Russia Rolls Out Open Source for Government

"Aside from the scale of these plans, which foresee all Russian government departments using free software, and civil servants being trained in its use (a shrewd move), what's particularly interesting is the formulation that open source will be the default except where it does not have the necessary functionality. This approach has been adopted elsewhere, and is reasonable enough, although it's important not to allow lock-in to proprietary formats to lock out open source solutions based on open standards."

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