Russian Schools to Switch to Linux After Microsoft Piracy Case
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Linux is the clear winner out of a dispute between the Russian legal authorities and schools over who should carry the can over the use of pirated Windows software, The Inquirer magazine reports. Rather than attacking mobsters who peddle pirated copies of Windows directly to companies, the Russian coppers decided to lock up a Sepich headmaster who bought hot Windows software which came from Perm region’s Capital Construction Administration.
Microsoft says that the incident has nothing to do with them, but it appears that Russian schools in the area are so scared about being shipped off to a Siberian Gulag, that they are buying Linux gear instead. 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 Open office desktop apps. The flavor of Linux being used will be one of the cheap localized Russian Linux distributives in Russia.
Teachers are not that happy about it. Apparently not many of them know much about Linux and there are no specialists around to teach them.
Pirated Software's Problem
However, this "a little bit more" situation is what's happening in the rest of the developing world, including countries like, say, China, which are much more populous and connected. Think about half a billion people using pirated software, with perhaps 64k connections for each. Add in a few thousand Internet cafes. Even if only 1 percent of the pirated software is infected with some sort of malware (and my hunch is that this is an underestimate), this is clearly a non-trivial problem.
Suddenly all that spam that has been making it through my two layers of filters is not so surprising. All of a sudden we have a large portion of the developing world essentially acting as open relays for spammers. We also have half the world available for a very, very big DDOS attack. This is not good.
--- Source - Dark Reading
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