The Shame in Spain

I've written a number of times about Spain's use of free software, notably at the provincial level. There's even a handy - if rather out-dated - map that shows the extent of Penguin love there. Sadly, it looks like Microsoft is making the Spanish government an offer it thinks it can't refuse:

According to a press release from HispaLinux, Spain's national Linux association, Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero's government is finalizing a plan that would supply all children who attend state schools with personal computers with touch-screens so to "promote awareness within families of the usefulness of information and communication technologies and encourage their use." Specifically, we're talking about Microsoft technologies.

Despite the enormous load this plan would have on the budget of each autonomous region (which would have to foot the bill), and hence, on the taxpayer, not a cent would find it's way back to any Spanish company. The Spanish Ministry of Education has not considered any other vendor apart form Microsoft, there hasn't been a public contest, and the media and other vendors were not informed about the pilot program until it was over. Furthermore, no other alternative has been considered.

If the plan gets the green light, it would have dire consequences for the communities of Andalucía, Castilla-La Mancha, Extremadura, Valencia, and all the other autonomous regions that already have a Linux-based IT infrastructures, which have already been paid for and are in use, in place within their school systems.

This is really scandalous on so many levels.

It's clearly born of ignorance about what is really being offered - lock-in to Microsoft's systems - in the naive belief that touch-screens are somehow the future, probably just because the iPhone has one.

It is born of arrogance that the government knows better, and therefore needn't consult with others that might have a view or - heaven forfend - knowledge on the subject.

And it's born of sheer stupidity, throwing away the huge lead that Spain had in this area, forcing local governments that had saved money by opting for GNU/Linux to waste money on an unnecessary and doubtless insecure solution from Microsoft, and as a result making the country dependent on a foreign supplier when it could have nurtured its own domestic software industry.

Shame on the Spanish government.

Viva España Libre!

Most people know that the Estremadura region in Spain is a pacesetter in terms of deploying free software, but here's a handy map that shows how it and everyone else is doing in that country.

Russian Schools Say "Да!" to Open Source

I'd heard of this project to equip Russian schools with GNU/Linux-based systems, but I'd no idea it was quite on this scale:

The project to implement the open source software in Russian schools might become the largest worldwide: this year the open source software packages will be installed in 1200 schools in pilot regions, i.e. Perm Territory, Tomsk Region, and Tatarstan. Although abroad Linux is widely used in state institutions and at schools (in the Spanish province of Estremadura it is installed on all school computers), such a large-scale migration to the open source software has not been carried out before. After testing in three pilot regions over 2008 and making adjustments, Linux is planned to be installed in more than 61 thousand Russian schools.