Microsoft Loses a Big One, or Courts 1, Marketing 0

I assume you have heard the term, ‘cut off his nose to spite his face’? Well it looks like in searching for economic relief in Russian courts the Win monopoly, gangsters that many paint them as, has run against some professionals. Namely, Putin. –

This is what has happened to Microsoft in Russia, and it all started with a school teacher. Back in 2007, Aleksandr Ponosov, the headmaster of a village school in Sepych, in the Perm region of Russia, was arrested for running unlicensed copies of Microsoft software on his school’s computers.

It has been reported that no less than Vladimir Putin himself intervened to get the charges thrown out; had he not, Posonov was facing up to five years in jail.

Pirated software is a major global problem which costs Microsoft millions of dollars, and Russia has played its part in that problem, but what followed the Posonov scandal could surely not have been foreseen in Redmond.

Rather than pay massive licensing costs to legitimise the country’s Microsoft software, then deputy prime minister (now President) Dmitry Medvedev decided on an altogether more radical route - to use Open Source, Linux-based software in all Russia’s schools.

Given the sheer scale of the country and the amount of planning, training and resources required, it is a massive enterprise.

Indeed, Medvedev has set Russia on the path to a much wider use of Open Source software: He intends it to be used across the board in the public sector and has set a completion date for the project of 2010.

So lets see, 143m people. Open Source percolating from the bottom up with cover from legalities by the biggest ‘Roof’ of all — the Russian government. Once its in the schools, regional and national governments will be next. By a stroke of irony, Russia might become the first major country where the populace is a major consumer of FOSS. Whether Microsoft? Well it can’t do them well to have a country that openly touts they don’t need their products. That kind of mindset could spread you know?

More at Red Devil’s blog.