MOSCOW: On February 25th, 2009, Igor Shchegolev, Communications Minister of the Russian Federation met with representatives of Russian Free and open source software (RFOSS) development companies at the Ministry of Communications and Mass Communications of the Russian Federation. The purpose of the meeting was to discuss concrete steps that can be taken by the State to support RFOSS development process.

Igor Shchegolev declared that the focus must be on the areas of RFOSS with the highest potential.

At the meeting with the RFOSS representatives he noted that with today's rapid world development of Free and open source software, Russia must make the best use of its capabilities in this field. According to him, the " the most promising developments in RFOSS must be selected and then we must focus on them."

Igor Shchegolev also stated that there should be national centers of competence that would attract foreign developers as well as promote the movement of domestic talent to the world market.

Speaking about the idea of an exclusively Russian operating system, he called it "exotic". He admitted that similar attempts had been made in some other countries, but weren't a success.

At a previous round-table discussion on IT-security, organized by the Russian Parliament Higher Technology Committee on the 11th of February, a proposal to pass all development work on Open Source Software to state corporations was rejected by representatives of the Ministry of Communications and Mass Communications and the Russian IT-association.

"It's unacceptable that the authors of the idea consider the Federal Public Procurement Law to be the main obstacle to Russian IT-development," Oleg Chutov, the head of the Department of Scientific and Strategic Development, admitted in his summary of the discussion.

"The Governments of China and Brazil made efforts to control the process of Open Source software development, i.e. to create closed operating systems. This approach just led them to a dead end," stressed Milan Prohaska, the CEO of the software distributing company VDEL.

"The idea of creating an exclusive Russian information system (to be developed in Russia and for Russian users only) is, in essence, an attempt to build an "information ghetto" for Russian programmers, to limit them both at home and foreign markets," added Prohaska.

Dmitry Efanov, the representative of The All-Russian Research Institute of Control Automation in the Non-Industrial Sphere (VNIINS), states that integration into the global development process is obligatory in order to create a real operating system in Russia. Ilya Massuh, advisor to the Ministry of Communications and Mass Communications, underlined the necessity to found a Russian Software Developers Association.

The participants at the round-table meeting also reminded the Ministry representatives of their intention to establish national Open Source Software centers of competence.