After a high-profile accusation of piracy threatened a schoolteacher with a Siberian prison sentence, many Russian schools will move entirely to open source software, from Linux to OpenOffice.org and the rest of the FOSS stack.

“Schools in the Perm region will soon quit buying software from commercial companies, said the region’s Education Minister Nikolay Karpushin. The announcement was made in line with the report on ensuring ‘license purity’ in the region’s schools.

According to Karpushin, schools would start using freely distributed software like the Linux OS, Russky office and OpenOffice desktop apps.”

Russia is one of the largest countries where I had not heard a lot of news about FOSS adoption, so this story caught my eye. Russia is, fairly or not, famous for digital piracy. Maybe instead they can become famous as a powerhouse of open source!

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 22nd, 2007 at 10:38 am and is filed under GNU/Linux, Open Source, OpenOffice.org. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.