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Russia Mandates Free Software For Public Schools
Posted by
CmdrTaco
on Thu Oct 23, 2008 11:36 AM
from the in-soviet-russia-joke-makes-you dept.
from the in-soviet-russia-joke-makes-you dept.
Glyn Moody writes "After running some successful pilots, the Russian government has decided to make open source the standard for all schools. If a school doesn't want to use the free software supplied by the government, it has to buy commercial licenses using its own funds. What's the betting Microsoft starts slashing its prices in Russia?"
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Glyn Moody writes "Last year, we discussed here a Russian plan to install free software in all its schools. Seems things aren't going so well. Funds for the project have been cut back, some of the free software discs already sent out were faulty, and — inevitably — Microsoft has agreed to a 'special price' for Windows XP used in Russian schools."
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In Soviet Russia (Score:5, Funny)
Microsoft is no more!!!!
Dammit, I'm moving.
Re:In Soviet Russia (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:In Soviet Russia (Score:5, Interesting)
In corporate america, microsoft controls goverment.
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Re:More proof (Score:5, Insightful)
Going back to Soviet Union? By slashing a monopoly and directing the money towards their own developers and encouraging competition as opposed to paying a foreign corporation which is already known to sue people in Russia?
Help me here...
Parent
Re:More proof (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:More proof (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:More proof (Score:5, Insightful)
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Quite legitimate (Score:4, Insightful)
Microsoft is staffed by people that do, among other things, throw chairs at people, describe open source as "cancer", and want to "$#%^&*@ kill Google".
Please, attack Microsoft on legitimate issues (e.g. prior extreme anticompetitive behavior, and incomplete reform), not pointless ad hominem attacks.
"Qualis rex, talis grex."
The symptoms of systematic dysfunction were well known to the Romans. Leadership is a very legitimate issue.
Parent
Re:More proof (Score:4, Insightful)
However, even these "cancerous" open source licenses are considerably better for the end user than virtually all proprietary licenses.
Compare:
You can use this software any way you want, and distribute it however you like so long as you distribute the source code in the same way you received it.
if you To:
You can use this software in a limited number of ways on a limited number of systems, you cannot redistribute it at all and don't get to look at the source code.
If you think licenses like the GPL are restrictive, then you must really hate proprietary software even more.
Parent
Re:More proof (Score:5, Funny)
OK, how about the fact that he dances about the stage doing monkey impersonations and shouting "Developers developers developers developers developers"?
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Re:More proof (Score:4, Insightful)
There is a major problem with calling it a cancer, and that is in context. You can't call open source a cancer and proprietary software healthy cells. This is due to proprietary software's inability to grow and intermingle. Maybe if you call proprietary software a tumor, GPL could be just a more aggressive cancer that turns everything into wonderful goodness, while BSD is a healthy cell.
While the virus idea works better, the whole premise is just silly, pejorative, and flawed. Highlighting Balmer's stupidity in saying it works just fine in showing Microsoft has a screwball for a CEO.
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Re:More proof (Score:4, Interesting)
Please, attack Microsoft on legitimate issues (e.g. prior extreme anticompetitive behavior, and incomplete reform), not pointless ad hominem attacks.
You're not from around here, are you?
Incomplete reform? I think you meant "continuing current extreme anticompetitive behavior", and omitted "expected future extreme anticompetetive behavior." The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over, expecting a different result. Or, as a famed technology leader once said:
"I once preached peaceful coexistence with Windows. You may laugh at my expense -- I deserve it." Jean-Louis Gassée, former CEO, BeOS
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Re: (Score:3, Informative)
What? They're not taking control of a market, the education department is simply just no longer buying software for itself. It's a cost cutting measure, not nationalisation.
They're not stopping anyone else from buying software, and I imagine private schools will continue to use microsoft software.
Re:More proof (Score:5, Insightful)
You Americans have a habit of screaming "Communism" at anything vaguely related towards state aid/state control without really knowing what Communism is.
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Re:More proof (Score:4, Funny)
Compared to who? Estonia?
Don't get me wrong, the U.S. is clearly a mixed economy (a term for some reason out of favour). But it seems to be a lot more right leaning than the rest of the first world.
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Is it "free" or is it "open source"? (Score:5, Informative)
The confusion between these two types of software is not trivial.
According to TFA, it is being mandated that "free" software be used, and open source isn't even mentioned (in the translated article, I don't speak russian, sorry).
"By the end of 2009, all school computers will be installed package of free software (PSPO). This is how transfers Prime-TASS, today announced Minister of Communications and Mass Communications of the Russian Federation Igor Shchyogolev at the plenary session Information Society and the modern technologies of information in the international exhibition InfoCom-2008."
