Russia Wants to Achieve Independence with Russian Software

Have you ever thought about how dependent you personally are on all the software vendors whose products you use? We normally don’t pay much attention to such concerns, but just imagine that one day Microsoft goes out of business for whatever reason it may be and many of your personal files will need to be converted to some other format for you to be able to open them at all – be it an article you wrote years ago for a local magazine or a spreadsheet you had for your family budget.

And who knows how good conversion will be and what portion of the documents will be converted flawlessly and where you will encounter errors? Come to think of it, it is scary to know that one single company has so much power over your life – be it Microsoft, Apple or Google.

And now imagine that you are a head of a country where all the lives of all the people depend on some company that resides in another country and that you cannot reasonably control? In this situation the entire issue is taken into the realm of national security where a country is not supposed to rely on external resources to an extent where it could pose a danger.

This is a very simplified description of the reasons behind Russia’s idea of sticking to open-source software or – better yet – only work with internally developed tools. Here in Russia this has been quite a popular topic for discussions among authorities and even the president and open-source software is officially encouraged for use in the country.

I myself have always thought that this is quite a reasonable position as the software you use actually determines a lot for you and if you want to be fully independent, use of open-source tools might be a good idea. In fact, I think that if all the talented Russian developers joined the open-source community behind the already popular tools, those tools could rapidly progress and eventually achieve the state where they are as good as (or even better than) those paid-for tools that millions of people around the world have learned to use over the years.

But now it looks like not many of the Russian developers are actually eager to join the open-source community and work without compensation for the ideals they believe in (and who would criticize them for their willingness to make money?). The alternative is here as the new project dubbed “Russian Software” is introduced to be officially presented soon.

In early September at the first youth innovation forum here in Novosibirsk (the city where I happen to live) a group of local developers will be introducing the ambitious project to the general public. The idea is to provide high-quality alternatives to proprietary international software titles and to make sure that these alternatives will also be much less expensive than the Western products.

The project has been implemented by a small (about ten persons) group of recent university graduates and young software developers who have been working on the idea in their spare time while sticking to their day jobs. And while now everything is based on their enthusiasm, it is quite obvious that the approach declared by the guys will easily find support from the government and they may move to full-time development in a fancy office soon if the idea is approved (provided that it is as good as it sounds).

All the applications in the package will run on a single software platform that will work on all the operating systems – so they will be available to all the users. Another advantage of this approach is that the platform will fully protect all the applications running on it from viruses and other malware.

The developers now admit that it is too early to predict anything for now as the project is still in the very early stage of its development and too many things are still to be completed for the products to become actually usable. But of course with government support this “ruware” will achieve significant progress – and soon – while I’ll be waiting to see if there’s anything good behind the project other than the idea itself.

Via (in Russian)