I attended both the workshop and the presentation
“Pardus a Turkish free software OS from scratch”
at the FOSS conference at NTUA yesterday.
http://conferences.ellak.gr/2011/
I was impressed by the professionalism [reflected also by the speaker himself]
with which the Turkish government seems to handle free software.
I also had a friendly conversation with Mr Gökmen Göksel,
a young developer working at TÜBİTAK/UEKAE,
the state research center which produces the OS,
who explained to me that his work on Pardus
is not only his duty as an government employee
but also he sees hacking and code writing
as his own hobby.
Pardus is an example of a state-funded project,
which remains open-source, receives help from its own international community,
and tries to serve the public.
I think it is a serious effort of state produced FOSS
that we should also consider in Greece.
You can read Gökmen Göksel’s documents
here:
[1] http://cekirdek.pardus.org.tr/~gokmen/PardusFromScratch.odp
[2] http://cekirdek.pardus.org.tr/~gokmen/Comar.pdf
Turkey is by no means the only government that invests in FOSS.
You can have a look at
the [American] Air Force Research Laboratory’s Software Protection Initiative (SPI),
http://spi.dod.mil/lipose.htm
yes, they also offer a light OS for civilians to use,
and also
read what the US Department of Defense think about free software.
http://www.fsf.org/working-together/profiles/department-of-defense/?searchterm=DoD
