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El Reg reports
The city of Moscow has announced it's going to start ditching Microsoft, following a call by president Vladimir Putin for Russia to be more self-reliant, and is starting with an untried-at-scale e-mail system.
The phase-out will start by replacing Microsoft Exchange servers and Outlook clients, on 6,000 of the city's computers, with an e-mail system from state-run carrier Rostelecom.
Windows and Office could be next on the list, and local reports suggest the shift could impact as many as 600,000 end users.
According to local business news outlet Vedomosti (in Russian here), the scale of the eventual rollout is because eventually schools, doctors, and housing and community service workers will be using the city-provided e-mail software.
The migration to email servers hosted at Rostelcom, using software from New Cloud Technologies in Russia, is expected to take two years.
Vedomosti says the city has budgeted RUB 43.6 million (about US$700,000) for the initial project, and that the new licenses will be around 30 per cent cheaper than Moscow's current Microsoft bill.
[...] Bloomberg [...] quotes communications minister Nikolay Nikiforov as saying "We want the money of taxpayers and state-run firms to be primarily spent on local software".
Moscow's CIO Artem Yermolaev said the city has already swapped out Cisco's surveillance camera software for local product.
In March, Oracle slagged off PostgreSQL in an attempt to fend off Russian moves towards the libre database.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 29 2016, @04:22PM
You mean, they're dumping the licenses and running pirated rebranded versions.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 29 2016, @04:26PM
They probably have the MS source code as well. But can they find homegrown hackers willing to provide support for it?
Expect to see some hilariously cryptic questions posted on stackoverflow.
(Score: 5, Funny) by LoRdTAW on Thursday September 29 2016, @04:33PM
Привет Я работаю над новым проектом, и я не уверен относительно того, что переменная _NSAKEY используется. Пожалуйста помогите.
(Score: 5, Funny) by termigator on Thursday September 29 2016, @04:37PM
He said "cryptic" not "cyrillic". But I guess for us non-Russian speakers they are synonymous.
(Score: 3, Informative) by LoRdTAW on Thursday September 29 2016, @04:40PM
Google translate is your comrade.
(Score: 4, Funny) by takyon on Thursday September 29 2016, @05:31PM
https://translate.google.com/#en/ru/Google%20translate%20is%20your%20comrade. [google.com]
https://translate.google.com/#ru/en/Google%20%D0%BF%D0%B5%D1%80%D0%B5%D0%B2%D0%B5%D1%81%D1%82%D0%B8%20%D0%B2%D0%B0%D1%88%20%D1%82%D0%BE%D0%B2%D0%B0%D1%80%D0%B8%D1%89. [google.com]
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 4, Funny) by turgid on Thursday September 29 2016, @04:44PM
My ekranoplan is full of lobsters.
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 29 2016, @05:23PM
My ekranoplan is full of lobsters.
Install Crawfish Patch 2.0B to the main motors. It will work for certain small volume of lobsters and you'll enjoy being able to serve Crayfish Stew using Lobster to your passengers for lunch.
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Thursday September 29 2016, @05:37PM
My Antonov is full of Caviar
(Score: 2) by turgid on Thursday September 29 2016, @06:26PM
Lucky you! :-)
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 1) by fraxinus-tree on Thursday September 29 2016, @07:06PM
Heh. Grep for _FSBKEY instead.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Thursday September 29 2016, @05:39PM
Russia (and other countries) might find it in their own long term interests to have all the source code, compile it themselves and have more confidence in what they are actually running.
The lower I set my standards the more accomplishments I have.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by jmoschner on Thursday September 29 2016, @06:22PM
If properly maintained, it is in the best interest of most large organizations (nations, companies, etc.) to write and maintain their own software. Avoiding being reliant upon other companies and putting your security and productivity into their hands can be more expensive than doing it in house. It also allows for being able to develop features and services that the organization needs.
(Score: 2) by Nerdfest on Thursday September 29 2016, @06:36PM
Any non-US government or company that needs any sort of secrecy is effectively retarded to trust any US product these days. I'm not sure proprietary software from any other country is really any different.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 29 2016, @08:36PM
If properly maintained, it is in the best interest of most large organizations (nations, companies, etc.) to write and maintain their own software.
