Software in Schools to Be Legal
The Ministry of Finance has approved the spending of 3 billion rubles for the purchase of licensed software by Russian schools in the next three years. Previously the ministry had insisted that the program be financed on a regional level. However, the program by approved by the presidium of the council on national projects after First Deputy Prime Minster Dmitry Medvedev intervened.
There are now 670,000 computers in Russian schools and that number is growing by 10-15 percent annually. About 1.9 billion rubles from the new program will go to buy legal computer programs. Russian schools are to have exclusively legal software by the end of this year. Each of the approximately 60,000 schools will receive 45 discs containing more than 50 programs.
Within the program, the Ministry of IT and Communications will hold a competition for the creation of a free Russian operating system base on OC Linux that will be installed in educational institutions in 2008 and 2009. That project is budgeted at 50 million rubles.
In August, there will be a competition among software producers, in which the Russian companies ABBYY and 1C will participate, as will the Western companies Adobe, Microsoft and others.
www.kommersant.com
All the Article in Russian as of July 24, 2007
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Photo: Grigoriy Sobchenko
