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."

Comments

so...

[AvitarX]

Is this where I post a, government should not lean to free software, it hurts the community's reputation troll?

Re:so...

[Anonymous Coward]

"I thought US was a free nation."

Doesn't mean it is a *smart* nation.

Pack your bags, Bill!

[Black Parrot]

The popularity of these "special offers" must be getting expensive for Microsoft.

Re:Pack your bags, Bill!

[JanusFury]

They aren't losing any money from these switches. They simply get less money in the future. They still have lots and lots and lots and lots... of money, and people all over North America using their OS and products.

Re: Pack your bags, Bill!

[Black Parrot]

> They aren't losing any money from these switches.

No, I'm talking about the very predictable "good will visit", where BG or one of his top officers will visit India and throw lots of money around in order to buy off the government and deep six this program.

Re:Pack your bags, Bill!

[Anonymous Coward]

and people all over North America using their OS and products

So? 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?

This isn't even getting into the fact that most service industries outsource to Indian companies, nor the expected growth of the Chinese economy alone...look, the board of Microsoft should be shitting their pants right about now.

Re:Pack your bags, Bill!

[Isle]

So? 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?

Actually they are not two of the most populous countries on Earth. They are the two most populous contries on Earth. But the U.S.A. economy alone do outstrip the combined economy of these two countries. You second comment however is right on spot, their economy is growing a lot faster and will eventually become the worlds largest economies.

Re: Pack your bags, Bill!

[SuperSnooper]

Funny that you should mention a "Good will Visit" : I just found out yesterday that Bill Gates is in fact coming to India next month.

Re:Pack your bags, Bill!

[Lonath]

They aren't losing any money from these switches. They simply get less money in the future.

I think that it's worse than that. I think MS makes money when it gives away these gifts. The reality is that it costs them say 100k to send Bill and Co to some country to convince them to stop going over to FS/OSS. They then "give away" 1 billion dollars worth of software to that country that actually costs them say a few million dollars to actually produce the packaging and do the copying.

Therefore, their real cost is about a few million dollars, but they can write off a billion dollars in losses for advertising or marketing or whatever they want to call it, and they get to keep hundreds of millions from the billions of dollars in actual profits that they get from the people who really do buy the software. They can do this because this billion can then get counted against their expenses so their taxes are lower. It's kind of like printing money.

So, in effect, as long as people keep buying MS software in the US, whenever these other governments try to go over to OSS/FS, they actually make money for MS if they take the MS bribe.

Re:Pack your bags, Bill!

[timeOday]

So? 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?

Well, let's look up the answer, shall we?

Year 2000 GDP

USA - $9.963 trillion
China - $4.5 trillion
India - $2.2 trillion
Canada - $774.7 billion

So in fact it's not even very close (even without counting Canada.)

Just one question...

[Anonymous Coward]

I suppose they won't be downloading software from Tucows or Freshmeat, ne?

Re:Just one question...

[abe ferlman]

Actually I think you're going to see a shift from the "Sacred Cow" to the "Well-regarded Gnu". What this means for Indian dietary restrictions is anyone's guess.

Text of the article

[Saib0t]

The website looks very slow, article copied here just in case.

Open IT: Govt to rewrite source code in Linux
SUDHA NAGARAJ

TIMES NEWS NETWORK [ WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 09, 2002 01:29:29 AM]
NEW DELHI: If the Chinese have IT, get it. The Indian government seems to be taking a leaf out of China's operating system, and is planning a countrywide drive to promote the open source operating system, Linux, as the 'platform of choice' instead of 'proprietary' solutions.

For proprietory, read Microsoft, which controls over 90% of the desktop software market.

The Department of Information Technology has already devised a strategy to introduce Linux and open source software as a de-facto standard in academic institutions, especially in engineering colleges through course work that encourages use of such systems.

Research establishments would be advised to use and develop re-distributable toolboxes just as Central government departments and state governments would be asked to use Linux-based offerings.

DIT is in talks with leading industry players like IBM and HCL to get a feel of their work in the area and invite proposals for joint projects. "As a first step we are persuading all government institutions to offer courses on Linux and programming for Linux environment. We would also set up Linux Resource Centres in academic institutes (with co-funding from government and industry)," said a senior government official.

Though India has made a name for itself selling solutions, software as a product is expensive within the country. And the cost will bite once India starts implementing IPR protection in earnest, as it has committed itself to.

While redistribution of proprietary software is restricted through a licence agreement, the licensing terms for Linux grants the right to obtain and redistribute copies. Many analysts believe that China's growing dominance in the IT space is fuelled by its low cost open source bias.

The Chinese government has consistently promoted its local software based on Linux, both for cost reasons, and reportedly for 'security' concerns as well.

The source code for proprietory software is not revealed, and this, it is believed, has not found favour with the Chinese, especially in defence and security related applications.

Microsoft, in what many observers and reports say is an attempt to soften the Chinese government's stand, recently committed to investing $750m in China in three years to help set up a software college and put its money into Chinese education.

In comparison, Microsoft has announced investments worth only $75m over a three-year time frame in India. Howver, the Chinese company Redflag Software, which was set up by the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the country's most prestigious research institute, has often come out with low-cost software based on Linux, in direct competition to Windows-based software.

The Indian government's plan, however, is not driven by security concerns, but by the far more simple arithmetic of costing. To put it simply, India being a developing country needs low cost solutions.

Unlike the Microsoft-developed Windows operating system, Linux code is free and downloadable from the internet. With the addition of special applications, it can be personalized to meet specific needs.

An industry-government-user-developer conference on the subject would be organised to throw up ideas for specific initiatives including funding, reliable sources told ET.

The only issue here is support and services, which Indian government sources feel is not likely to be an issue in a country known for its software support and service skills.

Like China, the government is also eyeing the increasingly lucrative global support and services market for the Linux environment may prove lucrative. While proprietary support agreements govern only the systems purchased (with licences), for free software support is independent of the number of copies owned.

"With applications in security being a focus area, inputs have been sought from the Defence on their experience with Linux. Indian-language based solutions, e-governance, embedded and high performance cluster solutions are other areas. But firstly we want to concretise the position on IPR issues in the use of Linux," the source said.

DIT is planning a three-tier mechanism, with itself as the first, industry, user groups and state governments as the second and a national apex committee headed either by a government representative, an industry expert or an academician to oversee manpower and skill development, applications development and deployment and public policy support, said sources.

According to IDC's figures for '00, Microsoft still controlled 94% of the desktop software market and while Linux is expected to overtake the number two -- Apple Mac OS -- by '03, it would still control less than 4% of the market.

In server software, it fares a little better and is expected to control around 30% of the market by '03, according to IDC. Linux, which has established itself in the server space, is an open reliable OS that runs on virtually any platform and was developd by Finnish technologist Linus Torvalds.

After developing the initial source code, Linus made it available on the Internet for use, feedback and further development.

Re:Text of the article

[Anonymous Coward]

"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).

Re:Text of the article

[Isle]

Like China can modify Red Hat's source code. Now if you said Red Flag I might believe you. I would also believe you if you said China used Red Flag Linux to put presure on Red Hat :)

Re:Text of the article

[taweili]

Do not treat too highly of the Taiwan issue in China's agenda. Unification of Taiwan is just a matter of time for China after China has obsord all the money from Taiwan. There is little choice for Taiwan but unify with the motherland.

China is leveraging its "potentially" large domenstic market which every business in the world is dreaming of "Only if everyone of the 1.2 billion people spending $1 on my product."

The government is prompting free/open source on one hand while taking money from Microsoft on the other. See Register's Ballmer to China: 'Steal all the software you want, so long as it's ours'. How much of the $750 millions Microsoft gave to China will be spent on Linux development?

America has used its vast domestic market to gain depolmatic advantage. Using domestic policy and law to interfer with the international trading agreement.

China is just using the same tatic.

Re:Text of the article

[hyperturbopete]

hmm suure

anything MS can do to encourage just the USE of MS software anywhere in the world is incredibly valuable.

Giving MS sftwr away in countries where they wouldnt make money anyway reduces demand for linux there.

by taking market share away from linux, it reduces the "network effect" for linux worldwide, slowing down linux's development worldwide, and buying time for MS's dominance -> $$$$

Re:Text of the article

[taweili]

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.

One of the interesting implications..

[OmniVector]

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.

Re:One of the interesting implications..

[BaronVonDuvet]

Originally Unix became so popular because it was provided to colleges and students.

Programmers that had been using it at colleges were keen to use it in the workplace. I think it's likely that Linux will follow this pattern.

The things that have kept Micro$o£t so popular are that people tend to pirate a copy and that it is installed on just about every new PC. Arguably making their software harder to copy will damage them in the long run.

Re:One of the interesting implications..

[djupedal]

Indian programmers have been an excellent source for at least the last ten years. Problem is, everyone knows this, and as such they'be become a commodity...meaning they are no longer the least expensive of this type of resource. Since everyone is using them, the price is no longer rock bottom.