Not really. It makes it that much easier for the NSA to target and deliver exploits which have a much smaller security community to try and detect and obviate. It allows NSA to put detaiiled "tiger teams" on cracking specific system classes and not having to worry so much about detectable bleed-over. You lose the economy of scale that is the Windows security community, for example. And joke all you want, the faux-crowdsourcing of security is the absolute best free benefit that Microsoft currently enjoys. Same for added features - the reduced cost yet increased profit that a generic program offers almost always outweighs the cost-benefit of maintaining internal IT development.
Economy of scale, bitches. It works every time.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 29 2016, @11:39PM
when you're talking about large organizations (nations, companies, etc) that is your economy of scale
the larger the organization, the less competitive an off-the-shelf product becomes
(Score: 4, Informative) by edIII on Thursday September 29 2016, @08:19PM
Doubtful. Exchange and Outlook are complete fucking shit. Outlook isn't very stable (I used it for years until switching to web based), and Exchange is a fucking nightmare. They store the email inefficiently, and those data stores were always corrupting themselves. Not to mention you needed to place the whole fucking thing on a Windows Server 2000/2003/2007.
It was the biggest, stupidest, and most bloated email system there is. The whole thing was a shoddy extension of IMAP in the first place designed for corporate bloat and to be sold to Fortune 500 companies where they could afford to pay somebody >$100k per year to run it.
All of the greatest features and functions you want are in open source alternatives. If you're going to continue on Windows boxes you could always go with MDaemon which is a proprietary offering. I ran that for over 10 years on a Windows Advanced Server. It was cheaper and easier to run than Exchange by far, and it was a complete mail server too of which Exchange isn't even a full mail server. Last I checked you needed to run a mail server alongside it.
Zimbra ZCS. It's free, can be set up high availability mode, has proxies, web based interfaces, and fully supports mobile devices. As well as being Open Source, extendable, and storing its data in an actual database supported by Open Source too. Russia could go with that, but they're going local, which means they can still go with the community version and refactor it their needs. Who wants to bet the Russian version is some flavor of Open Source or FOSS?
I would pay to leave Exchange/Outlook, but it's free to do. Why on Earth would you stay with that toxic crap? I pity the people still on their own Exchange servers.
LOL
Technically, lunchtime is at any moment. It's just a wave function.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 30 2016, @07:27AM
I recall about 15 years ago a tour of a University's servers.
"These 20 computers are handling the Microsoft portion of the mail - exchange servers".
"- And that one over there?"
"oh, that one? Yeah, that's the mail server. It handles each and every mail going into or out of the university, or being send within uni."
Sure, you'd expect some redundancy for the data storage, but still... that always seemed amazingly inefficient to me.
(Score: 2) by driverless on Friday September 30 2016, @08:10AM
No, the magic phrase is "We want the money of taxpayers and state-run firms to be primarily spent on local software". A bit of digging will then reveal that Nikolay Nikiforov's brother-in-law runs a software company that creates mail software. Welcome to Russia.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 30 2016, @06:14PM
Nikolay Nikiforov's brother-in-law runs a software company that creates mail software
...and I thought that *I* was the most cynical guy here.
I'll admit that I didn't see such a claim in any of the English-language coverage.
Maybe it's in the Russian-language coverage.
.
Nick Heath over at TechRepublic mentioned Munich's switch to locally-supported FOSS and how other governmental entities have observed their success and are increasingly following suit.
France's Gendarmerie Nationale and Italy's armed forces are mentioned specifically.
.
An AC latecomer to the (meta)thread has mentioned under "still don't get it" that Russia would have been wise to have specified *FOSS* as preferable and I agree with that.
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by driverless on Saturday October 01 2016, @03:25AM
..and I thought that *I* was the most cynical guy here.
I'll admit that I didn't see such a claim in any of the English-language coverage.
Maybe it's in the Russian-language coverage.
Oh, I didn't say that that absolutely was the case, but was pointing out a potential motivation, particularly since the statement was pretty blatant about making sure the money was being spent locally. Reasons for Russian laws:
1. Someone is making money off them.
2. Increase the powers of some government agency, e.g. FSB.
3. Someone is making money off them.
4. Someone is making money off them.
5. Vaguely moralistic stuff, e.g. anti-LGBT laws.
6. Someone is making money off them.
And, finally, because someone is making money off them.