Russia Mandates Free Software For Public Schools

Glyn Moody writes "After running some successful pilots, the Russian government has decided to make open source the standard for all schools. If a school doesn't want to use the free software supplied by the government, it has to buy commercial licenses using its own funds. What's the betting Microsoft starts slashing its prices in Russia?"

Comments

Wise They Are

[curmudgeon99]

I'm probably one of the few slashdotters who has lived in Russia. I will say that I met a ton of very smart people who are breaking from their national heritage in being hard-working. A university degree from Russia now and has always equated with a Masters in the US. They are just smart in not buying into the crap that Microsoft sells. There are so many entire technology stacks--just as in the Java world, not in .NET--that can be had without ever spending a thin dime on software. Face it--nobody is ever going to pay when there are free alternatives. And though as a software developer this eats into my bread and butter, I know they are right.

Re:Wise They Are

[curmudgeon99]

Yes, it is. If you look at the requirements to receive a degree in Russia, it requires the amount of work that would be required in a US Masters.

Slash prices?

[DoofusOfDeath]

What's the betting Microsoft starts slashing its prices in Russia?

I wouldn't bet on that. It's far cheaper for Microsoft to just give very, very big campaign contributions to Russian legislators.

Re:Slash prices?

[jc42]

It's far cheaper for Microsoft to just give very, very big campaign contributions to Russian legislators.

Yeah, and that's pretty much their tactic in the US now, too, since they became one of the biggest "campaign contributors" back in the 2000 elections.

Anyway, slashing prices is difficult in a country where most "customers" get Windows for free. To beat that, MS would have to start paying people to use their software. Of course, for government agencies, it can be a bit more difficult to get away with using pirated software. Your records may be accessible to the politicians who are on the take, and they have ways of punishing people who don't buy from their campaign contributors.

But there may well be a bigger reason: Maybe the Russian government's IT folks are finally getting across the idea that there are serious problems with trusting any binary-only software that comes from a big American corporation. Consider the story discussed here a while back, about the fact that Vista (and apparently XP, too) will sometimes ignore config settings having to do with updates, and automatically update things even when you have explicitly told it not to. This is a giant "backdoor", as the security folks call it. Not only can the software you buy have all sorts of extra code in it that they didn't tell you about ("special for the Russian market"); Windows may at any time replace parts of your system with a new version that has even more "special" code tailored just for you. That's gotta be making a lot of people a bit nervous.

This nervousness is probably encouraged by the widespread interpretation of the 1982 Siberian pipeline explosion, as the result of sabotage by American software. That's an Australian site, but you can find lots of descriptions of this event online, and most of them give the same explanation. This story is a good illustration for why you don't want to run unanalyzable binaries in the controls for critical infrastructure. And maybe you don't want to run binary-only software anywhere. ("Think of the children" comes to mind here. ;-)

Note that "free" software is usually also open source. That means you can hire your own hackers to study the code, and remove any backdoors they find. And you can do clean compiles, to ensure that the binaries you're running actually correspond to the code. This should be sufficient to convince anyone with a grain of sense. We don't know whether access to the source code would have prevented the above explosion, but we can safely say that lack of the source code does pretty much prevent finding and fixing such problems.

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[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

You know what they will say now...

[Anonymous Coward]

You know what people will say now if you use F/OSS: "What, are you communist or something?".

Of course, the same idiots have been saying this for a long time, but now they'll have something to point to.

It's too bad the US gets so hung up on political bullshit like this to the point that it really truly does get in the way of progress. Universal Health Care? No way, it's "socialism". Regulate the financial industry? Socialism again. Progressive taxation? Wealth redistribution. (Why isn't it called wealth redistribution when the rich are taking from the poor?) At first I thought "great news, maybe the US will see the advantage of this someday". But on reflection, I think this might set F/OSS adoption in the US back by decades.

Microsoft OSs have a kill switch

[Animats]

Remember, Microsoft OSs have a "kill switch" implicitly built into Windows Update. If you use Windows Update, Microsoft has total control of your computers. That's not acceptable given Russia's renewed determination not to be under the control of the United States.

Even with Windows Update turned off, there are all those little things, like "codec downloads" and "DRM downloads" which can insinuate new Microsoft software onto a computer. That's unacceptable to a sovereign nation.

Re:Microsoft OSs have a kill switch

[Hatta]

Not only that, but you can't even block it with your hosts file.

Illegal product dumping?

[pyrr]

What's the betting Microsoft starts slashing its prices in Russia?

It's hard to compete with free. In light of M$ slashing their prices in China to compete with pirated-retail versions of their software, would they be desperate enough in a bid to hold onto market share to practically give away software in order to compete with FOSS?

Moreover, they claim piracy of their products around the world costs them "billions of dollars". I assume that's calculated on the basis of US-retail prices translated into foreign exchange rates, and they seem to have a hard-and-fast notion of exactly what each copy of their software is worth in terms of intellectual property, profit margin, cost of materials, and so forth when they make such statements. I wonder, since they're so sure of what their product is worth, if they could be accused of illegally dumping their products in foreign markets. They'd obviously be selling them for less than they know/believe they're worth in able to compete.

Re:aren't we talking about russia?

