Hungary, Tatarstan Latest To Go FOSS

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."

Desktop Linux

[derrida]

That's the way to the desktop. Through governments and big organizations.

Re:Doing the math...

[rtb61]

As in 'training' costs for open source software versus proprietary closed source licence fees, it also allows money to spent spent on customising open source software for specific long term applications versus throwing away money on 'temporary' software licence fees (the reality being they often last no longer than two years in actual use).

Re:Expect More of This

[betterunixthanunix]

No, but these governments already have computers, and they are switching to free-libre software. The fact that they are switching is where the training costs are incurred -- temporary, yes, but costs that must be overcome if free-libre software will gain a foothold.

Re:Doing the math...

[MichaelSmith]

This seems to happen in places where money, and especially foreign exchange are at a premium. A big advantage for the Tatarstan Ministry of Education is that they don't have to commit to lots of purchases in US dollars. Instead, as you point out, they can make their own engineers who will work for local currency, and educate their people at the same time.

Re:Doing the math...

[Anonymous Coward]

This seems to happen in places where money, and especially foreign exchange are at a premium.

I believe that money is at a premium in all educational institutions. The college where I teach CS is looking at an $X million budget cut and our department is set to lose 2 lecturers.

But can we wean our people off MS? Can we heck as like.

Re:Desktop Linux

[lukas84]

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 development and Microsoft licensing may start to get on even footing.

Apple certainly isn't aiming for corporate users - they do not offer any system management, monitoring tools, software deployment, policy enforcement, etc. Their server offerings are extremely few, and their server software is only designed for department use.

I have no idea how Apple runs it's internal IT, bu then again they have an user base that constists largely of technically proficient people, and my suspection is that they probably just grant local admin rights to all their users - it would be interesting to read on "How Apple does IT".