The developers of the Russian Linux for special services complained about sanctions

The developers of the Russian operating system Astra Linux NPO RUSSITETT said that Monotype Imaging, the copyright holder of the Arial, Verdana, Tahoma and Times New Roman, refused to sell them a license. The Kommersant was told about this by sources on the IT market, and also confirmed the director of the NPO Rusbateh Center and the head of the ASTRA Linux developers team Yuri Sosnin.

According to the head, the deal with the copyright holder of popular fonts fell “at the last moment”, despite the fact that the parties have already agreed on the draft contract with a “rather high cost of deductions”. The newspaper source said that we are talking about € 130 for each workstation of Astra Linux with a limited font package, despite the fact that for some companies Monotype Imaging offered the price of € 3-4.

“Monotype Imaging has abandoned the contract, citing sanctions against Russian companies working in the interests of the Ministry of Defense. The reason for this was the mention of the participation of NPO RUSBETET in the work of the International Max Aviation, ”the newspaper writes.

Sosnin added that the developers, together with Paratayp, created the Russian analogues of Times New Roman - PT Astra Sans and PT Astra Serif. At the same time, for documents, civil servants are required to use Times New Roman, which in the Russian Federation is the “document management standard”.

NPO RUSBETET has been working on the creation of Astra Linux since 2010. According to the company's report for 2014, the main customers of the Ministry of Defense, the Federal Security Service, the Federal Security Service, the Foreign Intelligence Service, the Federal Customs Service and the Ministry of Health are the main customers. In 2014, the amount of contracts amounted to 1.7 billion rubles.