Russia tops national leagues in open source downloads Russia tops the global table for downloads of open source software over the last quarter, according to a survey tracking around 2,000 FOSS projects. Research by open source monitoring organization Scarf showed the biggest proliferation of downloads took place in the pariah state, where they grew 320 percent. Russia, which was …
It's a bit of a mixed blessing. While indeed many managers have grown up with open source and have no fear of it being used, there's still the potential maintenance gap. But, perhaps an even bigger threat: SaaS is eating everyones's lunch and it seems that, once companies get on "the cloud" they have fewer options to get off. So, while a few researchers may indeed be running open source stacks, the company is increasingly dependent upon a decreasing number of providers.
"the biggest proliferation of downloads took place in the pariah state"
87% of the world refuses to enforce sanctions to Russia, and are still trading with them.
EU is buying Russian oil ( via India ) - spending more money.
Only wishful thinking of USA/UK that sanctions are working.
Oh, Russian economy and inflation numbers are better than USA.
>Oh, Russian economy and inflation numbers are better than USA.
Not to mention that everyone in the UK has been told to accept the fact they're a lot poorer now than they were (kind of obvious....). There's nothing like taking a few billion out of an economy (plus spending a boat load on 'tradition') to underscore just what the lords and masters think of the plebs.
(....and if you think this is something new a bit of reading of old literature -- not stuff like "Das Kapital" but everyday stores from Dickens, de Querx and many others.....its always been like this.....)
>Russian economy and inflation numbers are better than USA.
That's pretty easy if you don't allow trade.
The inflation in YAANC bucks is 0% because nobody trades in YAANC bucks and I set the official value. In fact since I set the official exchange rate at $1M USD to 1 YAANC buck my GDP is doing very well
They sort of have form with that.
When the USSR fell, I went in with some other brits to open a sales office. We found hundreds of US made computers waiting for spare parts.
They will get whatever they need by hook or by crook.
That said, some of that hardware will be used by Putin for his war effort (drones and missiles) which will be returned with vengeance.
One of the first actions after the "SMO" started was US fast food corporations pulling their wares out of Russia. Common sense -- and nutritionists -- would suggest that the way to undermine Russia would be to systematically cut prices there, get 'em all on a McDiet. Taking Microsoft and other proprietary software out of Russia does them a favor as well since Windows has always been a fertile ground for malware. (Its improved a whole lot with 'the latest' but as we all know the actual commercial upgrade cycle is always years behind 'the latest'.)
So we keep doing them these favors. It suggests that we've got a hubris problem.
Somewhat tangentially Oracle have (had?) a substantial part of their R&D in St Petersburg. Although my experience of submitting bug reports to Oracle, even with suggested fixes for some where the source is available, was that a developer in that city would close the ticket since there's no money for Larry in fixing bugs...
I think they mean that they categorize businesses by the primary product they're known for. Software and computers are one category, cars are another. Even though both have computers involved in the products, they're still distinct types of businesses.
Another way of looking at it ... In the early days, large companies rolled their own IT ... Boeing's internal network was larger than the fledgling "Internet" until roughly 1986; IBM's internal network was larger until roughly 1989. Ford's internal network was larger until roughly 1991, GMs roughly 1992.
For example, Red Hat implemented a rule of “don’t ask, don’t tell” for nationality, country of origin and country of residence to ensure that anyone can contribute to and use Fedora. This change came after the project banned someone for being from Iran, when it could have avoided doing so if they hadn’t known their nationality in the first place.
Big Tech could and should implement similar measures, perhaps not for paid developers, but at least for users. They could do this by opting to use a range of neutral third party payment processors, by refusing to implement regional pricing and by selling one worldwide SKU of their products which can be used anywhere. This would have the beneficial effect of preventing dictatorial regimes from implementing onerous censorship requirements while also preventing economic sanctions from crippling the functioning of already-purchased products and services.
Alas, we can only wish!
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