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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."
Don't confuse open source with free.
OSS could be free, but it could also cost money. Money for training, installation and updates.
Red Hat, Novell/Suse Ubuntu, etc all have support packages programs available which government and education departments may want to utilize to help assure smooth and continued operation.
But presuming the outlay for proprietary software would have similar requirements, you can see that for every copy of windows they could obtain an unlimited number of Linux desktop copies.
This will might allow them spend their money on custom or specialized applications which just might happened to be proprietary.
Meanwhile, the technical community that develops in that environment will have a whole different skill set than those that develop in the Microsoft mono culture.
Western governments, still dependent on Microsoft are sandbagging themselves into a smaller and smaller dry-hole against the rising tide of Linux everywhere else in the world.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
> OSS can be much cheaper, but its cost is not going to be zero. You have to consider training and support.
On the other hand, we all know that children arrive from the womb conversant in the ways of Windows?
You can't seriously think this requirement ONLY applies to opensource, can you?
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
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
After some searching, I haven't actually found much more in the Hungarian news than was reported in TFA. So, I can't add many details.
What I can say is that there is a fair chance that the coalition that rules Hungary today will not be in place six months from now. Secondly, Hungary needs immediate cost savings. It is not in any position to spend money now to save money later.
This might be part of the motivation. Hungary's currency is in collapse, so it is much cheaper for the government to pay local developers in forints for software and systems than it is to pay Microsoft and Novell in dollars or euros.
I'd love to know the internal machinations that went on here, but I suspect that someone took the opportunity of the fall of the forint and the foreign currency debt problem (an enormous problem) to push an open source agenda. Whether this will hold up, or whether MS will make a counter offer allowing the Hungarian government to pay cheaply in forints remains to be seen.
Prime numbers are exactly what Alan Greenspan says they are -S. Minsky
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.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
Indeed. Perhaps they were confused by the common phrase "former Soviet Republic", which refers to entities that were formerly Soviet Socialist Republics (SSRs), but became independent around 1991, like Ukraine.
Republics of Russia, though are subnational entities that are still part of Russia (pre-1991, part of the Russian SFSR). They are one of several kinds of top-level subnational divisions of Russia, others including Oblasts and Krais and so on. The Republics are those with a traditional non-Russian population, so have some autonomy in the areas of language use. But they're effectively what other countries call provinces or prefectures.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Tatarstan is part of Russian Federation, which means that they can hire programmers and IT people from anywhere in Russia, not just from its own, much smaller, population. UNIX (*BSD and Linux) is well known in Russia.
Tatarstan is the subject of Russian Federation and actually is the same way independent as any other one.
More to say: sovereign independence of Tatarstan is the thing both impossible because it has no any outer state borders AND inevitably should lead to total destruction of Russia which is not the case to happen.
As a fact, the "pilot education program" about FOSS is the Alt Linux disk set packaged with a book for schools, is performed in several regions of Russia, Tatarstan is simply among them.
I even know someone in person from altlinux moscow based development team who is originally from Tatarstan.
Hope this is a fix to correct the info.
Let me postulate this:
MS awakes tomorrow, and jumps with both feet on the foss model.
However, they also charge for support.
Now, given MS existing penetration, could the *nix companies compete?
MS has depth of support that few linux companies can approach.
I indirectly worked for them briefly after the 95 launch as a support rep.
I had a case escalated to the point where MS paid for the customer to ship their PC to Redmond so that the engineering department could comb through it to diagnose a low level driver that was flaky.
The result was a hotfix that replaced the floppy driver used for Toshiba notebooks.
The whole process took very little time - a couple of weeks.
Sure, linux *can* respond as quickly, but as a rule it doesn't.
Case in point - the glaring flaw in the glibc libraries of RH 6.2 that made it wholly unusable on multiprocessor servers because threads would start spawning and eating up resources until the system crashed.
Yeah - it was that bad.
Yeah - RH knew about it, and so did many developers in the community.
No, no one ever did fix it iirc.
It remained broken until 7.0 came out, and it had it's own serious flaws.
So, can linux compete from a support standpoint?