Russia to reduce dependence on Microsoft, develop own OS.

[Sgt_Kickaxe]

[news.yahoo.com...]

"Freedom" may not be a concept that's historically associated with Russia, but as for technology, the federation will soon be far freer than many businesses can even imagine--free from Windows, that is, and its legacy of high costs, malware, and perpetual hardware upgrades.

Following in the footsteps of numerous other governments around the world, Moscow has reportedly set aside 150 million rubles to develop a national software system that's based instead on Linux. Its goals? To reduce Russia's dependence on Microsoft and to increase security, according to reports.

"We will become independent of Windows," Russian deputy Ilia Ponomarev told AFP Wednesday. The details of the new operating system will reportedly be decided at a meeting in December.

This isn't an anti-Microsoft statement but a pro-Russia statement... "Good for Russia!"

How quickly the public switches to the new system remains to be seen, assuming it's not forced on everyone.

[eelixduppy]

I think this is going to be the natural trend of technology anyways -- a shift to open-source projects. It wouldn't surprise me if more and more people started using "open source" OS's in the near future. Windows has made significant leaps in performance, but it still lacks that hardened element you get with studied open-source projects that make them statistically more secure.

Anyway, it would be interesting to see how this develops, if it does at all...

[SevenCubed]

Maybe they'll hire this Russian fellow as team lead [telegraph.co.uk...] because it sounds to me like he has his priorities in order and probably be a good influence of the project.

[kaled]

The problem with open-source software is that there is no motivation to fix bugs or create a sensible user interface...

Firefox : Memory bugs years old have never been fixed.
Open Office : It's taken me a couple of days to figure out how to do a few simple things. I've torn my hair out in exasperation and even burst out laughing at how badly designed certain features are. How about this for stupidity...

You can drag one document into another and create something called a "section". If you then "remove" the section, the text is copied into the document. This isn't a bug, it's by design. Now "unlinking" the section is a reasonable option to offer, but why no option to delete the section?

I could go on and on with examples of counter-intuitive behaviour and hidden features but I'll spare myself the agony. Most software is rubbish but open-source software can be diabolical.

Kaled.

[eelixduppy]

More often than not, proprietary software companies only make changes when it affects their bottom line.

>> Firefox
They are still there for two reasons. 1) it is very hard to fix bugs when third-party apps can be involved, like a web browser. 2) Not enough people cared to fix the problem. An open-source project is only as good as the number of people working on it. Just because it is open-source, doesn't make it "good".

[kaled]

it is very hard to fix bugs when third-party apps can be involved

Assuming you are talking about extensions and plugins, this may be the line that Mozilla use but where memory leaks are concerned it is complete tosh. All memory allocations should go through the main program, therefore tracking down leaks should be straightforward. As for other bugs...

If the interface is well designed and implemented, extensions and plugins should never destabilise the main program (or other extensions). If they do, the fact that they are able to do so is a bug in the main program.

Kaled.