microsoft. Granted, a lot of them may do so, but that's just evidence of how stupid (or on the take) they are. So part of the story might be that at the very top, Russian administrators no longer trust any software made in the USA.
But with the BSA story, it does sorta sound like MS is trying its best to get Russians to buy from someone else.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.