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.
January 30, 2009 at 7:34 am
Actually I just guested a Egor Grebnev post.