"The Minister also noted that by 2010 it is expected that the number of computers in schools will reach a million. According to Schegoleva, after three years of school will be able to make a choice: pay royalties to use software products, buying them at their own expense, or go to the domestic free software."
Nothing in there about "open source" submitter, so which is it?
Re:Is it "free" or is it "open source"? (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Wouldn't that be "free as in shoes" then?
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Not really. "Svobodnyj" has two meaning in Russian - free as in speech, and loose. Open is "otkrytyj". :)
(damn Slashdot imperialistic engine which doesn't support Cyrillic
The minister clearly said about free software, not open source or cost-reducing. So the summary is a bit misleading on that point.
Re:That was my thought as well (Score:5, Interesting)
... if it's "free" software they're after, what's to stop MS from just giving Windows to them for free on some kind of "educational deal".
Ah, but you and others are getting an entirely wrong idea due to a simple (and probably intentional) mistranslation. The Russian government's order and the original article were not written in English, they were in Russian. As someone else point out in another message, the Russian text describes the software as "svobodniy", not "bezplatniy". Both of these words translate to English as "free", but their meanings are totally different, and neither can be naturally expressed in English with a single word. The morpheme "svobod-" means free as in liberty or freedom. The root "bezplat-" is two morphemes, "bez-" meaning without, and "plat-" meaning cost or price.
They aren't ordering schools to use software that they don't have to pay for. They're ordering the schools to use software that's unencumbered by legal restrictions and, for example, can be taken apart and studied by students that are interesting in software or by school employees looking for backdoors and other security holes. It so happens that much "svobodniy" software is available at no cost and without legal restrictions, but that wasn't the adjectivee that was used, and wasn't the intent of the government's order.
To paraphrase Ronald Reagan's famous claim that the Russian language has no word for freedom, the translators in this case missed the fact that English has no word for "svobodniy". Rather, English has a word "free" that means both "svobodniy" and "bezplatniy", two unrelated concepts that English speakers typically confuse. One can, of course, express these concepts in English, using short multi-word phrases. But in this case, the translators chose not to do this, and instead went with the one-word translation that is misinterpreted by most English readers.
This is, of course, an old trick of propagandists. If you're familiar with the technique, you're probably amused to see it in use, and to see so many people falling for it so publicly.
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Wise They Are (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Wise They Are (Score:5, Insightful)
breaking from their national heritage in being hard-working
They created an empire with more surface area than any empire since Ghengis Khan, created the periodic table, defeated Napolean and Hitler, sent the first man into space, and challenged the US for global supremacy for fifty years. I think hard work _is_ their national heritage. The lazy Russian stereotype may have been accurate in the dying days of the Soviet Union, but it is by no means the norm for Russia.
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Re:Wise They Are (Score:4, Insightful)
Yes, they work very hard and have a lot of smart people, but they seem to have some major gullibility issues when it comes to politics.
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
More like a different experience than the west.
When Russia has been great and proud, it has been under
totalitarian rule (both under czars and portions of the
soviet era), and to many Putin seems to be restoring it.
Experience with democracy has been fleeting and disappointing,
There is no centuries old tradition of civil liberties and
people's power, only varying standards of living and international
influence, so they still look to a string leader like all
countries used to up until a couple of centuries ago.
Add
Cultural bias (Score:5, Insightful)
Aside from stereotyping russians, you guys are showing a lot of cultural bias, that you probably don't realise. Stop calling people lazy, and go read The Importance of Living. Or just spend time living in a hunter-gatherer tribe for a while. You might find yourselves returning to your lives and calling the people around you workaholics... or just plain insane.
"To truly understand another culture, you must first understand your own."
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Re:Cultural bias (Score:5, Insightful)
Aside from stereotyping russians, you guys are showing a lot of cultural bias, that you probably don't realise. Stop calling people lazy, and go read The Importance of Living.
I have spent a significant amount of time in Ukraine (rough comparison - Ukraine is to Russia as Canada is to the USA) and I have also known Russians in various places. I would not describe them as lazy. However, they do have a sense of entitlement that you cannot believe unless you have been there. Couple this with a seriously decreased sense of morality (thank you USSR!) and you do have a culture that sees nothing wrong at all with stealing, lying, killing, etc. to make money. I'm not saying all Russians are like this, but more are than we should really be comfortable with. Generally they are well educated and often well motivated, but they are not motivated in a way that's really beneficial to them or us in the long term. Ultimately they probably won't be able to solve the problems that they'll face in the near future (declining population, increasing rates of AIDS, poor health care, rampant alcoholism, etc.) because they are so self-centered. But they aren't lazy.
