Russian Railways and Rosatom Develop an Alternative to Windows OS

26 августа 2014, 09:54

Russian Railways and a subsidiary company of "Rosatom" Sarov Nuclear Center (VNIIEF) announced joint plans for the development of "Synergy" operating system, which will be based on Linux. It is expected that in the near future "Synergy" will be able to replace Windows. The cost of the project has not been made public yet. 

Based on the new open source system, the partners plan to develop a number of business applications for use in industrial and commercial sector. 

"Rosatom" was the first to make an attempt at developing a domestic OS in order to improve information security and replace imported software with Russian equivalent. Later, specialists from Russian Railways joined the project.

However, Ilya Medvedovsky, CEO of Digital Security says, “thinking that availability of source code guarantees security is a dangerous misconception, since 80% of the open source products are developed by the same foreign companies whose products need to be replaced.”

Another problem lies in the fact that in Russia there is a certain deficit of big companies with at least 500 staff IT developers who could simultaneously work on various subsystems of an operating system. Among other things, Russian Railways can offer developers who are experienced only in application systems, but the planned project requires services of professionals experienced in creation of system codes, says the founder of "New Cloud Technologies" Dmitry Komissarov.