Slashdot Mirror
Indian Government Goes For Free Software
Geekonomical writes "Economic Times has an article that says Indian Government's Department of IT is going to encourage Linux and OSS on all fronts including college education! The article has more details (eventhough it has a misleading title!) The reasoning being more of plain economics than security or other reasons."
However, things are changing now. There is a lot more media coverage on "Free" software and its advantages. Computer Magazines in India have been distributing Linux CDs for a long time now, so the level of Linux knowledge is increasing. There are LUGs in a number of cities in India.
The reason to be skeptical of this initiative is that Microsoft has traditionally invested heavily in India, and Indian politicians love to be seen with Bill. And the widespread corruption doesnt help either.
I mean with no offince once or ever how many people out of that 1,000,000,000 have phone, computer, internet, 60" tvs, sattlite tv with 500 channels and what ever other junk that we all crave
India has a large middle-class and many wealthy people (even some extremely weathly people). But for argument, let's say that 5% are as wealthy as your average American. That's 50 million people. You think that's trivial?
Pakistan too says that it will use Linux. An article at paknews.com talks about that. This is inspite of the fact that Microsoft is offering a 90% discount to the pakistan Government.
Don't read too much into this. What the article does *not* tell you is that it appeared as headlines the day after Bill Gates announced his visit to India in November.
While India is *extremely* strong on the OpenSource front, it is not unreasonable to expect that this particular news item (which isn't one - it doesn't state anything new) sets the stage for some (fairly common) government-level arm twisting. Remember Peru?
Don't get me wrong - I know what the "DIT" (actually Ministry of Information technology, but who has time to nitpick) is doing, and it is heading in the right direction, and pushing hard for open standards and open technologies.
It is just that this particular article does not appear to to be related to their efforts. Also note that this appears to be more of a commercial booster - the government has done nothing to interact with the astonishingly large OpenSource user base in India, which is sad.
You aren't remembered for doing what is expected of you
English is understood by "most" Indians who frequent slashdot.u ,
But there are *at least* 15 languages in India(_not_dialects_) whose speakers exceed English speakers in India.
To name a few:
Hindi,
Tamil,
Gujarati,
Malayalam
Telug
Bengali,
Marathi,
etc.
Most Indians - (not most Indians in the US, not most Indians on slashdot, not most Indian programmers) - most Indians don't know English.
There appear to be so many Indian programmers because despite being a miniscule percentage, 2% of 1 billion is still a huge number.
Not having software applications in the local languages is only going to increase the digital divide in India.
China's population is higher than India, and the Chinese use Chinese for computing.
In order of number of speakers of languages, the highest is Chinese, followed by English, and next comes Hindi.
Do you know how many websites there are in Hindi? Less than 500.
And Chinese? More than 10,000 and growing.
Now, please don't conclude that this is because the Chinese don't understand English and Indians do. That's specious reasoning.
The Indians who don't know English are denied a lot, that includes computing tools.
Can't see Hindi?
I completely agree with you. I hail from India. Almost all my friends back home in India are doing CS as a major and i am sorry to say that Linux/*NIX has hardly made any inroads. Infact, i will go one step further and say that computers themselves are not as widely used as they ought to be for obvious monetary reasons.At a college rated amongst the better engineering colleges of Mumbai(new name for Bombay), one of my friends, went through an entire semester of C programming without sitting at a computer. With such money crunches, colleges should consider Linux as a blessing at it cuts them a lot on licensing costs. However, most colleges in India dont have professors knowledgeable about *NIX to be able to conduct courses in that environment. It will be some time before Linux makes any significant inroads in India, but once it does, India does have the potential to become a very large linux user base.
-- Reality is just an extended dream.
Your worst nightmare may be coming true. And remember that karnataka(of which bangalore is it's capital) has the largest no. of engineering colleges, that's a coup. But most of the faculty in the top univ's & college's are atleast aware of linux & it is not entirely discouraging. And thanks to the LUG's it is being noticed, even if not extensively used. Heck, In my college, Me & one of my friends, both commerce graduates had more knowledge of linux than the CS guys. And in most colleges in my city, it is the vocal minority like us that has played a big role in popularising linux. Actually the crackdown on piracy will encourage the move to linux, since most of the educational institutes are using pirated stuff. I know some colleges which have started teaching Staroffice in bangalore. Maybe, if something like the dotcoms happened to linux, it would gain some attention, atleast among the 'where's the next big $ coming from?' kind of people.
This won't work for McDonald's, because a cheeseburger is stale if you ship it (and because the shipping is higher than the difference), but why not for software or consumer electronics? I'm surprised this hasn't become the standard way to buy stuff.
People do do this, it's called the "grey market". The EU say it's illegal, but retailers are doing it anyway.
I guess with software, you might only sell localized versions overseas which would be useless in domestic markets. IIRC, the licence you get with certain products only allows it to be used in the territory in which it was bought (someone told me this when we were thinking of going into the grey market to supply just-released Apple Powerbooks to Europe).
I'd like to get some of the gadgets they get in Asian markets that never make it to the West; if you could get them at bargain prices because of currency exchanges, so much the better!
There's no reason you can't do this, unless import tarriffs make it economically unfeasible. If there was a good economic case, I'm sure the Asian companies would be doing it already.