Russian government project of the Free Software integration in the schools under threat of failure by the multiple faults of the IBS company. A project to integration Free Software to schools, with a total budget of 3.5 million dollars, 2 years of development and testing, and one minor detail at the end - all disks shipped to 57.000 schools is broken... two times.

More recently, Russian сommunity of OSS developers and users were pleased to success. On the government level was decided that all Russian schools must use Open Source Software. However, we could not provide what ugly form it may take as a result of...

The first open tender for development and shipping Free Software Suite was appointed in Russia during Fall 2007. Group of companies "Armada" won this tender. Associate contractor in this tender was ALT Linux. In 2007 the company developed Free Software Suite for Russian schools which in 2008 was deployed in pilot regions and educational institutions that joined the test project. In these regions both technology of deployment and technology of technical support organization was worked out, which is critically important for success of the project. According to the results of 2008, 2151 schools participated in the project and a set of education materials were developed.

In May 2009 the Federal Agency on Education, it was decided (ignoring the developers opinion) to send a CD-disks with Free Software Suite to all Russian schools without providing support, as well as printed materials, specially prepared for the kit. I have no adequate explanation for the decision to abandon separate packaging kit, and indeed, the denial of his support. The project started as a priority by President Medvedev actually turns into second tier with not clear prospects.

The total number of schools in Russia about 57.000, most of them have very poor and expensive Internet channels, some schools and is not connected to the Internet (although officially declared that all schools have free cost Internet at least 128 Kbit/s). In this regard, from government budget has been allocated more than 530.000$ on the production of discs and courier delivery to schools. Without any open tender this orders received by IBS company - the largest IT-integrator on the Russian market (but more on this later).

In June 2009 without notice to ALT Linux the CD-disks with Free Software Souite was manufactured by IBS and delivered to 57.000 of Russian schools. Almost immediately a number of teachers reported to ALT Linux about unusable CD-disks with «Linux Master» and «School Server» Linux distributions. Technical support specialists from ALT Linux found that some "specialist" from IBS company has been modified original ISO-images without the necessary knowledge, and get fully dysfunctional installation images (all discs unbootable, long file names are truncated, etc.), then sent this images to circulation without any tests. Community, developers, teachers were amazed and shocked...

IBS company promised to correct his mistake and to ensure the delivery of fixed discs at their own expense. Some later the second edition of the disc was made (again without any note to developers), this time for the delivery of disks used a more cheaper and unsafe way by post office mail (rather than courier service as provided in the government contract), now is not possible to establish whether all schools have received the corrected version of the disc, and whether the second edition disks sent to the all schools.

In Jule 2009 we got the copy of that "fixed" discs, and again we shocked. The second version of CD-discs is now bootable, but a "small" new mistake is introducing - all the documentation filenames on Russian written to disk in the broken codepage. In fact, the teacher can not read the documentation titles after Linux installation. And yes, this work is cost 530.000$ from government budget. Russian users of Ubuntu have a sad joke - best to order discs from shipit.ubuntu.com to all schools - they worked and are free.

However, the real situation became much worse after the official comments. Head of Federal Agency for Education Vadim Lazutin said that the corrected version of the third disc will not be, because they are not needed. Also he said: «this CD is only for those people who have no Linux, but under Windows the filenames are displayed correctly», but did not specify where to get the money to the licensed version of Windows.

In an official comments the IBS company said that materials on the discs were recorded in the standard encoding accepted by Federal Agency of Education. This is not true, in reality, no such encoding exists, and no one encoding not standardized in Federal Agency of Education.

Additional links

Web-site of the project: http://linux.armd.ru/ (In Russian)

How Microsoft Sabotages GNU/Linux Adoption in Russian Schools

Free Software in Russian schools blog (In English)
Free Software in Russian schools blog (In Russian)