Interestingly enough, the NBT in low-cost programming resource will be none other than North Korea. China and South Korea stand to take best advantage. Film at eleven...

Re:One of the interesting implications..

[Troed]

good coders are good coders

You obviously know nothing about the difference between a "coder" and a "software engineer".

Yes I'm serious - and I'm both a Mechanical Engineer and Software Engineer. The actual time "coding" is almost the smallest part of a well designed project. You need engineers to take care of the rest that if(5!=duh) doesn't really do well.

Re:One of the interesting implications..

[OmniVector]

i'm a cs major, and good programmers are good designers. software engineering is more of the corporate world's attempt to produce more software in less time with fewer bugs that cram more features in. it doesn't focus on the structure of alogirthms, the effiency needed to produce realtime and embeded systems like computer science might emphasise more.

I'm not trying to troll, i'm just saying that most my CS friends are in it for the fun, the knowledge, and getting computers to crunch bits. where most my software engineering friends are microsoft praisers who think that c# is the greatest invention since the stone age since it has delegates and get/set{} operators now (to make their design better?).

Re:One of the interesting implications..

[Ravenn]

Arguably making their software harder to copy will damage them in the long run.

Which is why M$ cd's are able to be copied, even when the game industry has proven that copying can be made so much harder. Sure, all games can (and will) be cracked. But it is so much easier to just copy the windoze *cough* OS *cough* because they want people to be using it. They make the money not from the average user, but from businesses, governments and universities that use hundreds or thousands at a time.

Having Joe Average use it at home means that he is less likely to want to change the work policy. Have it installed at work, and it's too much hassle for him to change his home system.

Fortunately, this can work both ways now.

Re:One of the interesting implications..

[nkv]

where most my software engineering friends are microsoft praisers who think that c# is the greatest invention since the stone age

I couldn't agree more. I'd distinguish between the "software engineers" and the "CS folks" by saying that the former are soulless code grinders who slave away and fuel the "software industry" which is not too hot in itself (as Jamie Zawinski rightly pointed out, "whole sick, navel-gazing mess we called the software industry"). The latter people on the other hand are the people that keep the earth spinning. Whether their percentage is dwindling or growing is anyone's guess.

It's a mistake IMO to think that "standard software engineering practices" are some kind of panacea that can correct bad coders and produce good code.

Re:One of the interesting implications..

[smithwis]

You obviously know nothing about the difference between a "coder" and a "software engineer". Yes I'm serious - and I'm both a Mechanical Engineer and Software Engineer. The actual time "coding" is almost the smallest part of a well designed project. You need engineers to take care of the rest that if(5!=duh) doesn't really do well.

Arguably, a majority of the time is spent in debugging and support. Both of these are helped a great bit by the quality of the code in the first place.

BTW, you come off as really condescending, you might want to work on that;-)

Steve

Re:One of the interesting implications..

[Troed]

Don't judge an engineering practise based on the naming in US universities. My SE-education (Europe) is based solely on unix, c++, algorithms, realtime etc. My field of expertice today is embedded/telecom.

Re:One of the interesting implications..

[smittyoneeach]

One potential future has the rest of the world going to open source products and ditching proprietary code.
The good news about this, one would think, is that countries are less likely to screw around with compatibility in the name of market share.
The bad news is that the US love affair with Redmond starts to look like a highly protectionist trade policy. OOPs.

Re:One of the interesting implications..

[AvitarX]

Because joe user feels so safe activating their software that they obtained illegaly?

I somehow think that the windows piracy thing is going to slow down from the fact that faking activation is similar to cracking a game.

Re:One of the interesting implications..

[jotaeleemeese]

Engineers can be condescending with coders. We^h^hThey are higher in the food chain.

Re:One of the interesting implications..

[ma_sivakumar]

True. Exposure is the key. I am not a programmer, but having exposed to open source through slashdot for a year or so, when I set up my business recently decided to use Linux etc.

All the companies I talked for assistance in development work only with Microsoft solutions and were not willing to consider my project. Finally I decided to hire two fresh graduates, they are bright guys fresh out of college (no prior Linux exposure) with a little Unix usage.

They saw my system, there were immediately hooked and installed Linux in their home computers also to play around. Initially they could not write html by hand. After a couple of days they were comfortable

The government promoting open source will have broader implications, since the middle class in India puts a great faith in everything Government. If the government says it will be good. When a boy/girl wants to do a course on Linux, the parents will be more willing to spare the cash, if there is a government label on it.

Re:One of the interesting implications..

[Hektor_Troy]

Arguably, a majority of the time is spent in debugging and support.

Well, on basically all the projects I've worked on, where design has come first, second and third, we've had to spend maybe 1 or 2 percent of the time on debugging, simply because we've removed 99% of the bugs before the program left the drawingboard so to speak. Yes - support and Q&A weigh in as well, but most of the support is for bugs in the software (wether they're code bugs or inconsistencies in the UI), and that's not a whole lot of support.

If done properly, it is possible to spend 85% of the time designing the stuff, 14% on testing it, 5% on coding it and 1% on support. At least in my experience, but then again, I've never really worked on huge projects with idiots running the sub-projects and thus screwing things up.

Re:One of the interesting implications..

[inbox]

Yes, a majority of the time is spent in debugging and support. An inappropriate amount of time. And, arguably, one of the reasons modern software is so buggy!

The more design and the more engineering that goes into the process *before* coding is what reduces the time spent in debugging and support. That's the whole idea of software engineering, and I believe that was the original posters intended point.

Re:One of the interesting implications..

[oliverthered]

Aggreed,

BTW most large projects I've worked on havn't made the slightest attemt at defining the requirements correctly.

Normal Practice: 'Duh how do i do this? the requirements are contradictory? umm... I'll do it this way' 5% design, 20% coding 20% testing and 65% support and fixing bugs (more than 100%, well the project overrun!)

Correct Practice: 'The requirements are contradictory? Lets get some consultants and design people to sort the mess out with the clients' 60% design 15% coding 15% testing and 10% support and fixing bugs. (the left over time for cups of coffee and training!)

Re:One of the interesting implications..

[danro]

Where do you work?

I'm so fed up with the single-digit percentage of time alotted for design where I work that I seriously consider finding another job.

Is this as common as I think, or have I had rotten luck with employers three times in a row?

Re:One of the interesting implications..

[BlackHawk-666]

Maintenance seems to be the major portion of any project to me. Once it's designed, coded and deployed it enters that twillight world of maintenance, where it resides for the next decade or more :-)

Re:One of the interesting implications..

[0x0d0a]

Oh, for Chrissake.

And obviously, a "sanitation engineer" is higher up on the food chain than a "trash man"?

No one where I've ever been expects a "coder" to do nothing but code. Everyone does some design, and unless they're strictly project management only, probably some coding and debugging.

"Coder" is just an informal term for "software engineer", which could be someone with a computer science, math, or hell, physics degree.

Seriously, do you know anyone that does nothing but "coding", that would qualify to be a "coder" under your definition? That does absolutely no design at all?

Technicians think engineers aren't in touch with the real world and are overpaid. Engineers think that scientists aren't practical. Scientists thing that engineers are a bit too dim-witted to do something lofty like "advancing their field".

It's all semantics, and if you let it go, you wind up a lot happier and getting along those "other classes" quite a bit better.

Re:One of the interesting implications..

[oliverthered]

your not making the best agrument there.

1: Each module/function of a system should be given performance and footprint criteria (Normally something like =0.1secs at 80% CPU , =1k per transation, =1MB total footprint)

2: Complex areas of the system should be given to the highly skilled and simpler areas given to the skilled (the lesser skilled should be being trained and peer reviewing parts of the system)

3: don't rely on the compiler to produce optimized code, Design patterns have everything to do with performance and maintainability the compiler cannot re-organise the design patterns to meet the requirements setout in point 1. A good programmer who knows there stuff will always write good code, no matter how compact. The code will be designed so that when someone comes to maintain the code it's bliss.

Good signs in Europe as well

[jukal]

I have been following closely the adoptation of open source within European Union lately. It seems they are working, studying and experimenting this in many fronts. Here is some of the European Union efforts related to open source. Openchallenge (which I am related to) has also received very positive feedback from European Union officials.

It is interesting to see where we are in say after 10 more years.

Re:Good signs in Europe as well

[SabberFlapper]

Germany even funds parts of KDE, the Aegypten project. The green youth calls for a federal free software foundation...

few Linux inroads in India yet

[Megasphaera Elsdenii]

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.

Re:few Linux inroads in India yet

[popeyethesailor]

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.

Re:few Linux inroads in India yet

[sql*kitten]

When I was in India a year ago, I was surprised
at how strong the presence of Microsoft was in
science.

Hardly surprising considering Microsoft's active sponsorship of the IITs. I don't doubt that if Red Hat start funding research, professorships, scholarships etc that Linux will become equally as popular.

Re:few Linux inroads in India yet

[orcaaa]

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.

