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Hungary, Tatarstan Latest To Go FOSS
Posted by
kdawson
on Sat Apr 11, 2009 07:13 PM
from the on-the-bandwagon dept.
from the on-the-bandwagon dept.
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."
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Doing the math... (Score:3, Interesting)
"Mandate that open source procurement funding match expenditures for proprietary software"
In other words, their expenditures for proprietary software must equal to $0.00?
Re:Doing the math... (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Parent
Re:Doing the math... (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re:Doing the math... (Score:5, Informative)
Tatarstan [wikipedia.org] 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.
Parent
Re:Doing the math... (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
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Other way around. If you spend $20,000 on MS Office, you're allowed to spend up to $20,000 on OpenOffice. And presumably deposit the change in a convenient Swiss bank account.
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"In other words, their expenditures for proprietary software must equal to $0.00?"
I know you are trying to be fun here but then, you know not all operations allow for the commutative operation.
They said "open source procurement funding match expenditures for proprietary software" not "propietary software procurement funding match expenditures for open source". So no: it doesn't mean expenditures for propietary software must equal to $0.00".
In the other hand, it says "expenditures" not "expenditures from li
Desktop Linux (Score:3, Insightful)
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It sounds weird but how do you think dos/windows got into homes? Its because its what the kids were using in schools.
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Fast forward a few years and w
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Windows isn't exactly cheap in a company environment, but it does require very little development resources compared to FOSS for most deployments.
For a company, this means that you have less in-house development which means you can buy personnel on the market which is already proficient with the infrastructure you use, and that there is no need to develop software in-house.
Especially for smaller companies, this pans out mostly okay. For larger companies, Linux may make sense as the cost of in-house developm
Expect More of This (Score:4, Interesting)
With the world economic situation putting strains on government money, they will be forced to consider cheaper alternatives. OSS can be much cheaper, but its cost is not going to be zero. You have to consider training and support. Even so, substantial savings can be had by going the OSS route. Companies like Microsoft must be shaking in their boots. If OSS gets a decent foothold in government, it will cause an expansion in the private sector. Years from now when the economy improves, OSS will be firmly entrenched.
Hopefully, financially responsibility in government will occur elsewhere as a result, but I'm not holding my breath.
Re:Expect More of This (Score:5, Interesting)
> 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?
Parent
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Re:Expect More of This (Score:4, Interesting)
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?
Parent
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With our public schools teaching Windows and Microsoft Office as part of the standard curriculum, the training costs to business and government is vastly reduced. A whole generation is entering the workforce with a solid (cough) foundation in a very specific set of commercial software. When/If FOSS becomes the norm that would change, but in the mean time, a lot of people will need to be retrained.
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With our public schools teaching Windows and Microsoft Office as part of the standard curriculum...
My experience (and that of my father's) does not match yours. Given your UID, I would imagine that my anecdotes are more recent than yours. :)
I went to a rural high school in the very late 1990's. The only computer education I received from the State was a touch-typing course. My father is currently teaching in a suburban high school. The students in that school receive even less computer training that I did. The majority of their touch-typing class is devoted to internet browsing.
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My experience is based on what my stepdaughter took in school. I did make it a point to complain that the local schools were wasting money on commercial software when free alternatives were readily available. I also voiced my displeasure in them teaching to the advantage of one corporation. I told them they should be teaching skills that were more generally useful, not how to format paragraphs in Microsoft Word. Unfortunately, the woman with the title of "technology expert" at the grammar school barely
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Have they stopped teaching handwriting in elementary school?
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I'm a PC, and I'm four and a half (Score:2)
On the other hand, we all know that children arrive from the womb conversant in the ways of Windows?
No, but per Microsoft's latest TV commercials in the United States: "I'm a PC, and I'm four and a half." Children will be familiar with Windows after having used it to start PC games at home.
Re:Expect More of This (Score:4, Interesting)
OSS can be much cheaper, but its cost is not going to be zero.
All countries make a big distinction between (a) importing foreign goods and (b) paying their own citizens in local currency. Countries sell only so much on international market, and so they can only buy an equivalent amount of goods[*]. Here not only you free a part of your foreign trade up for other necessities (like patented medical materials or instruments,) you also create jobs for your own citizens.
[*] Does not apply to the USA, which is still living off of its credit card.
