Digital Ministry drafting changes to allow developers to participate in international projects not registered in Russia
MOSCOW. Oct 11 (Interfax) - The Digital Development Ministry is preparing amendments to legislation that will allow Russian IT developers to participate in international projects, including ones involving development of software based on open source code, Digital Development and Communications Minister Maksut Shadayev said.
Under previously passed changes to the federal law "On noncommercial organizations," Russians can participate in the activities of foreign noncommercial organizations (NCO) only once these NCOs have registered a division in Russia or their information has been included in the relevant registry of information about branches and representative offices of foreign NCOs. Otherwise, they could face administrative or criminal liability. However, Russian companies and citizens, including in the field of IT, already work with foreign NCOs not registered in Russia, industry organizations said in an appeal to the Digital Ministry.
State Duma member Anton Gorelkin said at a meeting of the Duma Information Policy Committee on Tuesday that "all major associations, including Russoft, Open Code and the Lawyers Association of Russia are probably sounding the alarm today."
"International projects are in jeopardy. I'm talking about the law on NCOs. Even projects such as Linux, which our developers are developing, AstraLinux - all of them can be labelled as spies, one could say, they could all be held liable, although they are all making a product for government agencies," Gorelkin said.
Shadayev said his ministry is working on solving this problem. "This is a burning issue. Indeed, the decision made restricts our developers' participation in various international communities and this particularly concerns opensource, as you rightly said. Therefore, we are now looking [for a solution] and will come out with a legislative initiative. We hope the committee will also support [this]," he said, adding that "we, of course, [should not] impose such restrictions on such international cooperation."
"In this sense, unfortunately, we're punishing ourselves in this regard. We will ask to consider our initiative in order to exempt participation in these types of international projects from such liability," Shadayev said.
Business daily Vedomosti reported on October 5 that the IT sector had asked the Digital Ministry to compile a registry of foreign "destructive NCOs" operating outside of Russia so as to reduce the risk of criminal prosecution for developers of software based on Linux and PostgreSQL.
The Digital Economy Legal Support Commission of the Moscow division of the Lawyers Association of Russia, together with industry associations Russoft, the Software Developers Association, Information and Computer Technologies Industry Association and the Open Code organization, sent its proposal to Shadayev and Gorelkin.