[Erikderzweite]

As Russian government wanted to go to the WTO badly, they have taken vast steps towards eliminating computer piracy. So a pirate version of Windows is still relatively easy to get, but so are Linux distros. The people's inertia will still hold windows share high though. It is a great move to offer free software in schools to overcome this inertia.

USA becoming a technology backwater?

[IGnatius T Foobar]

Actions like this speak volumes about the future of the United States in the global economy. As a whole we are locked into the Microsoft monopoly more tightly than any other nation. As the rest of the world embraces free and open source software at a faster pace than we do, they are essentially leapfrogging us in technological advancement. If more USA users don't wise up to this soon, we risk becoming a technological backwater. It could take years to catch up, if ever.

If you think this isn't possible, consider how much farther ahead cell phones are in Europe, or broadband to the home in Asia.

That was my thought as well

[GuloGulo]

I got basically the same idea that you did from reading the article, but then I asked myself, if it's "free" software they're after, what's to stop MS from just giving Windows to them for free on some kind of "educational deal".

Seems like exactly the kind of thing MS would do.

Re:That was my thought as well

[jc42]

... if it's "free" software they're after, what's to stop MS from just giving Windows to them for free on some kind of "educational deal".

Ah, but you and others are getting an entirely wrong idea due to a simple (and probably intentional) mistranslation. The Russian government's order and the original article were not written in English, they were in Russian. As someone else point out in another message, the Russian text describes the software as "svobodniy", not "bezplatniy". Both of these words translate to English as "free", but their meanings are totally different, and neither can be naturally expressed in English with a single word. The morpheme "svobod-" means free as in liberty or freedom. The root "bezplat-" is two morphemes, "bez-" meaning without, and "plat-" meaning cost or price.

They aren't ordering schools to use software that they don't have to pay for. They're ordering the schools to use software that's unencumbered by legal restrictions and, for example, can be taken apart and studied by students that are interesting in software or by school employees looking for backdoors and other security holes. It so happens that much "svobodniy" software is available at no cost and without legal restrictions, but that wasn't the adjectivee that was used, and wasn't the intent of the government's order.

To paraphrase Ronald Reagan's famous claim that the Russian language has no word for freedom, the translators in this case missed the fact that English has no word for "svobodniy". Rather, English has a word "free" that means both "svobodniy" and "bezplatniy", two unrelated concepts that English speakers typically confuse. One can, of course, express these concepts in English, using short multi-word phrases. But in this case, the translators chose not to do this, and instead went with the one-word translation that is misinterpreted by most English readers.

This is, of course, an old trick of propagandists. If you're familiar with the technique, you're probably amused to see it in use, and to see so many people falling for it so publicly.

Re:Thanks but,

[Erikderzweite]

Not really. "Svobodnyj" has two meaning in Russian - free as in speech, and loose. Open is "otkrytyj".
(damn Slashdot imperialistic engine which doesn't support Cyrillic :)

The minister clearly said about free software, not open source or cost-reducing. So the summary is a bit misleading on that point.

Re:I love fill-in-the-blank puzzles!

[dgatwood]

Hmm. Last I checked, Karma's a microphone company. It's also a Korg keyboard technology. And finally, Karma's a beach (or at least a beach residence).

But seriously, Microsoft is getting what it deserves in this regard. That said, I have a feeling that this is, at least in part, a power play to drive down the cost of MS products in Russia. Just a gut feeling.

Re:Ponosov's Case

[ringm000]

As far as I understand, in the US copyright violation is prosecuted in a civil action and the holder has to press charges. In Russia it can be prosecuted under civil as well as criminal law. It is an offense under the Criminal Code of Russia and the criminal prosecution does not have to depend on the victim pressing charges, much like e.g. in cases of battery or theft.

Yes, this is a rather stupid idea, and yes, cases like this are very rare.

Re:Began years ago

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes. I know. A few years ago I voted for a President that had Free (as in freedom) Software in it government plan. Now a few years after it we lots of free software in government, state bank and lots of it is developed here.

More than that, we changed from a developing country to a emerging economy, we joined G20, poverty is not more as it was before. This year we have the sales of computers as big as TV sets, and lots of stuff like that. Believe me, it works.

I live in Brazil, of course.

Re:Is it "free" or is it "open source"?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, but as shvytejimas mentions, in Russian (which I do speak), there is absolutely NO confusion - "svobodnovo" has absolutely zero to do with price. It's like saying fish and hotdog. "Svobodnovo", in the context of software, has all the connotations of "libre", as Stallman likes to use. We don't have the difference in English, pretty much all of the other 3-5 (depending on fluency requirements...) languages I speak do have this difference...

Re:In Soviet Russia

[ZiggyStardust1984]

In corporate america, microsoft controls goverment.

Re:More proof

[symbolset]

Please, attack Microsoft on legitimate issues (e.g. prior extreme anticompetitive behavior, and incomplete reform), not pointless ad hominem attacks.

You're not from around here, are you?

Incomplete reform? I think you meant "continuing current extreme anticompetitive behavior", and omitted "expected future extreme anticompetetive behavior." The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over, expecting a different result. Or, as a famed technology leader once said:

"I once preached peaceful coexistence with Windows. You may laugh at my expense -- I deserve it." Jean-Louis Gassée, former CEO, BeOS