Russia's Operating System May Be Fedora Based

Glyn Moody writes "Last month, a story about Russia producing its own national operating system based on GNU/Linux started circulating. Now there's some confirmation, and details of how the plan might be put into practice. Red Hat had a meeting with the Russian communications ministry, which announced that the development of free software in Russia was one of its priorities. One concrete idea they talked about was using the Russian Fedora project as a step towards creating a national operating system."

Fedora not a good choice

[messner_007]

I am using Fedora from the start and I like it very much, but I don't think its philosophy is suitable for a "national" distribution.

Fedora is created for testing, not for everyday usage for normal people (not neerds). I think even using Fedora qualify you as a nerd. OK, it gets even worse if you are using alpha's.

Using Fedora will cripple their productivity and they will start to hate Linux.

If they want to use Linux for serious stuff, like "national distribution", then they should chose another distro.

Let's start a Sputnik-like race!

[openfrog]

First, I would like to see comments on Slashdot cease referring to "the Reds" as if the USSR was still in existence. Are some Slashdotters actually young enough to have no memory of 1989-1990??? However and that being said, if Russia goes ahead with this project, it would be clever to agitate for a Sputnik-like panic and suggest that America must beat them to the goal of free software, as the thing that will propel humanity into the future.

russian point of view

[anjolio]

Hey guys, here is my point of view from Russia:

1. First of all jokes about communism and Red OS are not funny (here), we fed of them a lot, really. It was finished 18 years ago, maybe enough?
2. Really "red" meant "beautiful" about 2 centuries ago in russian. Borsch is very tasteful! (:
3. Russian linux community has a lot of discussions about this theme. A lot of people think that most effective action is spending money on current russian open source developers to improve international software. Of course we need better localizations in some cases. In my point of view it's the best way, but..
4. Government need to see a real result, such as rusisian OS, so as I think, they would not spend money on current developers and try to create new team with it's own distribution, or, maybe, to spend money on one of current russian distributions (ALT Linux is the likely one, as I see).
5. Windows is really looks like free OS now here, about 95% of home users have pirate version. I think something should be done and linux is the best way.
6. Actually nobody knows here (except government :) what this OS will look like: will it be just another linux distro, or will it be OS based on linux, but with closed sources. Everybody understand it will not be a new OS, it's really impossible.

Re:It's Simple Really

[mormop]

Agreed, monopoly isn't good but if you are a country that doesn't always see eye to eye with the home nation of the world's most widespread software manufacturer then breaking away to a system that allows to not only view the source code but also compile it from scratch into a distro of your own making is an extremely attractive proposition.

I'm not saying that Windows contains back doors and switches but once you stir DRM into the equation, a tap of a key in a far off country could cripple your economy, military and/or governmental services in the event of a trade war or other stand off. Once you have a national system, you can then use the "we must train school kids to use the software they'll encounter in the real world" excuse that Microsoft has traded off of for so long.

As Microsoft discovered early on, people will mostly use the same software at home that they have at work so there'll probably be a boom in the Linux userbase.