Re:few Linux inroads in India yet

[rsidd]

Not my experience, and I did my PhD in India. Theoretical physics people are pretty much standardized on linux. So are many engineering and mathematics departments. Experimental physicists, chemists and biologists on the other hand tend to use windows. It's exactly the same situation in the US. The physics group I was with in India had been using linux since around 1993 (I joined in 1994). Back then they still had a lot of msdos/windows 3.1 machines, but by around 1997 windows was almost extinct in my group.

Re:few Linux inroads in India yet

[Sedge]

Linux spreads mainly on word-of-mouth advertising, and network-based cooperation. I suspect that Linux will take off in India when (hopefully not "if") network connections there become cheaper.

IIRC, bandwidth in India costs about an order of magnitude more than the same connection to the 'net would cost in the USA. Salaries for skilled computer geeks are perhaps 5 to 10 times lower. Thus, a comparable network connection will cost the geek maybe 50 to 100 times more in real terms.

Makes perfect sense

[Jeppe Salvesen]

In countries where the wages are lower, the licensing/hardware portion of the TCO will be larger. Linux runs on smaller iron, without licensing costs. It's very simple math.

Re:Makes perfect sense

[sql*kitten]

In countries where the wages are lower, the licensing/hardware portion of the TCO will be larger. Linux runs on smaller iron, without licensing costs. It's very simple math.

That's assuming that Microsoft only sell in USD and require local currencies to be converted to dollars and US prices to be paid before they'll make a sale. However, MS, like McDonalds, Sony, Pepsi and other global corporations, tailor their prices to the local markets. Products of these corporations are generally as "affordable" wherever you are.

Re:Makes perfect sense

[fishbowl]

So how do they stop us from converting USD to the lesser currency, purchasing in a foreign market, and shipping it to the US?

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.

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!

Re:Makes perfect sense

[fault0]

> 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!

Well, many things are cheaper, some are not. The last time I was in India (this summer), things like cell phones, mobile phones, printers, and speakers were extremely cheap. CPU's and memory were also somewhat cheap.

Other things, like monitors and video cards were extremely expensive (there were no Geforce4's out even).

If you tried to bring something like a whole packaged set of computers from there to the US, customs would likely stop you. But of course, if you have the right connections, the import/export buisness can be very *profitable*. I was on a flight from Calcutta, India to Bangkok, Thailand, and nearly 80% of the people on the plane were smugglers of electronic/commodity goods. It was funny because when they landed, they had about 7-8 suitcases each. They obviously knew the airport people. In Bangkok, there were people there to help collect the suitcases. I'm not sure if the final destination was Bangkok or not, but the process seemed to be pretty efficient.

Re:Makes perfect sense

[sql*kitten]

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.

Re:Makes perfect sense

[robinsc]

Rubbish. MS Operating systems cost RS.6000 to Rs.10000 Which is more than the monthly starting salary of a software engineer. To many indians it is more than their total annual income. I don't see any tailoring in India at all.

Free software?

[Bas_Wijnen]

"The reasoning being more of plain economics than security or other reasons."

Sounds like their going for open source software, not free software. A nice coincidence is of course that they will end up with free software anyway, but "going for free software" is more what the people in Peru are trying to do IMO.

Re:Free software?

[timotten]

The article doesn't ascribe this move to any software development ideology -- "Free", "Open Source", or otherwise. IIRC, the rhetoric from OSS-folk emphasizes that sharing produces higher quality; FSF-folk emphasize that sharing empowers people. Hopefully, adopting GNU/Linux will save India money, will provide India with a stronger infrastructure, and will empower Indians to use computers when and how they want. I agree that this could be a very nice coincidence. :)

(Why do I post this? Because I enjoy preaching to the choir. It's good for the children, in this post-9/11 era. The terrorists won't win.)

Local language software

[codekavi]

What the government needs to make those college students do is develop applications in the local languages. Just 2% of the 1 billion in India understand English. That's only 20 million if my arithmetic is correct.

OTOH 900 million people *worldwide* (not just in India) understand Hindi. However there are very few applications and operating systems that do support Indic scripts.
http://rohini.ncst.ernet.in/indix/ , http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/Indic-Fonts-HOWTO/ , and http://www.geocities.com/hanu_man_ji are some efforts in this direction.
Instead of making them dream about making dough in the US, the Indian college students and programmers should be encouraged if not forced to develop tools, utilities and applications in the Indian languages. Not only will it boost the demand for PC's - many Indian homes have white goods in the range of $400 or so, but no PC's - who'll use them if you don't know English? - it will give a big boost to the quality of programming; there are many smart people in India but they are limited by a lack of knowledge of English.

Re:Local language software

[Anonymous Coward]

English is the second language of India, understood by most - thats precisely why there are so many programmers there.

Re:Local language software

[Valluvan]

Yes. Enabling software for local languages is extremely important if software is ever going to affect the common man in India. A few laudable efforts are the indix project by IISc (forgot the link) and Mandrake 9.x support for indian languages.

Still searching for my sig.

Re:Local language software

[codekavi]

English is understood by "most" Indians who frequent slashdot.
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
Telugu ,
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.

Re:Local language software

[codekavi]

The Indix project is by NCST. Link in my OP.
Do you have any links to the Mandrake 9.x support for indian languages?

Re:Local language software

[Somnus]

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 ....

Re:Local language software

[Valluvan]

oh.. alright. For Mandrake checkout tamilinux group at yahoogroups.com and mandrake site.

Re:Local language software

[codekavi]

:) autoritarian, do you think?
Well POSIX.1 was "forced" by the American government, and it did more good than harm ...

Re:Local language software

[codekavi]

Let me give an example:
In order to get a railway reservation in India, you have to go to the Booking office, stand in a line, wait for your turn(could take anywhere from 30 to 120 min), and get your ticket. Yes, the ticket system is networked nationwide, you can buy a ticket from A to B from any booking office, that may be located in C.

Recently the government(owns the Railways in India, and it happens to be the world's 4th largest network) started online railway ticket booking.
The people who book online, have an advantage of 30 to 120 minutes over the ones who don't - they don't need to stand in the line and wait, while someone ahead of them can book on the same train and deny them a ticket.

The trouble is, the website's interface is in English; whereas in the booking office, the forms can be filled in the local language - they're bilingual.

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.

Now, if the same interface was also there in the local languages, wouldn't people be eager to use it? You don't need to buy a computer to access the web, cyber cafe charges are ~40c an hour, so on spending 15 minutes in the cybercafe, you would spend the same amount as for when you go to the booking office.

So, a supply side pressure, as you rightly put it, may not always increase demand, but it's things like these ...

Re:Local language software

[codekavi]

Most Indians who visit London may know English; That doesn't mean that the Indians who don't visit London are illiterate. Nor does it mean that a person not knowing English should be considered to be illiterate. The PC in my home can just not be used by my grandparents because they don't know English. And my grandfather completed college at the age of 17, started teaching in the same college next year. He didn't learn or teach English - he taught Sanskrit.

Concluding that 98% of Indians are illiterate, is a little off the mark.

When software can be developed for use in Icelandic, Korean, Greek - all these languages have less sepeakers than most Indian languages, why not in Indian languages? Multiplicity of languages is not the issue, you develop the content or software in the language you use.

You go English because the tools are already there, not because you're scared of alienating the other languages.

Re:Local language software

[west]

Just 2% of the 1 billion in India understand English. That's only 20 million if my arithmetic is correct.

I find that number incredibly hard to believe. India has IIRC, some 14 official languages and 8 official alphabets. (And we in Canada complain about bilingualism.) As a result of the fact that nobody really wants to help make their neighbor's language dominant, and the fact that England ruled India for many years, English is the second language of most.

I still remember driving (okay, being driven :-))through South India and stopping at a small town when the car broke down. I was the first westerner there in many years according to the townspeople, yet a significant fraction spoke English well enough to hold a conversation with me. (And all were eager to practice their English with a native speaker.)

It was taught at the nearby school.

Re:Local language software

[Graymalkin]

Icelandic and Greek can both be represented in the ASCII character set and Korean was defined in the KSC 5601 specification so Hangul could be typed on ASCII based keyboards. I don't know anything about any languages spkoen or written in India but how easy would it be for any of them to be represented in ASCII, even with a shift methlod like RFC1557 for Korean? I know there's a character encoding for Hindi but not knowing the language it doesn't mean much to me. If your language isn't going to work on commodity computer components it is going to miss out on the enourmous production base of both hardware and software that already exists. Programming in many languages requires some knowlege or at least awareness of Latin based semantics if not outright knowlege of English. If you're asking people to program in C, Pascal, Java, or Ruby you pretty much need to teach them about the Roman character set. Write a Hindi front end for a compiler and more people who speak Hindi will program.

Re:Local language software

[pamri]

Indian language computing on linux(atleast on gnome) will become a reality in about 3 to 5 years, provided the below problems are ironed out.

