SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
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: 3, Informative) by DannyB on Thursday September 29 2016, @05:36PM
That would be like a dream come true. I already find LibreOffice quite usable.
What would also be good is to see Russia ditch Windows and use Linux. Such wide scale use can only lead to improvements that help everyone. Too bad so many in the US are unable to see this. But nothing helps like banning Microsoft.
If you remember, at Google a few years ago, Microsoft Windows was banned. You had to get special permission and have a specific reason to be allowed to use Windows. I could be mistaken, but I strongly suspect that Google might be a major user of desktop and laptop computers? Non Windows PCs means, most likely, Linux and OS X. Both of these are close enough to have large source-level software compatibility.
The more we wean everyone from the addictive Microsoft drug the better for everyone. Open source means a bazaar of innovation and competition. The pace of improvements may be slow. But it is relentless. Inexorable. Microsoft, Oracle, cannot out compete open source in the long run. Open source doesn't have the limitations or constraints of "this quarter" thinking.
Ultimately it is in Russia's own interest. In fact in every non-US country's own interest. Not to be at the mercy of a foreign abusive monopolist, likely infiltrated by the US government. (Remember "NSA Key" ?) Having a more secure internet as a result of the whole world working towards more secure systems helps everyone.
It could do for software what the IBM PC standardization did for hardware. And without being in the clutches of an abusive monopolist who wants all your personal information to be gathered from the OS.
To transfer files: right-click on file, pick Copy. Unplug mouse, plug mouse into other computer. Right-click, paste.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 29 2016, @08:20PM
What would also be good is to see Russia ditch Windows and use Linux
We should note here that Russia has threatened several times before that they will be dumping foreign technology and doing their own thing.
Now, their progress on their ARM-based processor has made noteworthy progress.
Russia Plans to Dump Some American CPUs for Homegrown Technology [soylentnews.org]
Linux-Based, MIPS-Powered Russian All-in-One PC Launched [soylentnews.org]
Replacing Windoze hasn't been as successful for them.
Going back to 2007, there was the case of Russian educator Aleksandr Ponosov who *thought* he was buying legit MSFT licenses but he got snookered.
They made a big goddamned stink about the software on TWELVE fucking computers.
Ponosov's case [wikipedia.org]
...after which, Russia said they were going to go all-FOSS.
Russian schools abandon Windows after piracy scare [googleusercontent.com] (orig) [theinquirer.net]
...and Putin said that they were going to produce a homebrew national software environment.
...but a couple of years later they said, **Well, maybe not...**
No Russian Operating System, At Least For Now [googleusercontent.com] (orig) [slashdot.org]
**...Maybe we'll just use stuff that already exists.**
So, we'll have to wait and see how it works out this go-around.
At least this time they started at the proper end (with the apps).
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]