The Ministry of Communications has approved prototypes of the national software platform

Penguin Software :
On December 27, Ilya Massuh, Deputy Minister of Communications and Mass Media, signed the documents on acceptance of the results of research and development work carried out by Penguin Software under a contract to create prototypes of the basic components of the National Programming Platform (NPP). All submitted developments and documents are recommended for use as a basis for further work on the subject of GMP.

What does this event mean and how will it affect the IT sphere of the Russian Federation.

First of all, what is the “National Software Platform”?

On the project website, the goals are indicated as follows:
« » - , . .

Speaking in normal language, the goal is independence from foreign suppliers (read “from the American company Microsoft”) and the desire to pay our own developers and not foreign ones.
')

What amounts are we talking about?

NPP will replace Windows in state institutions and in schools. There are open statistics on employees:

- employees of customs, tax, sanitary and other inspections - 1.238.000
- officials of licensing, controlling and registration authorities - 1.312.000
- Office of the Foreign Ministry and government agencies (CIS, UN, UNESCO, PACE, etc.) - 91.000
- employees of other federal agencies, ministries and departments - 1.253.000
- deputies and staff members of government bodies of all levels - 1.870.000

it can be assumed that each employee has a computer in the workplace. In addition, in the Russian Federation there are about 60 thousand schools, each has a computer class for 30 students.

Even according to rough estimates, it turns out about 7 million jobs where Windows is now installed, costing 3-5 thousand rubles.

As you can see, the transition to the NPP will save billions of rubles. We just have a big country.

How many are stolen?

This is the first question that comes to mind with any government initiative.

The competition for the creation of NPP was won by the company “Penguin Software”, which is controlled by the NGI fund, which is invested by ex-Minister of Communications Leonid Reiman (who would doubt).

The project is planned to pay 490 million rubles for 2012 and 2013. Is it a lot or a little? If we take into account that this amount includes installation, training, testing, etc., the related questions are few. Less than 100 rubles per job.

Why Linux?

In many forums, Krasnoglaziki are already seething and they are demanding "necessarily from scratch and in assembler."

Unix options are reliable and proven solutions. The Chinese equivalent of NPP for state institutions was developed on Linux. Google Android is based on Linux. Apple OS is based on Free BSD.

The choice as the basis of Linux allowed to reduce the planned costs.

How will this affect us?

By "us" are meant IT professionals. The state sector of the Russian Federation is a huge piece in the field of software development. In the coming years, a large number of internal document management systems will be rewritten (tax services, traffic police, courts, etc.).

What should all this work?

As a rule, these are desktop systems and the choice of development tools is small:

- analog. NET (Mono) does not really work
- naked C ++ is not very suitable for GUI
- QT is suitable for everything but is not widely used, there are compatibility issues (for example, 64-bit libraries differ from 32-bit)
- Java / Swing

The best option is Java:

- there are many ready-made specialists
- there is a large set of libraries for all cases (from cryptography and databases to work with a scanner or complex mathematics)
- it works the same way (well, more equally than others), both on Windows and on Unix, which is necessary because the transition will not be instant