Russian Schools Project Update

Although not much noise has been made about it, the Russian migration of schools to free software is potentially a hugely important project. Here's an update:

The pilot project to migrate schools of three Russian regions to Free Software has recently expanded its geography. Now it is possible for the schools outside of Tatarstan, Perm krai and Tomsk region to voluntarily apply for participation by completing a special form (Russian) published on the project website.

The project, if successful, may be the first step towards large-scale migration of Russian secondary education instutitions and, consequently, of the other state agencies to Free Software as President Medvedev stated last year (Russian) while being the First Deputy Prime Minister.

Note the comment at the end of the second paragraph there: Russian could become a real leader in this field.

The Subtle Art of Open Source Migrations

On Open Enterprise blog.

When the Microsoft Train hits the Brooksian Wall

For a long time enthusiasts of the open source development methodology have predicted that the traditional method will sink in the sand sooner or later. And since, as far as we can tell, Microsoft still employs such methods, the expectation is that one day its operating system upgrade would be a downgrade.

It's hard to tell from all the noise in the comments, but preliminary results seem to suggest Vista is that downgrade:

Extensive testing by the exo.performance.network (www.xpnet.com) research staff shows that SP1 provides no measurable relief to users saddled with sub-par performance under Vista.

And here's some corroboration that people are beginning to realise that the Microsoft train has hit the Brooksian wall:

Ninety percent of 961 IT professionals surveyed said they have concerns about migrating to Vista and more than half said they have no plans to deploy Vista.

Munich Lives!

As I noted before, Munich's much-bruited migration to open source has not been entirely wrinkle-free; but the good news (well, for the free world at least), is that things seem to be moving at last, and definitively:

After a city-wide test and pilot phase, the [GNU/]Linux team of the IT Department gave the start signal on Tuesday for the first official version of the future workplace system.