Trust is needed before Iranians accept native Operating Systems

Amir Nazemi, Iran’s Deputy Minister of Information and Communications Technology has stated on Twitter that Iran, through the ITRC, is continuing efforts for the development of an Iranian Operating System – www.ion.ir/news/46033/. Given recent problems, it is understandable that Iranians do not want to rely on Western systems and would prefer a domestic version. However, this is not the first time Iran has tried to develop its own Operating System; as an example, the University of Tehran did some work on this over five years ago> and the same problems remain for Iranian people; 1. can they trust systems to work as well as popular and tested operating systems such as Windows, by far the most popular OS in Iran, Mac OS X, and Linux, and 2. will their privacy be compromised? These are the same problems that mean this recent effort will probably fail again. The Iranian government must regain the trust of its citizens, that it has lost, before this will work. Perhaps working with more transparent and trusted companies will help achieve this.