The problems faced are lack of free opentype fonts(preferred for handling numerous ligatures & glyphs & their substitution), support for opentype fonts at the X-level. No, indix(linked by another user) won't solve the issue atleast in the present form, since it breaks a lot of X-protocols. Pango holds promise, but it is not being adopted by QT & it will take some time for rendering engines of all indic languages for Pango to be developed.

The plus side is serious efforts are being made to resolve the issue. OT Fonts are available for a few indic languages & existing ttf's are being converted into otf's,Gnome & KDE translation work is going on (some like my own mother tongue 'kannada' is being translated on WinXP) for some indic languages like hindi,kannada, tamil(one of the first indic languages to be translated), etc.,

The things that we should be alarmed is Microsoft's is on the upper hand: It has OT font's for all indic languages besides input engines, OTF rendering support & BillG who is making his 3rd visit to India has already signalled the need for localisation. And if i am not wrong the fonts have been developed with the aid of the local govt. And they are not in public domain or atleast freely usable on linux.

For more details, see: Indic computing mailing lists-search the indic_computing_devel mailing list for extensive criticism of indix & also the kde 18n mailing list. indlinux,kannada mailing list

Btw, here's another example of MS cosying upto the karnataka govt. The bhoomi s/w(up for this year's stockholmn tech award) may cost nearly 40 lakhs per taluk. A NGO, I currently am in touch with was successful in persuading the officials to look at the possibility of developing it on linux. And projects like this need indic support urgently.

Re:Local language software

[codekavi]

You touched the heart of the problem. The reason why there's so little Indian language computing is the lack of a standard. The Koreans made it mandatory for vendors to support their NL charset. Whereas in India, the government never made that condition mandatory.
So now, there are just too many (non)standard charsets floating around, and considering the situation now I think UTF-8 is the best bet, even though it takes up >1 byte.
ISCII was the standard developed by a govt research organisation for Indian languages, but it was never properly enforced. Also the organisation never brought out the ISCII editors in public domain. That killed Indian language computing.

With UTF-8, let's hope something emerges...

Re:Local language software

[orcaaa]

Actually, South India is one of the literate parts of India. Infact, in a state called Kerela, the literacy percentage is as high as ~95%. Secondly, English is not the second language for most Indians. The first two languages are always Hindi and their mother tongue. Eg, a *typical* resident of Gujarat will speak Hindi and Gujarati more fluently than he might speak English. Thus English could be called the third language for most people, but that does not mean its widely spoken(in the context of the entire population).

Re:Local language software

[ma_sivakumar]

That is right. Take for instance the localisation of KDE and Gnome. The translation for Tamil (a south Indian language) is mostly done by software engineers living overseas (in US etc), usually maintained by a handful of persons. As a result the translation is only partially complete any given time.

If the awareness about such projects spread in colleges and schools, the students can be organized to keep the translation of these two and mamy other open source application complete and current.

The status of other Indian languages are still worse.

Re:Local language software

[codekavi]

I'm sorry if I misunderstood you.
The percentage of English speaking Indians is not 2%. But quite close.

http://www.victorianweb.org/post/india/hohenthal /5 .2.html

English in India -- and Who Speaks English to Whom and When?
Annika Hohenthal, Department of English, University of Turku, Finland
In terms of numbers of English speakers, the Indian subcontinent ranks third in the world, after the USA and UK. An estimated 4% of the Indian population use English; although the number might seem small, out of the total population that is about 35 million people (in 1994)(Crystal 1995:101). Although the number of speakers of English in India is somewhat limited (as compared to the total population), that small segment of the population controls domains that have professional prestige (Kachru 1986a: 8).

Those are 1995 statistics, so you might add a few million to the 35 mil. mentioned above.
4% of 1 billion still leaves 960 million in the lurch.

The literacy rate of India is
http://www.cyberjournalist.org.in/census/cenli t0.h tml
(takes time to load)
65.38%. (2001 census statistics)

This means,
60% of the population, ie 600 million literate people in India are denied the use of computers and internet services(note that I distinguish between programmers and the users of the programmers because they don't know English.

These are the figures.
These 600 mill are the ones I'm drawing attention to.

Re:Local language software

[ma_sivakumar]

Remember, the Linux PDAs are being targetted at the rural population, who are not comfortable with English. Moreover, even though many people can understand English, most of them are not comfortable with the interface.

Take for example, my mother a retired high school teacher and my father a retired government employee, both are educated (post graduate/graduate), but are not willing to start using the computer because of the language barrier. Once there is a popular, tamil interface conveniently available, they and many more will start using computers.

Re:Local language software

[codekavi]

I just posted a correction, seems to be closer to 4%.
40 million people speak English.
65% literacy rate.
The links are there in another message in this thread.
That makes it 650 million literates.
Assuming all the 40 million who speak English ar also literate, it still leaves 610 million literates who don't speak English.

Even considering that these 40 mill knew English very well, would they be more comfortable using English or their own their mother tongue while working on a computer?

Re:Local language software

[Anonymous Coward]

"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."

More significant than the language, would be having the method of payment! Those who use the conventional method of standing on queue, pay with cash. Those who use the internet, pay with credit cards I suppose. This is a more significant factor in the "digital divide" than the language barrier, or even, having internet access.

I think you are underestimating people's ability to understand timetables and the names of their origin and destination cities, and you're forgetting the real reasons why they can't use the online booking system.

Re:Local language software

[fault0]

> 60% of the population, ie 600 million literate people in India are denied the use of computers and internet services because they don't know English.

They might not know Hindi as well. I know many fully literate people in my home state (west bengal), who know much better English than Hindi. The state requires students to learn Hindi, but either Bengali or English is stressed much more, depending on if they goto a Bengali-standard or English-standard school.

> 4% of 1 billion still leaves 960 million in the lurch.

7 years ago, it was 4%. I beleive it's significantly higher now, as knowing English has become somewhat "chic". Funny what the boob tube and movies can do.

Re:Local language software

[sql*kitten]

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.

Re:Local language software

[pinka]

This does not happen in a vacuum. Needs a market. Arguably the market was slowly developing before the burst bubble stopped it. One possible way this market can develop is by getting the millions of mom and pop stores to start using computers/software for mundane stuff like inventory tracking etc. The problem, of course, is that even in the regional languages the literacy rates are low, between 50 and 60 percent, I would guess; though, that too is steadily increasing.

Re:Local language software

[sql*kitten]

The things that we should be alarmed is Microsoft's is on the upper hand: It has OT font's for all indic languages besides input engines, OTF rendering support & BillG who is making his 3rd visit to India has already signalled the need for localisation.

It has these things because it spent time and money to make them. Even tho' it can be reproduced for negligible cost, information of any kind is not free.

The ethos of the Open SOurce movement was always that if you needed something and it didn't exist, you had the tools and simply made it. Nowadays if it doesn't show up on Google stright away, people just give up or worse, complain without actually doing anything themselves.

Re:Local language software

[Sanga]

http://www.tamillinux.org/ has the scoop on local-language-linux.

Mandrake supports Thamizh out of the box!!!!

Re:Local language software

[Sanga]

http://www.tamillinux.org/kde/imsges/Thumbnails.ht ml
has thumbnails.

Re:Local language software

[dwake]

Do you know how many websites there are in Hindi? Less than 500.

This is partly because the majority of Hindi-speakers are illiterate.

Re:Local language software

[codekavi]

>They might not know Hindi as well.

I never said they would know Hindi.
I just said they would be more comfortable in their local language, which in this case would be Bengali.

>7 years ago, it was 4%. I beleive it's significantly higher now,

How much higher? Even if you take 8% as the figure, we still have too many literates around who don't know English.
Again, I'm not saying Hindi should replace English, the _local_language_ , whatever it is, should.

Re:Local language software

[codekavi]

>>Do you know how many websites there are in Hindi? Less than 500.
>This is partly because the majority of Hindi-speakers are illiterate.

Yes, partly. Remember that Hindi newspapers have higher circulation then English newspapers in India. And if you keep in mind that Hindi is just one of the many languages, the share of English newspapers goes even lower.

Therefore the low number of websites in Hindi is only _partly_ because of illiteracy. Otherewise the same would have reflected in the newspaper medium also.

Now if you say it's because of lack of computer literacy, well, we go into egg and chicken circle ... :)

Re:Local language software

[codekavi]

>Those who use the conventional method of standing on queue, pay with cash. Those who use the internet, pay with credit cards I suppose.

Definitely, this is a factor in the digital divide. But please realise that 1) It's also possible to pay thru credit cards if you are standing in a queue. Also, many websites in India do offer cash on delivery options.

>I think you are underestimating people's ability to understand timetables and the names of their origin and destination cities,

I am not underestimating that. I'm just talking about easy of use, and therefore popularity of the medium. Given a choice, would you visit a Korean site to book a ticket to Korea or an English site? [I'm assuming you don't know Korean.] Please don't forget that English and Indian languages use *different scripts*.

Re:Local language software

[codekavi]

>Why is it unfair? There are no barriers to learning English, after all.

