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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?"
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.
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.
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.
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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.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
Yes, this is a rather stupid idea, and yes, cases like this are very rare.
... 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.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
In corporate america, microsoft controls goverment.
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
Help stamp out iliturcy.