An anonymous reader writes:
Russian government has recently announced a contest of proposals to develop a "set of Open source software for educational use", or in plain words, create a state-supported distribution of OS and educational software for schools and universities.
Maximum bid price for this project is fixed by the government to be about $2.8 mln. Five known companies and one university have replied with proposals to develop the software, and named prices from about $1.6 mln. to $2.8 mln.
However, the really interesting is the seventh proposal. It names a dumping price of just $200k for whole project. The proposing company, "KORUS Consulting", in a statement on their website says that in reality the project is going to cost them about $2.6 mln., but since they have decided to "invest heavily" in "Russian OSS market", they... will pay the remaining $2.4 mln. of these expenses out of their own pockets.
What makes this very creepy, is another page of KORUS website, describing the company as having "the highest status of partnership with Microsoft — a Gold Certified Partner, and a Certified Education Partner, and also that in 2006 the company was a part of Microsoft's Presidential Club, which only "top" 5% of Microsoft partners are allowed to join."
So, could it be, that this company (and Microsoft through it) looks to make the Russian Linux project a failure, by first winning it with offer which is ten times cheaper than everyone else's, then gathering all the rights to execute the state projects in this area, and then.. not producing anything even remotely usable, pushing all the potential users of this project's product back into the shackles of Windows and MS Office?
The project is currently in the proposals evaluation stage. Surely, will be interesting, how that turns out.
