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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: 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.