This is a follow up to the earlier post about Linux in Russia. (All links in this post are to blog posts in Russian.)

It looks like Alksnis' attempt to get the parliament to issue a ask Putin to attend to the creation of “Russian OS” didn’t go very far (in general in Russia the parliament speaks to the President when spoken too). The parliament voted with 66 votes for, 1 against, and 383 not showing up. However Alksnis declared a small victory when the prime minister issued a resolution asking the Ministry of Education to provide a package of basic software to all schools and see that this software is used (there are PDFs in Russian on Alksinis' blog). The request mentions free software only as an option – it basically says that the Ministry of Education should line up the software either by licencing it, by finding free software, or by ordering custom development. At the same time, it may be an important step. As many have pointed out in the past, MS software wouldn’t be so popular in Russia and other countries with similar or lesser wages if it wasn’t so easy to pirate. Currently it seems that schools pirate software individually. This resolution requires that either the government licenses all the software properly – a big bill – or they tell the schools to use free software. In the very least there won’t be more cases of underpaid school teachers being sued for installing pirated Windows so that they could teach students about computers.