Not open source for everyone

The largest Russian IT companies were not included in the official participants in the experiment of the Ministry of Digital Development to create a domestic repository of open source code, analogous to GitHub. The list includes more than 60 organizations, including authorities, but there are no VK, Yandex, Kaspersky Lab and a number of other leading players. Their work is in demand, experts say, but leaders may be wary of plagiarism, relying on autonomous development. The Ministry of Digital Development assures that more companies are participating in the project than those listed in the list.

“Kommersant” got acquainted with the list of participants in the experiment of the Ministry of Digital Development to create an analogue of GitHub, which involves granting the right to use open source for other participants in the repository. Scroll published on the website of the Ministry on June 5. In it, for example, “Basalt SPO” (the developer of the operating system ALT Linux), “Red Soft” (“Red OS”), “Sberbank Technologies”. In total, together with the Ministry of Digital Development, the Ministry of Internal Affairs, the Ministry of Labor and other government agencies, 62 organizations entered the project. However, the largest Russian IT companies, such as Yandex, VK, Kaspersky Lab, InfoWatch, Positive Technologies and others, are not on the list.

The launch of the test version of the national repository should take place before the end of the third quarter, and the release of the version open to the mass market is planned for late 2023 – early 2024, says a Kommersant source familiar with the project.

Initially, the opening of the “national repository” was scheduled for December 2022. At InfoWatch, Positive Technologies did not respond to inquiries. Kaspersky Lab, VK and Yandex declined to comment. The Ministry of Digital Development claims that not only companies from the list are participating in the project, but the latter simply “undertook additional obligations”.

The idea of ​​creating an analogue of the American GitHub from Microsoft came to the Russian authorities back in 2020. Then the Ministry of Economy planned to allocate 2.1 billion rubles for the project. But experts believed that the “state code” would not be in demand among developers (see. “Kommersant” dated January 20, 2020).

The idea became relevant in 2022: due to sanctions, Russian developers were afraid of restricting access to GitHub. Almost immediately after the outbreak of hostilities in Ukraine, GitHub blocked the accounts of a number of Russian companies, banks and a number of private users (see “Kommersant” dated April 15, 2022). But only in March 2023, the government adopted a resolution according to which 1.39 billion rubles. from the funds of Rosinfokominvest should be directed to the creation of a national open source software repository. At the end of May, the Department of Information Technologies of Moscow announced the launch of a similar project. (cm. “Kommersant” dated June 2). They took as a basis the foreign GitLab code, which was “redesigned to suit the needs of Moscow”.

The experiment of the Ministry of Digital Development primarily involves authorities and code developers under government contracts, a representative of the Astra Group of Companies explains: “The goal is to form a source code repository, the exclusive right to which belongs to the state, so companies developing, for example, whose code is not implied, were not included in the list of participants.

However, the market needs the developments of large Russian IT companies in terms of open source. So, the technical director of SKB Kontur, Artem Preskaryan, notes that the needs are not covered by the supply of solutions from friendly countries, many alternatives to the necessary software are either assembled from open source solutions, or written independently: “In some cases, we consider alternative solutions from Russian developers, for example from Yandex.

Large IT companies were not included in the repository due to the risks of plagiarism, leakage of code and corporate data, Nikolai Komlev, head of the Council of the Chamber of Commerce and Industry of the Russian Federation for the development of the digital economy, believes: “Large companies in a crisis are trying to choose an autonomous development path.”

New IT projects, universities, and any other developers who create and develop Russian software will be able to use the independent Russian site, Rustam Rustamov, Deputy General Director of Red Soft, notes. However, according to him, it must be taken into account that open source solutions often have developed international communities and it will be difficult for many companies to migrate to other platforms.

Timofey Kornev