Russia, broken Linux CDs shipped to schools

Aleksey Novodvorsky and Viktor Alksnis report that School Linux project faces major difficulties: no financing for 2009 has been approved; and install CDs have been amended by a third party in a way that made them non-bootable.  Here is a report by xkor, presumably a school teacher, who says he cannot proceed with installation using CDs that’s just been shipped.  There is a growing number of reports that install CDs are simply broken.

Sergey Abramov and his motherboard

http://www.thg.ru/business/intel_xeon_5500_moscow/index.html

RASPO

Russians to form RASPO — Russian Association of Free Software (SPO is something like “FSW” for free software).

To me, “association of software” sounds pretty stupid.  Association of people is okay and association of companies is still okay, but association of software is not.  And there is no “association for free software” variant in Russian (i.e. no easy way to plug for).

Medvedev renders IT government effort a bullshit

Russia, president Dmitry Medvedev said that there had been no real IT progress in government [available for people from their computers], and he called government IT plans “a chimera” [and possibly "a vapour", which is a very polite term for plain "bullshit"].

Medvedev said that document exchange in public offices still goes in “on-paper” form, and people by no means can use their computers for tractable communications with the government [esp. getting information on their documents and their requests to officials].  Medvedev commanded to finish the development of a government web site, which shall provide basic information on government services, in the nearest future; earlier, the site was supposed to be launched by Jan 2009, and in fact it wasn’t.

Russians fail to agree on National Operating System

The National Operating System initiative has been postponed.  “A letter to president Dmitry Medvedev, which was supposed to be signed by all major IT players, asking for political and financial support for ‘Russian replacement for Windows’ development, has not been written and agreed yet,” reports CNews.  “Agreeing the text between interested parties turned out to be much harder than we initially expected, — said Gosduma deputy Ilya Ponomarev [a proponent on behalf of Russian parliament]. — Major IT players could not yet deliver their common views on the subject.”

It is no wonder that ALT Linux, Microsoft, and FSB (former KGB) cannot decide what the National Operating System would be.  Their attitudes are simply different.  Microsoft is not likely to approve something that can cut down their market share and their profits.  And FSB is yet another story (possibly they want more control and more secrecy).

Nicolai Gedda

Nicolai Gedda is among the best singers ever.
And his Russian is very good, near to perfect.

Pavel Borodin: Russia to save Europe from crisis

Russia will save Europe from the economic crisis, said Pavel Borodin, state secretary of the Russia-Belarus union, today at a press conference.

“We are all, as my former chief used to say, are ‘dear’ Russians.  And soon we are going to be indeed ‘very dear’ [valuable] for Europeans.  We can save them from the economic crisis,” said Pavel Borodin.  By his ‘former chief’ Borodin means Boris Yeltsin, the first president of the Russian Federation.

However, Borodin suggests that “there is no economic crisis taking place in the wold at all”.  According to Borodin, the world’s problem is resource crisis as well as territory crisis.  “Though Europe and the United States are settled down [for comfortable life], they have no oil, no gas, no tin, no nickel, no gold, no metals [fossils].  They’ve got nothing.  We’ve got everything, so that we are secure,” said Borodin.

Putin Turns Down Michael Dell’s Aid Offer

http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/01/28/putin-turns-down-dell-aid-offer/

After a speech Wednesday at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Mr. Putin, Russia’s prime minister, took some questions from Davos attendees. Michael Dell, the founder and chief executive of Dell, posed the first query. He asked how technology companies could help Russia make the best use of its talent and technology. Mr. Putin appeared less than impressed with the question.

“You see, the trick is that we don’t need any help,” Mr. Putin said, according to a video of the event on YouTube. “We are not invalids. We do not have limited capacity.”

Reports from the event suggest that the audience was taken aback by Mr. Putin’s aggressive remarks. The version of the event on YouTube, however, seems to put things in a less caustic light. (The reports also have Mr. Putin saying Russia does not have “limited mental capacity” rather than just “limited capacity” in an infrastructure sense, as the translation seems to imply.)

Mr. Putin appeared set on defending Russia as an advanced nation and not a developing country in need of aid. He celebrated the broad use of computers and Internet access at Russian schools and boasted about Russian software developers.

“Our programmers are some of the best in the world,” Mr. Putin said. “No one would contest that here –- not even our Indian colleagues.”

Sovereign Democracy

Russian Gosduma to pass a law under which the party that wins elections will appoint regional governors.

Since 2004, governors are no longer elected, but directly appointed by president Putin.  After the law is passed, governors will be appointed by the leader of winning party (which is United Russia), Vladimir Putin.

Open Source Government

Back in April 2008, Roberto Galoppini wrote in his blog: “Russian Ministry on Information Technology and Communications published recently a document entitled Concept of development and usage of Free Software in the Russian Federation (Russian). It is a 29-page text, which is by far the most detailed roadmap of government involvement in Free Software. The legal status of this document is not very strong: in the recent Russian governmental tradition a ‘concept’ is a kind of a detailed policy declaration, which may not be fully observed or may even be rejected or forgotten after a short period of time. However, it may serve as groundwork for future projects and more specific policy measures. Thus, even though a concept document does not create anything by itself, its availability is necessary for creation of good things.”

I noticed Roberto’s blog entry due to Anatoly Yakishin, ALT Linux analyst, and otherwise a professional surgeon. (Yakushin possibly prefers his blog not to be indexed by search engines, so I removed the link to his blog entry.)

“Development infrastructure. — This might be the most surprising and contradictory part of the document,” says Roberto. “The government plans to build a reference package building environment, a unified software repository for different platforms (including operating systems, basic development tools, middleware etc.), tracking of all the software titles used in government and tools for automatic certification of software that corresponds to particular standards.”

“This ‘infrastructure’ is viewed as the platform for community participation in development of FOSS for Russian government and a multi-featured tracking and management tool for various kinds of software used throughout the government. The specific infrastructure actions include conduction of government-sponsored development competitions, definition of priority projects, maintaining of an up-to-date list of recommended standards and specifications etc.”

I think I have to read the document carefully before making some comments.