European Union: A Brief Overview – Open Source Software in Romania

Since 1989, many things have changed in Romania, including computers, and the way how other nations perceive the country. Romania is better known for its „Dracula figure“ than for its IT involvement.

Romania is developing its own Linux distributions. One of the biggest is Darkstar Linux, based on Slackware. Furthermore, the open source community is translating free software projects into Romanian, e.g. KDE or GNOME. The Romanian Linux User Group (RLUG) translates and improves the Debian documentation.

Like many other European countries, Romania has caught a glimpse of what Linux and other open source software can do for business or private use. Romanian user hope the government will realise one day that instead of wasting money on proprietary products, it can not only improve the functionality of institutions but also use open source software as a way to direct those funds to other more important issues.

Romania has made the first steps to develop high-capacity networking infrastructure in order to achieve high quality public Internet access. However the high costs together with low living standards will still limit access in the near future.

The regulation of legal aspects of information matters may lead in time to attempts to restrict or control the freedom of public Internet access. – Open Source Observatory

Article of 22 October, 2005. Authors: Sandu Teodora-Gabriela, Bucharest Municipality, Romania and Michael Nagler, MERIT, University of Maastricht.

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