Because of past budget constraints, Russia’s schools mostly ran illegal copies of Microsoft operating systems and programs. Now that Russia has entered the WTO, the laws have become much stricter and schools are starting  to be prosecuted.

How to fix this costly dilemma? By building your own, of course.

Schoolchildren and teachers in Russia will soon be learning using free, open-source Linux operating systems and software in an effort to cut the cost of teaching information technology. "The situation became rather serious, and something had to be done," Alexey Smirnov, Director General of the Company ALTLinux stated, "One possible decision was to buy licenses for all the software being used – but so much software was being used, it proved too expensive… so the decision was taken to use free software, although not immediately, but over three years."

The program will start as a 3-region pilot program. All schools in the pilot regions will have the choice of switching to Linux, or paying for a commercial alternative. By 2009 all schools in Russia will either be running Linux or running legitimate copies of commercial programs, like Microsoft Office.

Russia has emphasized that the main aim of switch is to reduce dependence on foreign commercial software and provide education institutions with the choice whether to pay for commercial items or to use the open source software provided by the Russian government.

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Entry was posted on Tuesday, October 9th, 2007 at 5:51 pm under Linux, Open source, Piracy.

Read more entries by Ema Kwiatkowski.
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