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Russia To Develop a National Operating System
Elektroschock writes "According to Russian media, the Russian Government is going to develop a National Operating System (Google translation; Russian original) to lower its dependencies on foreign software technology licensing. The Russian plan will base its efforts on Linux and expects a worldwide impact. Microsoft is also involved in the roundtable process that led to the recommendation. The Chinese government successfully lowered its Microsoft licensing costs through an early investment in a national Linux distribution. I wonder if other large markets, such as the European Union, will also develop their own Linux distributions or join in the Russian initiative."
So, what to do about a state that takes GPL software, modifies it, redistributes it, maybe even charges for it?
Why would you need to do anything? Those are all allowed under the GPL.
What the article actually says, is that some members of Russian parliament are just _proposing_ to develop a national OS. M$ representatives, on the other hand, say that it is not a national OS which Russia need, but to make use the technologies which are already exist. so, don't get excited just yet - there are many things they talk about in Russia.
The article says that this is an idea, raised by some random people and it is only being organized and will be later offered to president Medvedev as a proposition. Calling it a fact, as the summary did, is so yellow press it hurts.
Don't worry, be happy!
Maybe pure politicians don't, but somebody at least at the EU is trying to do something about it, look, they have released their own Free/Open Source Software Licence (sic): http://ec.europa.eu/idabc/en/document/7774 ;)
Anyway, I think they could have just used gpl or whatever other copyleft license, but i guess at least they are indeed promoting an EU-wide open-source policy
exp(i*pi)+1=0
That's why in C the equal operator returns int. This allows different levels of being equal.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
I find the Russian attitude toward copyright to be mostly refreshing. They do want to give incentives for people to make a little money from creative works, but there isn't the perpetual and infinite lifetime to creative works that seems to be prevalent in western Europe and has infected legal circles within the USA.
The way that Russians treat copyrighted material of others is pretty much how they want to have their own content treated. At least they are consistent in this manner. It certainly doesn't compare to the blatant copyright infringements that happen in China.
You might want to consider reading beyond basic economics...
Software(and, to an extent, high complexity hardware like ASICs) are special cases because the gap in transparency between source and binary is quite high, and because, with the complexity of software, there is a huge amount of room to hide potential nasties(or not bother to hide them, as with most DRM schemes). With most other commodities, by contrast, the finished product can't hide much of anything nearly as easily.
Food can be tainted, vehicles can be faulty or low quality; but the ability to build in really subtle backdoors is more or less absent. You can poison food; but that will be immediately obvious. Can you make food that is perfectly palatable until a control signal is propagated to make it toxic?(Incidentally, with biotech, you probably will be able to do this sooner or later, expect Monsanto to try, and then food will join software as an issue) You can with software. Can you make a mechanical device that will break on remote command? You can with software.