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Hungary, Tatarstan Latest To Go FOSS
christian.einfeldt writes "It seems as if almost every other week there is news of another government migration toward Free Open Source Software. Two of the most recent such moves come from Hungary and the tiny independent former Russian republic of Tatarstan. On April 2, the Hungarian government announced that it will be modifying its procurement rules to mandate that open source procurement funding match expenditures for proprietary software, according to Ferenc Baja, deputy minister for information technology. In Tatarstan, a Republic of 3.8 million inhabitants, the Deputy Minister of Education announced that by the end of this school year, all 2,400 educational institutions in Tatarstan will have completed a transition to GNU/Linux, following a successful pilot program it rolled out in 2008."
That's the way to the desktop. Through governments and big organizations.
nemesis. Home of an experimental fe code.
As in 'training' costs for open source software versus proprietary closed source licence fees, it also allows money to spent spent on customising open source software for specific long term applications versus throwing away money on 'temporary' software licence fees (the reality being they often last no longer than two years in actual use).
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
This seems to happen in places where money, and especially foreign exchange are at a premium. A big advantage for the Tatarstan Ministry of Education is that they don't have to commit to lots of purchases in US dollars. Instead, as you point out, they can make their own engineers who will work for local currency, and educate their people at the same time.
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