Basically the situation leads to people being forced to learn English, and being forced to accept an English centric world. I don't see that to be fair.

Indian languages can be represented in ASCII, the ISCII encoding does exactly that. The problem is in rendering the conjunct consonants. See http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/Indic-Fonts-HOWTO/index. html

Re:Local language software

[m_ilya]

There are no barriers to learning English

Huh? Moderated as Interesting? It is highly ignorant. Have you ever tried to learn foreign languages yourself? As a person who is not English native I can say that it is simply not true. Learning foreign languages beyound simple "How are you? Thanks, I'm fine" requires noticable effort and for most people who have no special talent for learning languages means spending a lot of time and/or money on studying. This is the barrier.

Re:Local language software

[codekavi]

>English is the second language of India, understood by most - thats precisely why there are so many programmers there.

Then why did the Bangalore linux group have this page up?
http://lli.linux-bangalore.org/index.php

Excerpts from the page:
The Linux Localisation Initiative
The Linux Localization Initiative aims to translate Linux documentation provided by the Linux Documentation Project (www.linuxdoc.org) and its contributors, into Indian languages. This long and boring sentence should give you an idea about the labors ahead. There are quite a few languages apart from Hindi, which is of course the national language of India. A selection includes Bengali, Marathi, Konkani, Malayalam, Kannada, Oriya, Telugu, Tamil, Gujarathi, Punjabi, Sanskrit, Urdu, and Tulu.

Our Mission
We believe that information technology in India in general and Linux in particular has been confined to the 3 % of the Indian population who feel comfortable reading, speaking and writing English. Given that there are 1 billion Indian citizens, this is a scandal. Linux and its ecology encompass almost all areas of computing today from small embedded devices and clusters with thousands of nodes. We believe that Linux technology should be accessible to all Indians, regardless of linguistic background.

The Linux Localisation Initiative has been organized by the Bangalore Linux User Group (BLUG).We plan to start of translations immediately. See below for the list of documents we have begun to translate

Re:Local language software

[sql*kitten]

Huh? Moderated as Interesting? It is highly ignorant. Have you ever tried to learn foreign languages yourself?

Sure, I've lived and worked in half a dozen countries. I speak a little Dutch and a little French, enough to get by and do business. My personal observation is that almost everyone who has to interact with foreigners prefers to do so in English. Put a Spaniard, an Italian and a German to work together, and they'll all revert to English. The French and the Dutch people I worked with spoke to each other in English, and not just because there were English people present (we could have spoken French if they'd let us, but they insisted on English).

requires noticable effort and for most people who have no special talent for learning languages means spending a lot of time and/or money on studying

So does anything worthwhile. What's your point?

Re:Local language software

[dinadan]

we are talking about the indian railway ticket reservation, aren't we? as a german citizen i would be really pissed if our railway ticket reservation would be in english instead of german. (btw, it is optional in english for tourists)

Re:Local language software

[sql*kitten]

we are talking about the indian railway ticket reservation, aren't we? as a german citizen i would be really pissed if our railway ticket reservation would be in english instead of german. (btw, it is optional in english for tourists)

That's a fair point, but remember that German is spoken throughout Germany as the primary language, whereas there are 15 or so languages in common use throughout India. It would be impossible to use one of those without one group being favored, and the rest being upset about it. There are two options: use a lingua franca like English, or make the system work in all languages. I've worked on applications that do a dozen or so languages, and it adds massively to the cost. For example, development slows to a crawl when you have to get the only Russian speaker to check that a screen looks right, then fixing it for him breaks the layout of the Greek screen.

One of the nice things about English is that it has been able to easily absorb words from elsewhere. There are German words in there, French, Indian, Japanese, you name it. And it's easier to learn than German (no genders on nouns, no Dative case) even tho' English, German and Dutch are closely related.

Apart from artificial languages like Esperanto, English is probably the best candidate for a universal language.

So, does this mean ...

[Anonymous Coward]

... the Indians are gonna use Apache?

Oh, you mean the other Indians ...

Re:Not enough GDP per capita

[pubjames]

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?

That's one thing India and Pakistan agree on..

[heytal]

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.

Re:That's one thing India and Pakistan agree on..

[Rogerborg]

• This is inspite of the fact that Microsoft is offering a 90% discount to the pakistan Government.

They're not idiots. They'll understand that the first hit is always free. Microsoft can discount all they like, but once they've wiped out the competition, they know that can charge whatever they want. Unfortunately for them, we know that too.

Re:That's one thing India and Pakistan agree on..

[pamri]

This is a good article on linux in the sub-continent, on dawn - a pakistani newspaper, though it's long & not so new to us geeks. BTW,Frederick Noronha is a sort of Indian RMS, with less zealotry & is a free-lance journalist whose main area of concern is, no guesses, free software.

Just not depending on foreign companies???

[Anonymous MadCoe]

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.

Its about time

[abhikhurana]

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.

Re:Its about time

[hdparm]

I passed out two years ago

Have you recovered yet or this post comes from a deep coma?

Re:Its about time

[abhikhurana]

No, I just babble in my sleep and a penguin types for me :-)

Re:Its about time

[Ashish Kulkarni]

AFAIK, Linux has already been introduced in univs. In Mumbai University, for the first year of Engg. (common across all branches), there is a compulsory course "C on Linux". The adoption rate has been slow (people are still unfamiliar with linux, I recently helped the lab assistant in our college to setup Redhat) but now Linux is being made a option for other courses too, even in the final year.

Re:Its about time

[Anonymous Coward]

Hmmm ... I am from IIT Kanpur. There As far back as 1994 or before that we had plenty of PCs in the computer labs (meant for student projects) running on Linux, with all the other related free software. Around 1995/96 or so (I think) we had most of the VT100 type terminals replaced by inexpensive PCs running Linux- acting as X - terminals (Hundreds of them ). There were courses based entirely on Linux. Noone cared much about M$ OSs :-)

Re:Its about time

[pamri]

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.

Re:Its about time

[toolz]

IT.COM is a technology business expo, and while it has some Linux content, it is largely representative in nature.

If you want to see the true might of Linux, check out Linux Bangalore/2002, India's biggest annual Linux event, held in December.

More like hoo-hum

[djupedal]

Government? Is this a troll? Have you tried doing business in India in the last several years? India is stuck in such political turmoil that it will still be where it is today, ten years from now. China, on the other hand, has no such issue. (note I didn't say 'no issues')

Look at your local dept. store and tell me how many goods say "Made In India"...then see how many say "Made In China".

Need more?
Check the cost of Indian programmers. You'll find that it is no longer the least expensive resource of this type on the planet.
Sorry, but I disagree with your vision of the future. India had it's chance for the last decade, and that chance has been squandered.

Look to North Korea for the next batch of low-cost programmers if you want to talk progressive.

Re:More like hoo-hum

[glenstar]

Look to North Korea for the next batch of low-cost programmers if you want to talk progressive.

Now that I hadn't thought of. I have investigated Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam as sources of programmers. To date the only promising one is Vietnam.

I wonder what sort of FBI file an American could rack up by setting up shop on North Korea...? ;-)

Re:Sweet!

[Anonymous Coward]

Right, 'cuz everyone in both India and China owns a computer, and are switching to linux along with their governments. Idiot.

How to up your karma Re:Text of the article

[NTDaley]

For every story post a comment with the full text of the linked articles.

Apparently this qualifies as informative!

Re:How to up your karma Re:Text of the article

[Saib0t]

I don't think it is informative, and for my part, this post of mine could go at -1 for all I care.

The thing is, when I saw this story appear, I went to read the article and the website seemed very slow. So I copy/pasted the article here just in case the website went *poof*. There's no way to tell morons to go read the article if they can't read it, heh :-)

(and just FYI, I hit Karma 50 (or whatever it's called these days) a long time ago. I'll post anonymously next time though...)

Re:How to up your karma Re:Text of the article

[NTDaley]

My apologies.
It wasn't intended as a dig at you, I intended for the spiny barbs on that post to be aimed at the people who modded it up.

I agree that copies like this are handy when the site has been slashdotted.

Re:How to up your karma Re:Text of the article

[Stephen Samuel]

From my experience, I don't think that this site is slashdotted -- just slow because it's across the Pacific. Nontheless, posting the text of the article rarely hurts. What bothers me more is that 7 points have been put into this article in a moderation war.

Personally, I figure that it's better to have this post moderated up than down because it relieves unnecessary load on the pan-pacific links.

No wonder

[vadim_t]

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.

Re:No wonder

[Afty0r]

So where did I miss the free security consultations, for Linux, and the free phone support?

Re:No wonder

[vadim_t]

I said *often*. If you need to be able to get support *now* and get an immediate fix, then obviously you need a support contract. But contrary to how many people think, there's not so much stuff that has to be available 24/7. For example if you're a small company that does business only during the day you could take the database server down at night and nobody would notice.

There are tons of places with information about security, btw, like bugtraq, and general information about securing Linux is available on the net and you can always ask people on IRC.

