Linux To Be Installed In Every Russian School 293
J_Omega writes "According to an article from last week at the Russian IT site CNews, Linux is slated to be installed in every Russian school by 2009. The article makes it appear that it will be going by the (unimaginative) name 'Russian OS.' As stated in the article: 'The main aim of the given work is to reduce dependence on foreign commercial software and provide education institutions with the possibility to choose whether to pay for commercial items or to use the software, provided by the government.' Initial testing installations are supposed to begin next year in select districts. Is 2008/09 the year of Linux on the (Russian) desktop?"
Good for them (Score:3, Interesting)
With the hopeful side effect, of course, of a more robust OS for all others involved. Given russia's rather lax attitude towards IP ( which I can't fault them in ), it's questionable whether we will see changes committed back to the tree. But here's hoping!
Time for Linux Penetration WorldMap ? (Score:5, Interesting)
It'd be interesting to see some world maps showing which countries have massive deployments and when you mouse-over, it shows you the # population that is using Linux.
Then we can turn to our bosses and say... "See!"
Anybody up for the challenge?
Adeptus
I'm very disappointed (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Great, the penguin goes red! (Score:5, Interesting)
Let's teach all the russian kids how to hack. This is what we should be doing in the USA.
Back when I was teaching, I did exactly that.
I had a standing challenge that any kid who managed to pop any of my servers, and show/prove exactly how he or she did it, got a their overall grade bumped by one letter for that semester. The ground rules were simple: they could only break into a server that I controlled. I did it because 1) kids try for it out of curiousity anyway, and 2) they may as well be challenged to study than admonished into ignorance. I went out of my way to include security into the curricula whenever and wherever I could.
Out of six years of teaching, only one student had managed it... he organized the local (Salt Lake City) 2600 chapter. Last I heard he was running his own security consulting firm.
One solution to copyright infringment suits (Score:3, Interesting)
Microsoft could have solved this by lowering the price of XP for educators in russia enough so that it could have been meaningfully distributed around the country. But they didn't. Oh well.
Partially due to cost, too (Score:2, Interesting)
Getting Linux into western schools / OpenEducation (Score:3, Interesting)
No way; Microsoft will stop this. (Score:3, Interesting)
What's going to happen, most likely, is that they let the pilot programme run, and then buy sufficient amount of FUD-spreading from those involved to declare it unsuccessful, with a nice side-effect of discrediting the only competitor (Apple is not competitive in Russia - hardware pricing is way too high, and, perhaps, more importantly for education sector, their software is not localized for Russia).
Re:Time for Linux Penetration WorldMap ? (Score:5, Interesting)
http://www.listphile.com/Linux [listphile.com]
Re:Not a balanced starting point (Score:3, Interesting)
On Linux, I've seen the same thing, but at a much more legitimate level (I believe), in fact I had a non-techy friend recently tell me he'd installed FC7 on his laptop and was wondering what to do now that he'd unpacked and compiled a program he downloaded. He wasn't sure where the icon had gone after 'configure, make, make install' and I explained how to copy the ".desktop" file from another program and edit it, and he started making icons for all the programs he didn't have icons for (many of which require command-line arguments, but oh well).
Lots of people hack around with Windows for fun, lots of people hack around with Linux for fun. The difference is that Windows users have huge walls of limitation set up in front of them, Linux users do not.
Re:Is Linux really important? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Good for them (Score:4, Interesting)
You may have a very good point. However, there's likely something else at work here: the widespread belief in Russia (and a lot of the world) about American software's role in that big explosion of a Siberian pipeline [msn.com] in the summer of 1982.
Add to this the recent stories about Microsoft software that updates itself silently, even when you turn off the auto-update, and MS's explanation of why this is the right thing for them to do. A Russian administrator would have to be really stupid (or really on the take) to approve of anything from Microsoft. Granted, a lot of them may do so, but that's just evidence of how stupid (or on the take) they are. So part of the story might be that at the very top, Russian administrators no longer trust any software made in the USA.
But with the BSA story, it does sorta sound like MS is trying its best to get Russians to buy from someone else.
Re:Great, the penguin goes red! (Score:3, Interesting)
he got us so interested in his story but he didnt tell us how it ended properly...
Sorry 'bout that; here's (roughly) how he did it:
He got to the Windows NT Server through his student account, shook out a copy of the local SAM, then spent the next few days brute-forcing it on a different machine. I was handed a printed list of every user account and its password on that machine (including the one I used for that box) as evidence. It was cool and scary at the same time; IIRC it took MSFT about six months from that point (which I had submitted to them) to patch the vuln that allowed him to grab it.
Re:Huh? (Score:3, Interesting)