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Re:Wise They Are (Score:5, Insightful)
Face it--nobody is ever going to pay when there are free alternatives. And though as a software developer this eats into my bread and butter, I know they are right.
I always looked at it as the evolution of software. Software costs money to make, it basically after a certain amount of time (depending on it's complexity) free software that mimics your software will show up. It's almost an inevitability. I see that as a way of keeping commercial software on it's toes and forcing it to continuously improve. That, and if software is created and does something everyone uses for a long time (like Windows) it makes sense that eventually the whole idea of an OS goes into the public domain so that we as a programming culture can move on and not have to re-create that ever again.
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Re:Wise They Are (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Exactly and there are more companies then just Microsoft. Most of them are actually willing to support their application and fix bugs for you. Also a lot of the Non-Free software the company can afford to pay for patent rights and license other software to actually make it work correctly. There have been times in Open Source just because it was Open Source and wasn't willing to pay some money they had to take features out. Because of the Patent or License. You can complain about the problems with Licenses
Slash prices? (Score:3, Interesting)
I wouldn't bet on that. It's far cheaper for Microsoft to just give very, very big campaign contributions to Russian legislators.
Re:Slash prices? (Score:5, Funny)
Pffft. In Soviet (and Non-Soviet) Russia, Microsoft waits in a very long line to bribe the officials.
Parent
Re:Slash prices? (Score:5, Interesting)
It's far cheaper for Microsoft to just give very, very big campaign contributions to Russian legislators.
Yeah, and that's pretty much their tactic in the US now, too, since they became one of the biggest "campaign contributors" back in the 2000 elections.
Anyway, slashing prices is difficult in a country where most "customers" get Windows for free. To beat that, MS would have to start paying people to use their software. Of course, for government agencies, it can be a bit more difficult to get away with using pirated software. Your records may be accessible to the politicians who are on the take, and they have ways of punishing people who don't buy from their campaign contributors.
But there may well be a bigger reason: Maybe the Russian government's IT folks are finally getting across the idea that there are serious problems with trusting any binary-only software that comes from a big American corporation. Consider the story discussed here a while back, about the fact that Vista (and apparently XP, too) will sometimes ignore config settings having to do with updates, and automatically update things even when you have explicitly told it not to. This is a giant "backdoor", as the security folks call it. Not only can the software you buy have all sorts of extra code in it that they didn't tell you about ("special for the Russian market"); Windows may at any time replace parts of your system with a new version that has even more "special" code tailored just for you. That's gotta be making a lot of people a bit nervous.
This nervousness is probably encouraged by the widespread interpretation of the 1982 Siberian pipeline explosion [builderau.com.au], as the result of sabotage by American software. That's an Australian site, but you can find lots of descriptions of this event online, and most of them give the same explanation. This story is a good illustration for why you don't want to run unanalyzable binaries in the controls for critical infrastructure. And maybe you don't want to run binary-only software anywhere. ("Think of the children" comes to mind here. ;-)
Note that "free" software is usually also open source. That means you can hire your own hackers to study the code, and remove any backdoors they find. And you can do clean compiles, to ensure that the binaries you're running actually correspond to the code. This should be sufficient to convince anyone with a grain of sense. We don't know whether access to the source code would have prevented the above explosion, but we can safely say that lack of the source code does pretty much prevent finding and fixing such problems.
Parent
Microsoft OSs have a kill switch (Score:5, Interesting)
Remember, Microsoft OSs have a "kill switch" implicitly built into Windows Update. If you use Windows Update, Microsoft has total control of your computers. That's not acceptable given Russia's renewed determination not to be under the control of the United States.
Even with Windows Update turned off, there are all those little things, like "codec downloads" and "DRM downloads" which can insinuate new Microsoft software onto a computer. That's unacceptable to a sovereign nation.
Re:Microsoft OSs have a kill switch (Score:4, Informative)
Actually, Even with Windows Update turned off, MS can still force in an update.
That what happened in Aug 2007
Parent
Illegal product dumping? (Score:3, Interesting)
What's the betting Microsoft starts slashing its prices in Russia?
It's hard to compete with free. In light of M$ slashing their prices in China to compete with pirated-retail versions of their software, would they be desperate enough in a bid to hold onto market share to practically give away software in order to compete with FOSS?
