D.Grishkin

Yesterday evening, Deputy Minister of Communications and Mass Media Ilya Massukh signed the acceptance certificate for the prototype of the national software platform (NSP). With the help of this platform, officials expect to eventually achieve savings in budget funds used to pay for licenses for computer programs. It will be possible to save up to 80% of all expenses, or 1.72 trillion rubles over several years, according to a presentation of the project, which Vedomosti has reviewed.

As required by the competition deadlines, Penguin submitted the prototype documentation at the end of October. And then the government accepted this documentation for almost two more months – during this time, according to the terms of the Information Community program, another competition was to be held – for the development of a standard distribution of the NPP by the end of 2011.

The development of a "Russian analogue of Windows" was first discussed in the summer of 2010. Officials decided not to invent an operating system (OS) from scratch, but to use as a basis, as is usually done all over the world, the distribution of the freely distributed Linux operating system with open source codes. According to the state program "Information Community" for 2011-2020, adopted in October 2010, it is planned to spend 490 million rubles on the development of the NPP in the first two years of this program. The program stipulates that already a year after its launch, the national operating platform should account for 2% of all installations on Russian computers - excluding government agencies and local governments, only at the expense of budgetary institutions and organizations. And in another year - 5%.

The competition to create a prototype of the NPP was won at the end of September 2011 by Penguin Software, a company owned by the NGI fund, a major shareholder of which is former Minister of Communications Leonid Reiman. In the summer, Penguin supported the appeal of the Russian Non-Commercial Partnership for the Promotion of Free Software Development (RASPO), which spoke out against the terms of this competition: RASPO did not like the short deadlines for developing a prototype and the very idea of creating a single version of the NPP. But this did not stop Penguin and another RASPO participant, VNIINS, from applying for participation in the competition and winning it with a proposal to develop a prototype for 5 million rubles, with the starting price of the competition being 27 million rubles. Penguin CEO Dmitry Komissarov promised to involve programmers from VNIINS and other companies that are part of RASPO in the development of the NPP.

A prototype is a “complex subject,” explains Vitaly Lipatov, an expert on the selection committee and CEO of the St. Petersburg Linux developer Ethersoft. This is a large project, with 73 points in the testing program, and each one is “not a button to press,” Komissarov told Vedomosti. According to him, the testing lasted five days, three of which were at the ministry itself and two more were remotely accessible. Lipatov, a member of the committee, is the architect of the competing Linux system Alt Linux, so the committee “didn’t give Penguin any slack,” he assures. Lipatov explains that he had comments on the prototype testing methodology that Penguin itself proposed. The project was reviewed and returned for revision several times, as Minister of Communications Igor Shchegolev recently said. But at yesterday’s meeting, the committee acknowledged that Penguin had made corrections to a number of comments, and recognized others as insignificant, Komissarov is glad.

One of the results of the creation of the NPP prototype was the development of the technical specifications for the next competition to create the platform itself, and Penguin suggested that instead of one standard, four main Russian distributions be used as a basis: Alt Linux, MSVSfera, Naulinux, and Rosa, Komissarov says. Penguin demonstrated versions of these distributions that are compatible with each other: a program for one of them works in the others. As a result, a fund of algorithms and programs compatible for all distributions and an operator that will support this fund should appear.

Yesterday, Massukh told Vedomosti that programs for NPPs can be written not only for Linux: ministries, departments and budget organizations will actively rent programs via the Internet using cloud services.

"Russian Windows" has passed its first inspection