What about phone support you might get it free too with some luck. If your requirements aren't big (you just need some help to set it up) you might get lucky and find some Linux evangelist that would do some work for free just for the sake of removing MS software from a few computers. I helped with the servers at my school and nobody paid me for it. The teacher just asked nicely.

Again, I didn't, and am not saying that this is an option for everybody.

Impoverished

[jolan]

Wow, another impoverished nation wants to use a free operating system rather than Microsoft Licensing fees. Who would have thunk it?

Don't read too much into this

[toolz]

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.

Re:Sweet!

[csmorris]

I'd imagine the actual number of people who have access to a PC, much less administration responsibilities for a Linux box (IIRC web surfing, email, etc. in KDE/GNOME is point-and-click), are quite a bit lower. There are quite a great many U.S. households which don't own (don't want or can't afford) a computer, and I don't think China or India would be doing any better in that regard. :-|

Re:A good thing.

[SuperSnooper]

Well, I'm glad someone's being honest about it. Unlike the GRE people - they've cancelled the Advanced GRE in Computer Science for India and China this year, supposedly because "the Indians were sharing GRE questions on the internet". Their spokesperson said there was no discrimination, since they were confident that "these sites could not be accessed by people anywhere else outside of Indian and China". Excuse me? I didn't know we had a special continent-wide network here that's inaccessible outside....

Ironic

[tcoady]

This article is ironic because

1. It renders as invisible on Mozilla
2. This has not been noticed after 93 comments

There is a bug report on this site already at http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=105292

Re:Ironic

[quinto2000]

What are you talking about? I'm using Mozilla 1.1 on Debian, and the linked article renders fine. Of course, the Times of India is one of the worst of the world's papers, so "fine" is a relative term...

Re:Ironic

[tcoady]

OK thanks for that information - I just assumed that as it was an unresolved bug it would affect other users the same way. My mistake.

Re:Ironic

[tcoady]

OK WFM on Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i586; en-US; rv:1.0.0) Gecko/20020606 as well. Sorry!

Re:Ironic

[Sam the Nemesis]

The site is that of a leading financial newspaper in India. It does not represent the government of India.

Check whether the DIT site renders in Mozilla.

~ Sam

P.S.: BTW, on my Netscape 7, the site renders correctly. And I thought, Netscape was based on Mozilla.

I find the current usage of that word disturbing.

[pommiekiwifruit]

Semitic - from the middle east. As in like the palestians and some Israelis are. Not from Russia or the USA as many other Israelis are.

When did the word change to mean "Jewish" and disenfranchise other semitic peoples? According to USians, palestinians are anti-semitic? What, they don't like themselves???

Re:please mod down racist humour

[will_die]

Is it not racist but is could border on religionphobic.
It is not all india that holds cows sacred, or don't believe in eating meat, just certain religion followers, and they don't care about the race of the belivers.

Re:please mod down racist humour

[Draoi]

I read this as a pretty crap piece of racist humour

That's sectarian humour, BTW.

If the World Wants to Free Itself ...

[FreeUser]

I have been following closely the adoptation of open source within European Union lately. It seems they are working, studying and experimenting this in many fronts.

This is indeed good news.

The fact of the matter is that if the world wants to free itself from the American hegemony and economic dominance in the 21st century, one of the critical things it must do is free itself from dependence on American Proprietary software, particularly operating systems, with all of their NSA backdoors, NSA-inspired weak cryptography, deliberate incompatabilities, moving development targets, subscription pricing, and so on. Probably the smartest and best approach is to leverage software freedom by using Free Software and developing home-grown talent and expertise in customizing it for local or regional use. Not only does that allow a solid audit of existing code (and help insure against malicious code a la Microsoft's NSA_KEY), but it creates a breeding ground for local expertise and a local software industry.

Of course, Europe is already on par with the United States in this area despite our home-grown software monopoly, but for the developing world this is a tremendous boon, and it is exciting to see countries like China and India embrace software freedom.

China: ~1 Billion
India: ~1 Billion

That is already about a third of humanity. Add to that Germany, Brazil, Colombia, etc. and you have a ground swell that must boggle Bill Gate's mind. Even if Palladium and DRM were to do their worst, effectively banning Free Software in the United States, it would only be the United States that suffers ... the bulk of the rest of the world seems to already have made their choice for freedom, and are poised to sprint right past us into the information age if we are foolish enough to cripple ourselves in the way Microsoft and Hollywood are lobbying Washington to do.

Next time we feel depressed, or run down, in hearing the latest bad news from Washington we can take heart that, at worst, it is only the United States emasculating its own information industry, not humanity as a whole. I, for one (despite being an American who will undoubtably suffer both economically and intellectually if the battles against Palladium and DRM are lost), take heart in that.

Re:If the World Wants to Free Itself ...

[omniprovident]

I don't have a problem with anyone/country making better products - but do you really need a directive, law, rule or policy change to get ya' there?

Whatever software development model you ascribe to, could you really want government telling you how to build your product, or say for instance, we will only take GPL products for our software purchases? I think that's preposterous...and dangerous.

The talent's already in India and China (and elsewhere) - they don't need GPL-centric regimes to foster their industry. They just need to make better products.

Re:If the World Wants to Free Itself ...

[BlackHawk-666]

The government already lays down laws that govern nearly every aspect of your life. Why should software development be any different? e.g. you can't just go throw some bricks together, call it a house, and live in it. There are basic safety standards that need to be adhered to. Also, the government are the elected officials of the people...and we pay for everything the government says and does. I personnally don't want them spending £600/annum (or whatever the current cost of a complete desktop suite is) for each person who has a PC when there are perfectably acceptable alternatives available.

Re:If the World Wants to Free Itself ...

[Malcontent]

The govt probably produces more code then any commercial company.
The govt can encourage any technology it wants if it's in the interest of national security or the general welfare of it's citizens.

The US govt is very busy standardising on MS products in order to help an American company and there is no reason why other countries can't do similar things to help out their own companies.

Re:If the World Wants to Free Itself ...

[WNight]

Actually, I think you do need those regulations.

You currently have large corporations bribing standards bodies and government agencies to make their proprietary products a standard. (Microsoft)

If all standards were required to be LGPLed you'd always be able to come along and work with a competitors product, regardless of their wishes.

I'd also say that operating systems and interconnection systems (file system drivers, etc) should all be required to be GPLed. (If you wish to sell to government or government funded industry.) OSes aren't a commodity in the same way as the software that runs on them. They exist just to enable software to work. Competition in this area always seems to involve sabotage of APIs and hiding functionality to allow some products to work better than others.

But, other than the OS and the protocols/file formats/etc, I don't think software needs to be GPLed. And before you ask, that leaves a lot.

English already the language of modern Indian lit

[tlotoxl]

That 2% figure does seem pretty suspicious -- are you sure that it doesn't represent the number of fluent English speakers?

Anyway, I'm sure local language support in India is a good idea, but since the literary community pretty much already uses English as the defacto national standard (or that's what I've read, anyway), what's the big deal with English being the standard for computing? While a majority of the population may not be fluent in English, Indian educators doesn't seem completely incapable of teaching English (unlike their Japanese counterparts) and Indians seem keen to learn it.

If Hindi actually is more practical, sure, why not use it?- but post-partition attempts to establish Hindi as the official national language failed and I don't see why it would suddenly be embraced now.

Re:English already the language of modern Indian l

[codekavi]

>That 2% figure does seem pretty suspicious -- are you sure that it doesn't represent the number of fluent English speakers?

Ok, guys! It's 4% and not 2%.
Does it make a difference?
They failed to replace English with a local language in the government, because the government was formed of the elite.

But don't forget:
1. The most popular TV news channel in India is not in English.
2. There are more Indian language movies watched and made in India than in English.
3. The newspapers with the highest circulations in India are not English newspapers.

So you can see what is popular with the _people_.

Re:please mod down racist humour

[The Original Yama]

I found it funny, and I'm Hindu. I don't think it was intended to offend (and if it was, I have more important things to worry about than this). I think it's just silly childish humour (kinda like my sig.).

Don't have a cow, man.

Re:I find the current usage of that word disturbin

[hey!]

Semitic == descended from Shem. By biblical reckoning, all humans are descended from Noah's three sons: Shem, Ham and Japtheth. Ham was counted as the ancestor of the Eyptians, Cushites, Ethiopians, Libyans, Canaanites, Assyrians and Babylonians; he was cursed and presumably his progeny inherited this curse. Everyone else by implication must have descended from Japtheth, of whom not much is said in Genesis.

Going by the root meaning of the word, "Semite" could potentially apply to anyone who claimed descent from Shem. Current place of residence wouldn't matter. Arabs are, by biblical and quranic recknoning, even more closely related to Jews -- they are reckoned as descending from Ishmael, Abraham's oldest son, whereas the Jews are reckoned to have been descended from Isaac, Abraham's second son. Ishmael's mother was Hagar, an Egyptian (thus descended from Ham), whereas Isaac's mother was Sarai (Sarah), a Semite. This is probably the reason that Jewishness is held to descent matrilineally: otherwise Ishmael would, in a sense, have a suprior claim to Abrahamic descent. By subtle implication, Arabs are not Semites by matrilineal descent, although clearly they are descended from Shem.