Moreover, they claim piracy of their products around the world costs them "billions of dollars". I assume that's calculated on the basis of US-retail prices translated into foreign exchange rates, and they seem to have a hard-and-fast notion of exactly what each copy of their software is worth in terms of intellectual property, profit margin, cost of materials, and so forth when they make such statements. I wonder, since they're so sure of what their product is worth, if they could be accused of illegally dumping their products in foreign markets. They'd obviously be selling them for less than they know/believe they're worth in able to compete.
Russian translation? (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm confused, can Glyn Moody read Russian, or is the article based on the Google translation?
From this, no one is being forced to use anything, they are given free software, and individual schools must foot the bill of commercial software. I'm sure this will help spur free software adoption, but isn't the real story about the Govt not buying school software anymore? A story like this in the states would imply the schools are now rejigging their IT budgets, not necessarily adopting free software wholesale. A story about govt funding to schools being cut probably wouldn't be taken in such positive light either.
Just my two cents.
[Via Google Translate: By the end of 2009, all school computers will be installed package of free software (PSPO). This is how transfers Prime-TASS, today announced Minister of Communications and Mass Communications of the Russian Federation Igor Shchyogolev at the plenary session Information Society and the modern technologies of information in the international exhibition InfoCom-2008.]
[Via Google Translate: The Minister also noted that by 2010 it is expected that the number of computers in schools will reach a million. According to Schegoleva, after three years of school will be able to make a choice: pay royalties to use software products, buying them at their own expense, or go to the domestic free software.]
It might be to Microsoft's advantage (Score:5, Funny)
If Microsoft simply let Russia go free (sounds weird right?) then perhaps there will be fewer Russian hackers writing Windows malware. That would be something of a long-shot I suppose.
USA becoming a technology backwater? (Score:5, Interesting)
If you think this isn't possible, consider how much farther ahead cell phones are in Europe, or broadband to the home in Asia.
MS Should RAISE the price (Score:5, Funny)
I have an uncle who lives in Russia, where he bought a computer preloaded with XP. After some time he realized it wasn't a legit copy, and went back to the place he bought it from to inquire about getting an "upgraded" version. The manager had this to say to him: "There is exactly ONE legal copy of Windows in Russia, what makes you think that YOU should have it?"
Hence, MS should just raise the price of that one copy.
Ponosov's Case (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:Ponosov's Case (Score:5, Insightful)
Good story. An innocent headmaster buys PCs that are preinstalled, but did not realize the PC seller has used illegal copies. The headmaster gets in trouble with the law for piracy.
Eventually the headmaster gets cleared, but he immediately organizes to push for Free software.... the result being that now Russian Schools no longer want Microsoft products. Only free products.
Karma's a _____, ain't it Microsoft?
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I love fill-in-the-blank puzzles! (Score:5, Funny)
Ooh! Ooh! I know this one!!!
Karma's a NOUN!
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Re:Ponosov's Case (Score:5, Interesting)
Yes, this is a rather stupid idea, and yes, cases like this are very rare.
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Re:aren't we talking about russia? (Score:5, Funny)
I know. It's so difficult to find a linux distribution these days. Ever since linux distros had to go underground I have to search the far dark corners of the internet to find a working download. If I want a copy locally, I have to go to the seedy part of town and down some dark alleyway whispering to the dealer who will get me my linux fix. Oh! If only linux were freely available from universities, computer geeks, and the internet!
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Re:aren't we talking about russia? (Score:4, Funny)
Are you taking ample precautions to avoid the grue?
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Yes, Linux is more expensive then Top100 pro (Score:4, Informative)
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Re:aren't we talking about russia? (Score:4, Funny)
If only linux were freely available from universities, computer geeks, and the internet!
When I wanted to install RedHat 4.something, I went to see if they had it in my university's library. Joy! They did! Unfortunately, the librarian refused to let me check it out because I "might install it on my own computer, which would be illegal." When I finally demonstrated that it would be OK, they still refused to let me leave the library with it, although I was welcome to bring a stack of floppies to copy the CD onto (as this was before CD burners became common).
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Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
As Russian government wanted to go to the WTO badly, they have taken vast steps towards eliminating computer piracy. So a pirate version of Windows is still relatively easy to get, but so are Linux distros. The people's inertia will still hold windows share high though. It is a great move to offer free software in schools to overcome this inertia.
Re:You know what they will say now... (Score:4, Insightful)
You know what people will say now if you use F/OSS: "What, are you communist or something?".
I doubt it. The people saying things like that are small town lower class. The decision to use open source is made by people who run technology oriented businesses. The divide there is pretty large.
Parent
Began years ago (Score:4, Informative)
Brazil, India, China, Philippines, Extremadura...
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