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."

Comments

Too many morons in EU Parliament

[VincenzoRomano]

EU politiacians don't understand (or don't want to) the importance, the strategy and the economics of an EU-wide open-source policy!
Private interests are more important by far!

I see why Russia wants this

[Teancum]

I can totally see why Russia would want to have this happen... at least their own distro for use internally within the Russian government.

• Developers - By directly sponsoring a complete distro, they have their own developers who are both actively engaged within the greater Linux community, know the kernel cold (there certainly are Russian programmers who can be and are even now developing software currently in the kernel), and have their loyalties to the Russian society even if not directly to the Russian government. This means Russia has the developer base to keep up with the rest of the world in a critical area.
• Security - If there is anybody paranoid about security, I don't know who is worse than the Russian government. The only way to have a genuinely secure operating system is to review each and every line of code that goes into that OS by somebody both with the skills necessary to properly evaluate the software, and the loyalty to the organization necessary to fix things that seem out of place. See also the above point, which is even more critical here.
• Meeting local needs - by having a group that is embedded within the Russian culture that certainly is not a part of the Silicon Valley culture, they have a much better grasp of what is needed for their own local society. While working with Cyrillic characters isn't that much different from Latin characters, this is but one situation where local support is desperately needed. Interfacing with older Soviet systems is certainly an issue as well... I can only imagine some of the compatibility issues that would have to be worked out there.
• National pride - There is also a little bit of national pride on the line here as well. Having something "made in Russia" is powerfully attractive for a number of reasons... at the very least to show that your country is able to keep up with the best and the brightest on the planet. Of all the reasons I've listed, this really is the least significant, but the one most head-smacking obvious and ultimately the one that would best sell to a legislative body that has to pay for any significant expenses to get this project going. I certainly doubt that Russian citizens are going to be upset with a modest expense being directed in this fashion through their tax dollars.

A top to bottom review of the Linux kernel from another group of developers with a completely different interests, backgrounds, and motivations than other major contributors to Linux would also be a very good thing for the development of Linux as a whole. I wish Russia the best on getting this accomplished, and I hope that their success is huge.

It isn't like the American government doesn't do this too. The NSA (National Security Agency... aka the USA cyber spys) has their own distro for most of the reasons I've listed above, and has nearly continuous recruitment going on at college campuses for CS graduates. The Red Flag distro (Chinese) is another national distro that has been done for more than just pressuring Microsoft into lowering the price of Windows.

Frankly, I see Microsoft's involvement here as a red herring and something to ignore for this discussion.

Re:In Soviet russia

[Neeperando]

I spent some time in Russia, although I have not been overly studious about Russian history. My understanding is that, during communism there were no goods in the stores. Now, there are plenty of goods, but no one can afford to buy them.

I also get the impression that your average Russian has no desire to do the kinds of things that Americans would see as necessary to help the economy (start a small business, take risks, etc), because of the assumption, which is fair given the last 1000 years or so, that someone will just come in and take it all away and/or destroy it.

Of course, these are just the impressions of a stupid American who only understands the Russian Soul to the extent it can be taught in a language class, and didn't take much Russian history. I could be way off.

Re:In Soviet russia

[davester666]

It sounds more like "make a big public showing that they are working on switching to license, then wait for the Microsoft Rep to show up 15 minutes later and offer much larger discounts on MS products"...