In any case "Semitic" has always more or less meant "Jewish", although others not so called are considered as Shem's descendents. The term was coined to describe Jews, not living in the Middle East, but Europe. Before the twentieth century, many other kinds of biblical words where used to describe Jews: "Hebrews", "Isrealite" etc.

The attempt to spread the meaning of "anti-semitism" to cover predjudice against Arabs is an attempt to give the term new meaning. It's an exercise in debating tactics, no matter how well motivated it may be.

Re:please mod down racist humour

[fault0]

> I read this as a pretty crap piece of racist humour.

It's not exactly racist humor. Not all Indians are hindu, and most hindus are vegetarians. Some hindus even eat beef (like myself).

Re: There is an Indian Linux distro in development

[The Cydonian]

Indian Linux is your answer. The website says it will be developed in all 18 official Indian languages.

Might be slightly misleading of course; I'm presuming they really meant all 10 ISCII ("Indian Standard Code for Information Interchange") alphabets in transmutation to give, I don't know, 12 or so languages. Will be interesting to see if they later provide for transcribing the Arabic script as well; the website at present seems to be suggesting only native Indian scripts. Not to accuse them of ethnic bias; I'm pretty sure it's plain intellectual laziness.

A More Detailed Explanation:- Hindi, Sanskrit, Marathi and Nepali use the Devnagri script; a few languages such as Konkani, Manipuri use the Roman script and scripts of other languages. Sindhi, Kashmiri and Urdu use the Arabic script (or modifications of it thereof). Unicode doesn't recognise the Assamese script to be different from the Bengali one, but provides for two additional Assamese-only characters; not sure if ISCII does that as well. (IndLinux's page gives seperate keymaps for Assamese and Bengali; I neither speak nor read these languages, so I don't know if they are significantly distinct.) All other languages, namely, Gujarati, Oriya, Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam and Kannada have their own unique scripts.

Tamil is way ahead in implementation though; the Tamil Linux group is very active; the website says you can use Tamil in Mandrake 9.0. Can't read Tamil myself, but the KDE snapshots provided look extremely cool to me.

Re:Keep the politics out of this

[fault0]

> free democratic Taiwan against totalitarian China is important?

Taiwan wasn't exactly democratic until the mid 90's. Of course, granted, the government in the mainland did a lot more human rights abuses than the Taiwan government, but the role was reveresed before 1949.

Anyways, the mainland will probably eventually have a freely elected governemnt, and Taiwan will probably be a part of it. I support the idea of Taiwan being a independent region until then, however.

Re:Answer

[fault0]

> Keep your anti-semitic propaganda out of here!

LOL, it seems that anything ever said against Israel is anti-semitic. Will you call them Nazis now? Well, it _is_ anti-semitic, but it's not the right word to use in this cases because it has a bad stigma to it.

Re:Wrong Circles

[The Cydonian]

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.

Dude, you've been moving around the wrong circles. You'll find the good guys here. Yeah, the chapters listed are geographically weird. Really don't think the "Vizag" chapter is different from the "Visakhapatnam" one; you see, Vizag:Visakhapatnam::LA:Los Angeles.

A better reference is probably the Linux Counter. For instance, there are more registered Linux users in India than in a country that most Indians love to hate, but is still smaller than a country they should really hate, fear and compete. :-D

(The comparison is really a joke to tease patriotic Indians. No offense intended to Pakistanis or Chinese)

I dont think your numbers are quite right

[Kenneth Stephen]

I'm not arguing with the 2% number you mention for English-speaking folks - that seems about right. I think your numbers about Hindi speaking is way overinflated. The three South Indian states of Karnataka, Kerala, and Tamil Nadu speak little or no Hindi at all. Lets factor in the fact that the literacy rate stands at around 55% and therefore it can be reasonably assumed that 45% of the population know only one language. Now add in the fact that there are 21 major languages in India, and you'll see why I say that 90% of the population speaking Hindi is too high a figure. I would place it down to around 65%. Still a rather large number though.

On an interesting side note - the IBM announcement for AIXv5.2 states that the locale for Hindi will now be supported.

Re:I dont think your numbers are quite right

[codekavi]

>I think your numbers about Hindi speaking is way overinflated.

The 900m number for Hindi speakers was the worldwide figure, not just in India. Within India, yes, the number would be lesser.

Sorry for the misunderstanding, but I did mention 900 speakers worldwide in my post, not just in India.

Re:Keep the politics out of this

[FooBarWidget]

You think having a democratic government is more important than making sure that every citizen in China has enough food?
China has lots of people but is relatively poor. Democracy only works if the country has a strong middle class. Making poor countries democratic can only be counterproductive.

Re:English already the language of modern Indian l

[fault0]

> 1. The most popular TV news channel in India is not in English.
> 2. There are more Indian language movies watched and made in India than in English.

Except that now days, English words are intersperced in the shows and movies.

> So you can see what is popular with the _people_.

Their own native tongue, not English, not Hindi. I'd love to see figures showing what percentage of non-literate Indians speak Hindi when it's not their mother tongue.

Re:A good thing.

[fault0]

> That means our economy suffers as a result, since money is hemmoraghing out of the country in buckets.

I agree with you in most parts of your post, but not in this part.

First of all, it's saving American companies cash. This is really quite important in the state of the economy right now.

Second, programmers who come from India to the US often don't return. Where does the money go? Yup, back into the *US* Economy.

Anyways, the trend has always been like this. I'm sure in the distant future, when China and India are the world's largest economies, Chinese and Indian companies will ship jobs to the US. I know this sounds horribly politically incorrect, but it's bound to happen :-)

So....

[theLOUDroom]

Who wants to bet Bill Gates is on a plane right now to go give them some "free" software?

Re:I find the current usage of that word disturbin

[fault0]

Anyways, there is probably the same amount of Shem's decendants in the Israeli's, Palistinians, Syrians, Jordanians, and Lebanese.

Re:Wrong Circles

[orcaaa]

Dude, you've been moving around the wrong circles. You'll find the good guys here [linux-india.org].

Dude, i am member of quite a few of those chapters. My point is that compared to the vastness of India and the number of engineering grads we produce, that number is paltry. Infact, my lug have been trying to arrange a seminar in diff colleges in a certain city. But these are few and far between and we have the same speakers to speak everytime....irrespective of the type of college. Infact, lets analyze the counter stats. Maharashtra has roughly 100 M people. It has at least 100 engineering colleges, due to the presence of Mumbai and Pune. Maharashtra also has about 500 people who *know* linux. Even if we assume that all 500 are gurus, we still have only 5 linux gurus per engg college which has like 500 students, or only 1 person per 100 engg students.Bear in mind that these stats are scewed by the presence of IIT Mumbai which extensively uses linux.Add to that, the number of commercial offices in Mumbai that use linux and employ linux known sys admins, and you will be left with very embarrasing ratio.

Big surprise!

[Kaz Kylheku]

A *government* wants to help itself to the fruits of the people's labor without compensating them? Wow, say it isn't so!

Download a new build

[ajaygautam]

Apparantly, you need to download a newer build. I have 2002100409. Works fine in it...

Re:Download a new build

[tcoady]

OK thanks. I did try that but I seem to have grabbed an identical build since I took Mozilla 1.2 Alpha and I am not sure if this is updated in the nightly builds.

It was amazing

[too_bad]

This time when I visited India I was amazed to see that
not only was Linux very much a part of their engineering curriculum
but the students were encouraged to do most of their projects on
Linux. It fetches them extra marks, and students try to learn Linux
on their own just so they can get an edge!

It was also amazing to see that local Linux-gurus are charging anywhere
between 1000 Rs to 5000Rs ($20 - $100) for installing and trouble-shooting
Linux.

Do I smell a business oppurtunity here ?

Re:It was amazing

[too_bad]

Reminds me the good old days back in 93-94 when tried
to explain what this Linux-thingy is to our profs and
struggled with the Slackware and installed successfully
after smoking half a dozen lab machines :)

Only on slashdot!

[Zamfir]

imagine another industry where the craftsmen would celebrate their colleagues giving away they work instead of having it paid for!

imagine mechanics getting together to celebrate that more and more people are fixing their cars themselves. sure, we're obsolete, but the world is better place without people being dependent on us, the evil mechanics! thank GOODNESS i am not able to work for nothing instead of getting paid!

why would anyone encourage the demise of their industry?

open source may be good for business but it is NOT good for developers. just think, if open source really takes off, that'll mean more talented developers can lose their job, making them available to work on new open source projects, which will cause more developers to lose their jobs, making them available to work on new open source projects.....

Re:Only on slashdot!

[kbielefe]

I don't consider contributing to an open source project as 'giving away' my work. 'Giving away' would be what Microsoft would do if they suddenly GPLed all their existing products. What do they get in return?

