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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: 3, Interesting) by fraxinus-tree on Thursday September 29 2016, @07:16PM
The project smells of large scale Russian style corruption without a plan to do any real work. But if it is for real, I wish them luck. AFAIK (and yes, I do read Russian) they will try to migrate everything to some government-run cloud and centralizing the information is more important than the software licenses.
(Score: 2) by janrinok on Thursday September 29 2016, @07:42PM
I agree. At the moment purchasing software does not make any local politicos any money. But, if someone can 'control' the sale of local licenses then there is a profit to be made.
They have been moving aways from Windows for several years now because of the security fears i.e. all data will end up in the US or the fear that the US could use cyber warfare in times of crisis to disable Russian systems. This way they hope to prevent that is by having their own version of linux which can operate on existing Microsoft formatted data. And if someone can also make some money.....