InfoTech: Putin says Russia's government to migrate to OSS

Putin is not by any means the first leader to say that it is a nation's best interest to move to open source software.

And it's not just nations.

In Germany, in the early 2000s, said that they were considering such a move. In 2003, Microsoft was reported to have installed Microsoft Office 2003 across the 110,000 computers in use in North Rhine Westphalia.

A battleground was being formed: around the same time Munich announced that it would renounce most commercial software, including Microsoft Windows and Office and its components in favour of Linux and OpenOffice.Org.

A central policy group at that time agreed with IBM that Linux and other open source software would be deployed in government departments.

But the Munich experience did not prove happy: dubbed LiMux, did not go as smoothly or as quickly as planned. Indeed, by 30 June 2010, only 3,000 workstations had been converted, that only 2,000 would be converted during 2010. The total number of workstations had increased to 15,000 over the period. The plan was that 80% of Munich's workstations would be converted by mid 2012. But the city has admitted that that's not going to happen and has voted to extend the project to 2013.

One of the biggest problems has been user resistance: they simply don't want to swap from Windows.

That's precisely what Microsoft bet on in Malaysia where former Prime Minster Mahathir announced that the government would migrate to Linux and other open source software. Within weeks, schools were given a variety of Microsoft product. That resistance to change is powerful especially when started young.

Now, five years later, government departments still do not accept documents in OpenOffice.Org.

But the move is gathering pace in some directions: in 2007,North Rhine Westphalia (remember them from above?) contracted with Novel to provide Linux server and desktop products to some 560,000 students. That would bring the number of students in various States where Linux is the platform of choice to just under 900,000.

Amsterdam is trying to move to Linux but the plan is locked in a trial stage.

In the UK, Birmingham City Council aborted a planned migration to Linux after a revised costing showed it was cheaper to stay with Microsoft than to migrate.

So, the Linux Foundation's announcement today that Russia's Putin has said that Linux will be the Russian government's primary platform by 2015 looks, at best, optimistic.

And its not even news: Putin originally made the announcement in December last year when he signed an executive order.