Russia Moves to Linux In 2011

Prime Minister of the Russian Federation, Vladimir Putin, signed a government order for the transition of federal executive bodies and agencies of the federal budget to use free software between 2011 - 2015.

According to the document signed on December 17th, 2010, the Russian government will have to dump proprietary software and move to free and/or open source alternatives, such as GNU/Linux.

The Russian CNews website said:

"Prime Minister Vladimir Putin signed a plan for transition of power structures and the federal budget [to] free software. According to the document, the introduction of Linux in government should begin in II quarter 2012."

"Today it became known that Prime Minister Vladimir Putin signed a document which describes the timetable for the transition of power structures on free software (OSS)."

"The document is called a "transition plan of the federal authorities and federal budgetary institutions on the use of free software", and covers the period from 2011 to 2015."

The following is part of the 25-point document translated with the help of Google Translate:

"1. Approve the attached plan for the transition of federal executive bodies and agencies of the federal budget for the use of free software for 2011 - 2015 years."

"2. Federal executive agencies to implement activities in accordance with the plan approved by this Order, within the established government of the Russian Federation, limiting the size of their staff and budget allocations provided to them in the federal budget execution authority to the specified area of activity."

Here is the entire government document, translated from Russian to English with the amazing Google Translate language translation service.

It is well known that the Russian Federation has been moving in the direction of free software in the last years. For example, in 2008 all the Russian schools had to implement free software packages on all of its systems. Therefore, schools who want to use proprietary software packages will have to pay for it out of their own budget.