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Russia's Operating System May Be Fedora Based

Posted by timothy on from the if-the-hat-is-red-wear-it dept.

Glyn Moody writes "Last month, a story about Russia producing its own national operating system based on GNU/Linux started circulating. Now there's some confirmation, and details of how the plan might be put into practice. Red Hat had a meeting with the Russian communications ministry, which announced that the development of free software in Russia was one of its priorities. One concrete idea they talked about was using the Russian Fedora project as a step towards creating a national operating system."

2 of 242 comments (clear)

  1. Fedora not a good choice by messner_007 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I am using Fedora from the start and I like it very much, but I don't think its philosophy is suitable for a "national" distribution.

    Fedora is created for testing, not for everyday usage for normal people (not neerds). I think even using Fedora qualify you as a nerd. OK, it gets even worse if you are using alpha's.

    Using Fedora will cripple their productivity and they will start to hate Linux.

    If they want to use Linux for serious stuff, like "national distribution", then they should chose another distro.

  2. russian point of view by anjolio · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Hey guys, here is my point of view from Russia:

    1. First of all jokes about communism and Red OS are not funny (here), we fed of them a lot, really. It was finished 18 years ago, maybe enough?
    2. Really "red" meant "beautiful" about 2 centuries ago in russian. Borsch is very tasteful! (:
    3. Russian linux community has a lot of discussions about this theme. A lot of people think that most effective action is spending money on current russian open source developers to improve international software. Of course we need better localizations in some cases. In my point of view it's the best way, but..
    4. Government need to see a real result, such as rusisian OS, so as I think, they would not spend money on current developers and try to create new team with it's own distribution, or, maybe, to spend money on one of current russian distributions (ALT Linux is the likely one, as I see).
    5. Windows is really looks like free OS now here, about 95% of home users have pirate version. I think something should be done and linux is the best way.
    6. Actually nobody knows here (except government :) what this OS will look like: will it be just another linux distro, or will it be OS based on linux, but with closed sources. Everybody understand it will not be a new OS, it's really impossible.