Russia bans purchase of foreign non-niche software in Russian state agencies

[Anton Nesterov]

Zenaan Harkness:
>> Ivan Markin:
>>> Anyway they would just sell super overpriced Uslugi (installation
>>> services etc.) and it would look like "this software is purchased" (from
>>> "our" company obviously).
> 
> That is just fine, that's a good thing - resources are being kept in
> Russia, for Russians. And then the only question is efficiency of
> government spending, which is an entirely different and solvable
> problem - for example as long as the government makes transparent its
> spending, then "installation services of GPL software" would soon
> enough be seen as lucrative pursuit, and competition would
> (presumably) arise for said installation (and customization) services,
> and the costs to government should normalize, that is the costs should
> normalize around relatively low installation/ customization/ training
> services, rather than the cost of proprietary software rent-seekers
> such as Microsoft, SAP and Oracle. This again will be a very good
> thing for Russia and for Russians. More countries should follow this
> lead of Russia - in fact it is in everyone's interest.
> 

Well currently Russia has many problems with transparent spending. Even
if tenders are public, it's still problematic to cancel clearly corrupt
tenders. They often build it in such way that only one affiliated
company can participate, like "company should had at least N workers,
with N workers with Z certificates" and so on.

So the idea of moving to free software is awesome (when the idea of ban
foreign software is not), but realization would be flawed because of how
Russia works.

> 
> Perhaps you can spread the word that "overpriced services" is not only
> OK by the GPL, but encouraged. "Charge as much as you can.":
> http://www.fsf.org/philosophy/selling.html
> 
Yes, I know, and I don't think there is any problems with providing
services for money. By "overpriced services" Ivan means kickbacks, it's
not special for software.

> It is still so much better than pumping money into proprietary
> freedom-denying community-compromising software that you might get
> from Apple and Microsoft.
But it's a proprietary freedom-denying community-compromising software
that you get from Astra Linux that clearly violates GPL, I don't think
it's any better. If they fix that problem and opensource everything,
that would be awesome, but now it's bad.

> 
>> There is proprietary OS MSVS based on RedHat used in military which not
>> only violate GPL by not providing source codes, but even removed most of
>> copyright notices.
> 
> Military probably gets to do what it wants, without much question.
It's not only military actually. Government company VNIINS just removed
all copyrights from RedHat, added some functionality and now sells it to
authorities, mostly military, but it's also used by drug police and others.

> 
> BUT, these examples and others, are examples of opportunity to build a
> little GPL-enforcing community in Russia, perhaps send a letter to the
> president (currently Putin), or simply to jump on the free libre
> software bandwagon and make some money - but showing how to do it
> right, with respect of original authors' intentions as expressed by
> the respective software licenses.
There was a govt decree about moving to free software, but it mostly
failed. For example, all schools was forced to install ALT Linux in
2007, if I remember correctly. They did, but it was installed in
dualboot with Windows and used only to show inspectors that well, here
is your Linux, we're in compliance (initially there was no accepted by
Ministry of Education books, only courses for teachers, but even that
was almost stopped when Putin came back, so that result was obvious).
Money was spend, but with no actual results. So Russia tried to jump on
the free libre software bandwagon for years with little or no success.

But also there was some successful migrations to free software, for
example, all clinics in Moscow moved to ALT Linux. There was no need of
ban of foreign software for it, they just did it. That how it should be,
but it's more like exception than a rule, and it's really hard to make
all Russia work that way.

> 
> This move by the Russian government is an excellent move, make no
> doubt. Those Russians who can make money from it, can do so with their
> heads held high, in dignity and with rightful respect from the rest of
> the world. Go to it! Service your government and make some clean
> money!! You have the blessings of the large global free libre software
> community, the Free Software Foundation, etc.
The problem is not in Russian companies making money on free software,
but doing this in corrupt way and with GPL violations. If they can do it
without that, this would be good.

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