Parent
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You mean like "Today Tatarstan, tomorrow a slightly larger Russian republic in Central Asia"?
pebble in the puddle (Score:3)
I'm reminded of a pebble dropped in a puddle. The initial splash causes ripples that lap the sides, wetting them enough so that flies settle to eat there. The pebble, meanwhile, lies there and is only seen again after all the life surrounding the puddle has erupted and moved on, after the baking sun is done its drying.
So it is w/ Free Software in the United States.
It's not bad being outside, it seems. Lighter and more free.
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It means that 10am-bedtime needs to sleep more?
Hard to be optimistic about Hungary (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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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.
I've now found more on this (in Hungarian) [origo.hu]. My ability to read Hungarian is limited, but I do see that according to Gábor Bódi (whose government job title, I can't even begin to translate, but it is pretty high up) "this will be a trial year, with many possible outcomes of this initiative."
If I am reading that article correctly (and it is very possible that I am not), while the proposal clearly talks about open source software (nyílt forráskód), much of the justification
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Hungarian reading person here. As for your question:
Yes, the number is right, it's about 54 million USD as maximal spending allocation for OSS - same amount as for MS and Novel - as it read
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In any case, the language the minister used is a bit deceptive. Unfortunately after taking a close look at what he said, it seems the money
FINALLY the year of desktop Linux in Tatarstan!! (Score:2, Funny)
Tatarstan is not former (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Subversion (Score:2)
At this rate wont be surprised a lot if Windows 8 ends being a MS version of Wine running in top of linux.
looks like... (Score:2, Funny)
... Tatarstan will get a lot of plaque from Microsoft for this move.
(yes, I originally read it as "Tartarstan")
Yay Hungary! (Score:2)
Yay Hungary! My grandfather would be so proud. Many years ago he called me and said, "I hear there's an alternative to this Microsoft bull shit. Make it happen on my computer. Oh, and I just got my Hungarian keyboard in. Make that work too."
Let me get this right... (Score:3, Funny)
Russia - which used to be the bad guy - is adoptng Linux - which is the good guy - while the US - who is supposed to be the good guy - keeps hanging onto Microsoft - which are the bad guys?
So who are we supposed to support if they ever go to war?
PS: are they going to change the name of the capital of Tatarstan to Linuxgrad? And they could also have a Stallmangrad. Think of the tourism income from geeks...
Not tiny, not former, not independent (Score:2, Informative)
Tatarstan is not tiny - it is one of the most populous and important regions of Russia. Its capital Kazan is one of the most important cities in Russia.
Tatarstan is not independent - it is an autonomy within the Russian Federation.
Tatarstan is not a former Russian republic - see above.
Might just be a buzzword conglomeration... (Score:2, Interesting)
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It makes perfect sense. For every one million OpenOffice installations, a government department can buy zero copies of Microsoft.
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Isnt FOSS free?
Not when you factor in that political decisions in Hungary only have one purpose: to steal as much as possible before the upcoming elections. Everyone knows they stand a snowball's chance in hell to get re-elected. "Gyurcsány takarodj!" (Gyurcsány GTFO) almost made it into the national anthem since 2006 [wikipedia.org].
At least they're not naming Microsoft directly anymore.
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Home of fish and chips.
No, it's Tatarstan. Home of candy and fizzy-drinks, where toothbrushes fear to tread.
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Re:Geography lesson? (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Parent
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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.
Except that this one declared independence (which is not uncommon) and Russia seemingly acknowledged it (which is unheard of):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tatarstan#Tatarstan_today [wikipedia.org]
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Hungary won't change many attitudes in the U.S.
Why would that matter?
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Option (c) (Score:2)
You forgot option (c)
(c) Examine the formulation of the pill that somebody else made, and make a copy
That's the thing, is, that, all but the smallest countries actually have sufficient population to manufacture what they need. If anything, adopting protectionist measures encourages the development of automation to cope with labor shortages. The United States, for example, became an industrial power because of protectionist policies in the 19th century. Otherwise, she would have been blown out of the wat
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what is the chance that software compiled for Bolivian KDE will run under Paraguayan KDE? (Hint: WINE)
What is the relevance of that at all? If KDE apps can run under GNOME, and KDE3 apps can run under KDE4 (and vice versa), I seriously doubt Paraguayan KDE will have a problem with Bolivian KDE.
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