WHAT does Microsoft do when someone says: No, sorry, we do not want to use your software any more. If that someone is a small business operating in an increasingly cut-throat world, a great deal of pressure can be brought to bear on them to fall into line. But what if that someone is a whole nation, and that whole nation happens to be a world superpower with the resources and will to forge its own, alternative route to technological competitiveness? This is what has happened to Microsoft in Russia, and it all started with a school teacher. Back in 2007, Aleksandr Ponosov (pictured below right), the headmaster of a village school in Sepych, in the Perm<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/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. ... http://reddevil62-techhead.blogspot.com/2008/10/russias-open-source-revolution.html -- Πριν εκτυπώσετε αυτό το μήνυμα, σκεφθείτε το περιβάλλον! Ένα χαρτί λιγότερο! - http://karounos.gr/blog/