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."
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.
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.