YEREVAN, NOVEMBER 1, NOYAN TAPAN. The results of a survey conducted in 14 Armenian ministries (of foreign affairs, education and science, finance and economy, and others), and big universities (the American University of Armenia, Yerevan State University, and others) show that the documents adopted by the state for introduction of information technologies are not satisfactory. Tagui Tumanyan, of the Center for Information Law and Policy (CILP), stated this on October 31 during the two-day international conference "Open Source Software Policy Importance for Information Society Development". According to her, among such documents are the concept of IT industry development and the strategy of e-document circulation introduction adopted by the Armenian government, under which pilot programs are being implemented in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Ministry of Finance and Economy and some other ministries. In these programs, open source software packages (Linux, Open Office) are used in intradepartmental networks with the assistance of donor organizations. The speaker noted that 71% of the organizations surveyed said that they have no IT use policy, which, in the words of T. Tumanyan, reflects the imperfection of the state policy on IT use. According to 22% of those surveyed, they try to develop such a policy for their organizations. Only 7% said that they use a policy. 29% of surveyed said that 80% of software packages used by them are licensed, another 29% said that 30% of the packages used are licensed. 35% of the state governance and educational organizations surveyed expressed their willingnes to use open source softaware, 29% said that they are ready to do this, if Microsoft requires that its licensed software packages be used. 7% said they do not trust open source software in terms of safety, and 29% replied that they have not yet decided whether to use open source softaware or not. T. Tumanyan indicated the following common fact: the internal budgets of those surveyed did not envisage money for refreshing their software.

---