Code for the lead

rabiakhatun

Open source (OS) technologies and platforms enable greater productivity by pooling the efforts of the IT community. This is at the core of the open source project creation process, which allows for the pooling of resources and talent, lower costs, and the rapid creation of a technological foundation for future solutions.

Unlike proprietary software, open source components can be tested for exploitable vulnerabilities before they are included in a software project or at the assembly stage. For example, you can test the code for vulnerabilities, evaluate the future behavior of the program, its architecture and logic.

At the same time, open-source content writing service communities react to market signals much faster than large IT companies that create proprietary software can afford. The production cycle for creating a solution is also significantly reduced.



For the first time, serious thought was given at the state level to reducing the gap in this area from the Western IT industry in 2007. The Board of the Ministry of Communications adopted the "Concept for the Development and Use of Free Software (FOSS) in Russia". However, it was only in December 2010 that the Russian government approved a plan for the transition of federal executive bodies and federal budget institutions to the use of FOSS. For the first time, the creation of a single repository was provided for by law.

Eight years later, in September 2018, the Russian Ministry of Communications issued guidelines for the transition of state-owned companies to the predominant use of domestic software. However, the decisions of the government and the Ministry of Communications were not fully implemented. In part, the situation could be due to the lack of interest in this project on the part of potential consumers of FOSS and companies that were assigned the role of filling and supporting the repository.

Finally, in March of this year, information appeared that the Ministry of Digital Development offered the Russian Foundation for Information Technology Development (RFRIT) and ANO Open Code funding to create a repository that would become a domestic analogue of GitHub. The experiment will last from early November 2023 to September 2024.

BARRIERS TO OPEN SOURCE DEVELOPMENT IN RUSSIA

In August 2023, Russian Federation Laws No. 346588-8 , No. 346769-8 and No. 346750-8 came into force , prohibiting the participation of Russian citizens in foreign non-profit organizations (NPOs) not registered in a special register.

Since a significant portion of international open source projects are registered as non-profit organizations, ordinary users of FOSS projects and employees of Russian companies that carry out development within the framework of import substitution programs may be at risk.

Let me remind you that international NPOs supervise Linux distributions, including domestic ALT Linux, Astra Linux and Rosa Linux. The PostgreSQL and MariaDB DBMS, the KDE and GNOME user environments, the Eclipse development environment, the Jakarta EE platform, the LibreOffice and OpenOffice office suites are being developed. The NPO teams are also involved in improving the Python, PHP, Perl and Rust programming languages ​​and much more.

A serious challenge for the domestic IT market, due to which the development of domestic OS solutions may be restrained, has become the mass penetration of high-tech components and technologies from China. First of all, from Huawei. Some industry experts note the danger of replacing one technological dependence with another.