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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."
Is that India has one of the highest number of programmers in the world (i'm not going to question their education in comparison to some of the programmers in the US, because i think that is irrelevant. good coders are good coders). The fact that they made this push in colleges, where people LEARN to program in the first place, might put a spin on the number of applications being released Linux. I've browsed sites like planet-source-code and rent-a-coder, and it's amazing the number of indian programmers i see on those sites.
- tristan
"The Chinese government has consistently promoted its local software based on Linux, both for cost reasons, and reportedly for 'security' concerns as well."
Another big factor is microsofts refusal to remove Taiwan as a independent country. With the source-code they can remove it themselves. In the latest Redhat 8.0, Redhat has removed Taiwans status as a independent country (listed as part of China with their flag removed).
It is great to hear OSS is making inroads out there in the world but we need the USA = 25% world GDP to wave the OSS flag of Freedom than Microsoft will have some thing to really worry about. 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
Aslong as Dell, HP/Compaq, Gateway and many many others continue to sale Windows machines Microsoft can feel pretty good about their Outlook even though it does give them 5 new viruses every day.
It is interesting to see where we are in say after 10 more years.
When I was in India a year ago, I was surprised
at how strong the presence of Microsoft was in
science. Virtually none of the people
I spoke to had had any Linux exposure, let alone
Linux experience. This is in stark contrast with
'the West'; Linux prospers in most of the sciences.
This makes this movement all the more remarkable.
English is the second language of India, understood by most - thats precisely why there are so many programmers there.
Maybe it's good for any country to keep in mind that depending on a foreign company for their software may be a bad idea.
I feel any country or group of countries (EU?) would do a smart thing if they started to develop their own application software and OSes (this could go even further to running their own Certificate authorities).
Just to make sure there is no foreign entity (no matter from which country) that can "pull the plug" on them.
I passed out two years ago from one of the best Engineering colleges in India. And only two people in my college had ever worked on linux. Sure there were many who were pro linux and anti MS, but ask them if they had ever coded on linux, or just compiled the kerenel ( I actually asked this to one of my seniors, a so called linux guru, and then he confessed to me that he had never really compiled a kernel, eventhough he was always boasting how easy it was), and all of them will be saying that, well linux isnt all that gr8, I couldnt make my X run and so on.... The fact was that out of 1000 students, only two had PCs which they really used for some development work for linux, all the rest were just boasting about it.
The reason was that they always had other options, namely pirated MS software.When you can get Visual Studio for Rs 150 (about $3) and Windows for Rs 100(about $2), and even for getting linux you have to buy a computer mag for Rs100 (Hey, broadband in India sucks, even in Universities), do you think anyone will actually use Linux??
So what I am really happy about is that now they are planning to introduce linux courses in the colleges... that will force them to finally get them to install linux on their PCs and I know for sure that once they get tinkering around, they can't resist the FORCE. It happened to me, and I am sure it will happen to others too.
Besides it will also lead to they syllabi being changed abit which haven't been revised in a Decade or so.
Alll I can say is if this actually happens( Do u think MS will saty silent and let so many potential MS technology developers just get out of their hands?? U must be kidding), it will be one of the best things to ever happen to linux.
What's under yellowstone?
Now that MS had the great idea of charging for security I'm sure that poor countries would be even more likely to switch to Linux. Who wants to pay first for the licenses, then for the support and then for additional security when with Linux you can get all that for free? Of course you can get paid support for Linux too, but as somebody mentioned here, often the community provides more than enough of it for free.
CAVEAT: I'm of India descent, but I don't live in India, and the last time I was there was 1996.
....
I'd say most of the people who can read and write, and certainly those wealthy enough to have access to a computer, know English.
Local language support (Hindi is one, don't forget the other major languages like Bengali, Gujarati, Telugu, etc.) seems more appropriate when Linux usage extends beyond gov't/academia to home and commercial situations.
I skeptical that social change (i.e., adoption of computers/internet across the population) can be effected by supply-side pressure when there are such high barriers to adoption
So, the English speakers not only get the ticket without having to stand in line, they also get an (unfair) advantage because they know English, they're more likely to get the ticket, or will have a earlier position in the waiting list.
Why is it unfair? There are no barriers to learning English, after all. And given that English is the de facto lingua franca (yes, I am aware of the irony of using that phrase), anything that encourages more people to learn English can only be a good thing.
I don't know much about Hindi, but can it be represented and manipulated by a computer as easily as US7ASCII? That is a crucial advantage of English over non-ASCII (or EBCDIC) languages, Unicode or no.
Okay, it's just the Brussels Regional Government.
That's not a billion heads, just a million or two.
Perhaps this is will be one of the positive legacies of this recession?
Once a certain fraction of organisations use Linux seriously, it will be an unstoppable movement.
Businesses and governments have no loyalties, only interests.
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Microsoft already own 95%+ of the Chinese market on desktop. Microsoft has traditionally used "give them copies, make them depend on it, and bully them into paying" approach of marketing in most of Asian countries. This has worked well in the past in poor small Asian countries who depends on the US domestic market for their exports.
However, Microsoft may just not make the case in China.
First, China isn't some small Asian countries. It's domestic market will grow to a fairly large size so it could defense the bully action from Microsoft as well as Washington.
Second, Linux and other free OS have become viable alternative to Windows in recent years. By the time, China has developed into a viable market for Microsoft to "harvest," there will be choice.
Third, Chinese government is so focusing on not letting money goes out of its boarder. It's taking preventive action in ensuring the choice exists for them.
A couple weeks after Ballmer's $750 millions check is cut to Chinese government, the government announce its Yanfang Linux project which is posted to replace Windows in governmental computing environment.
With a couple more years to bring Linux environment to maturity, China is on the right track to defeat Microsoft in its plot to dominate Chinese's computing environment.
You don't actually believe that the combined economies of two of the most populous countries on Earth is somehow smaller than that of two countries (North America is the U.S.A and Canada). Do you? look, the board of Microsoft should be shitting their pants right about now.
I am an Indian.
Let me tell you, most of the software used in India is pirated and we like get almost every software produced on earth for 5 dollars for the pirated copies. Only the big companies use licensed software.
US Companies are hardly making any money out of India. And even after this Government initiative of Linux, the big companies will continue to use Windows. So this hardly affects anything to the US.
I have found a solution to Riemann's Hypothesis, but have run out of spac