I know penguins live at the South Pole, but having visited the Soviet Union back in January 1987 when the air temperature was -60° C, you will always have a hard time convincing me that penguins wouldn’t love parts of the Northern polar regions.

A lot of things have changed since my college visit in the late Eighties. Leningrad is St. Petersburg, the Soviet Union is now the Russian Federation, though Moscow is still Moscow, and Russian winters are still very cold.

Chilly temps aside, the climate may be becoming more friendly to the Linux penguin. According to the Russian tech news site CNews (original Russian), the Russian IT community is lobbying President Dmitry Medvedev to get behind the development of a state-sponsored Russian distribution of Linux. Such a development would be part of a shift away from Microsoft Windows and towards a more general open source, Linux-based platform.

This plan differs from other state-sponsored distributions, such as China’s Red Flag Linux, in that the proposed Russian distro would actually be designated the national operating system for the Russian Federation.

Naturally, commercial Russian distro maker ALT Linux is tickled, er,  pink about the idea. Microsoft Russia, also naturally, is less than enthused, questioning the need for a national OS at all.

We’ve been down this road before; while seeing Linux supplant other operating systems on government machines is really good news, there are still some that believe that it’s an anathema to the very idea of choice Linux is supposed to represent. I tend to disagree: after all, someone chose to put Windows on all of those Russian machines, so what’s wrong with choosing something else?