The BRICS countries (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa) had resolved in the mid-2000’s to each implement their own operating system which would utilise local skills and services to ensure full sovereignty and control over the operating systems in use by not only their governments, but also their defence, intelligence, energy sectors, etc.
Apart from the local economic investment and sovereignty, such a local OS based on open source would mean having no outflow of foreign exchange (or the possibility of foreign security backdoors being introduced), and would also boost innovation within their own country. Such innovation is not only present with local companies being paid to support and enhance the software, but also that any other local businesses can freely use the software to kick-start their own businesses operations without the ongoing and annually increasing subscription payments to a foreign company.
Similarly, China had produced Ubuntu Kylin OS (ongoing), Brazil announced similar plans, India launched their BOSS OS, and South Africa created Impi Linux OS which attracted investment by Mark Shuttleworth, but it was bought out by Business Connection and discontinued in 2008. Interestingly, in South Africa’s case, Impi Linux made it into the private sector, and it was rolled out from June 2005 within Exclusive Books which is a large private book retailer for use on their point of sale terminals.
#technology #opensource #russia #BRICS #datasovereignty
Astra Linux is a Russian Linux-based computer operating system (OS) developed to meet the needs of the Russian army, other armed forces and intelligence agencies.[1] It provides data protection up to the level of "top secret" in Russian classified information grade. It has been officially certified by Russian Defense Ministry, Federal Service for…