When a Linux kernel hacker, for instance, contributes his work to the kernel, he gets in exchange the fruits of the labor of other kernel hackers, the developers for GNU, the developers for XFree86, the developers for Gnome, the developers for Mozilla, etc. The sum total of what he gets back is worth well more than what he put in.

Even people who don't contribute code usually add value to the overall product. Some people pay cash for tech support. Personally, I 'paid' for my Mandrake 9.0 cds by contributing about $700 worth of free labor in answering those questions. Other people may work as a 'marketing department', advocating Linux to their family, friends, and colleagues.

Mechanics may not work for free, but I have heard of many mechanics who will fix a Doctor's car in exchange for a free checkup, etc. Developers get 'paid' in one way or another for their contributions to open source, otherwise it wouldn't have lasted this long.

As far as putting ourselves out of business, probably a great majority of developers work on internal company software rather than software that gets sold. Or software that is sold but as part of another product. I may be biased because I never wanted to work developing commercial software. Although, I read once that there are 10 embedded processors for every 1 processor in a desktop computer. Also, some projects just plain don't fit with open source. I am fairly confident that the software I help develop for the AH-64D Apache Attack Helicopter will not be open sourced anytime soon!

Microsoft's ad?

[endemic]

Anyone else think its odd that Microsoft's ad was on this page with this particular article?

Re:Microsoft's ad?

[Geekonomical]

Well, its not really odd considering we see multi-color MS Visual Studio ads on slashdot (sometimes on posts that talk about ideologists like RMS :-))

Language barriers

[pjt48108]

There is a lot of talk about the lack of local language support in Linux. To make a long diatribe short, I think if the gov't of India is making an effort to move towards OSS, then I wouldn't be at all surprised to find Indian gov't support for a publicly-financed initiative to do a complete localization project. Once that is done, the floodwaters will surge and all will be raised in the same boat. Huzzah!

Maybe then we will see Americans going to India to be cab drivers for the new elite. ;-)

Plain wrong, it seems

[Jeppe Salvesen]

I spent a bit of time looking for quotes on Microsoft Software in India. I finally found something. Let's say you want to buy Microsoft Office XP Professional. That's 21000 rupies. Convert, and you've got 435 USD - while Microsoft USA think 580 USD is what US customers should pay. If we use the McDonalds scale, we can compare US to Mumbai, India. Mumbai is a large city, so we'll assume it's relatively expensive. In McDonalds in Mumbai - 49 Rupies for a Chicken McGrill value meal. That's about a buck, give or take. You'll need to check your local McDonald's to compare. I bet the India one is about the third the price. So - with all due respect, you appear to be wrong. We could of course cooperate on a more thorough comparative study if you wish.

Re:Plain wrong, it seems

[sql*kitten]

You'll need to check your local McDonald's to compare. I bet the India one is about the third the price. So - with all due respect, you appear to be wrong. We could of course cooperate on a more thorough comparative study if you wish.

I don't know if we have the Chicken McGrill here (I am in England), I can't find it on their website (only looked briefly, couldn't see prices) but my rationale for McDonalds as a comparator was based on an article in The Economist. They seem to have thought about this quite carefully.

Re:Plain wrong, it seems

[Jeppe Salvesen]

For your position to hold, the Chicken McGrill value meal would have to cost about 1.3 USD. So - my burgeronomics, the Indian Office XP is overpriced, probably by a factor of close to 2. It does not appear to be localized, either.

Btw - the reason why the Indians don't eat Big Mac is probably Hinduism - eating cattle is really, really karma. So - I had to settle for the Chicken McGrill, the only item I recognized. I guess globalization isn't quite as rampant as I thought ;)

Hey, my government also switched to Linux!

[ites]

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.

Changing the Hiring Pool

[serutan]

This could have other long-term implications for Microsoft, quite apart from sales. Microsoft employs a lot of programmers from India, and I have found them to be among the brightest people I've ever met. If Indian schools move away from turning out expert Microsoft developers, it could dry up this important pool.

I work for some consulting engineers

[Hektor_Troy]

Being engineers, they understand the need for ACCURATE and COMPLETE blueprints, before you as much as lay the first brick. Which is more or less what they told me quite early on in the process.

I think working in a company where they are from a culture that are proponents of blueprints is a VERY BIG advantage compared to the regular IT industry.

And yes - it is apparantly as common as you feel; at least that's the concensus from the people I graduated with - and that TRUELY sucks.

I'm considdering starting an OSS group called "The Lazy Procrastinators - too lazy not to design!"

Unfortunatly I'm too lazy and unmotivated to actually get it up and running. But hey ... I'll do it tomorrow.

Re:I work for some consulting engineers

[Hektor_Troy]

Alright - send me an email (hektor clanekg dk). I'll add you to the list of willing subj^hsla^hvic^hvolounteers.

Re:I find the current usage of that word disturbin

[pommiekiwifruit]

In any case "Semitic" has always more or less meant "Jewish"

I am sure I have seen Arabic (and less usefully Aramaic) referred to as being a semitic language, in the context of it being written right-to-left like Hebrew (and thus making i18n of operating systems slightly harder).

If anti-semitism has always been used the current way, it's just confusing. But then many Germans/Scandinavians who speak great English think that "funny" has the meaning "to be enjoyable" (that rollercoaster was very funny) so English is hardly a language free of such complications. Perhaps it means different things in different fields. Pah! If the word wasn't used to justify human rights abuses I would probably be less peeved.

But thanks for the explanations. BTW I read that some people used the curse of Ham's descendants (Noah didn't curse Ham himself bizarrely) to justify slavery etc. so it all seems complicated to me :-(

Re:English already the language of modern Indian l

[codekavi]

>I'd love to see figures showing what percentage of non-literate Indians speak Hindi when it's not their mother tongue.

All I'm saying is that each one of the Indian languages has more literates than so many other languages that have so much computing work done in them. Not advocating _a_particular_ Indian language, as your post implies.

Comments editorial ...

[Ninja Programmer]

(eventhough it has a misleading title!)

Pot. Kettle. Black.

Since almost everything has been said already...

[The_Guv'na]

I can't wait til MS send the rep out there to put India back on track to freedom and democracy The American Way (TM & Copyright), as opposed to suffering under the evil leftie Open Source Software regime.

Considering that, in my experience, few Americans know what a curry is, this could be highly amusing if the rep were to be treated to one of the more "warming" dishes such as a tasty Madras or Vindaloo ;-)

Oh the look on his face while eating the gut-meltingly spicey dish, and having to finish it for the sake of politeness, with a smile, and converse at the same time.

Oh, and it usually burns just the same on the way out! The intestinal irritation caused in unaccustomed/non native diners can also hinder the absorbtion of adequate moisture from the meal, leading to... Ahh, you get the idea. :) You can see why Curry is the most popular dish in Britain!

Ali

P.S. I make no guarantees as to the accuracy of any of the biological info in this post, so it may be bollocks.

Forget the *government* being smart...

[0x0d0a]

...I'd like to see US *students* being as smart as Indian students. At one US university I attended, the overwhelming majority of the computer science faculty were Indian. At my current one, about a third of the students are Indian, and many of the most impressive students are Indian.

India is beating the living crap out of the US in CS. Some damn fine intellectuals, and lots of software shops.

They're going to drive down our luxurious US salaries...:-(

Re:Forget the *government* being smart...

[Gaurang]

At one US university I attended, the overwhelming majority of the computer science faculty were Indian. At my current one, about a third of the students are Indian, and many of the most impressive students are Indian. India is beating the living crap out of the US in CS. Some damn fine intellectuals, and lots of software shops.

I am an Indian studying in a US CS Graduate course. You may be right in saying that there are more fine Indians in the US Computer Science departments today than from other countries including the US.

I have tried to analyse this and the reasons I have come up with are as follows -

1. In India, there are only two ways to a career - either Engineer or Doctor. Almost everyone of the 1 billion people in India who goes for a undergrad degree wants to get into either of these two fields, since other fields generally dont have better job prospects. So the BEST and SMARTEST Indian students are to be found in these two fields. Whereas in the US, you have too many options for a career, so the smart people in the US are distributed in hundreds of majors.

2. India has just TOO MANY people and LESS Resources. So students have to really compete very hard to get into colleges, to get decent grades, to get jobs. Indian students, all their lives, have to really EXCEL to get anywhere in life. So they end up studying more and learning more than Americans. Americans have a cool life - plenty of resources and less people. So they dont have a compulsion to excel, they study as much as their interest dictates, and they learn as must they want to. They dont have a burden to really excel. Still, actually, all of technology has been invented by mostly Americans, and there are still many fine Americans in the CS dept.

3. The brightest of the Indian students in India come to the US. Almost all of the top 5% students of a class in India, come to the US for higher studies because of very superior education standards of the US.

(Please mod me up - I want to convey this to everyone. :-) )

IIT

[Squalish]

Sadly, the fact that most of a billion people have linux in colleges and government jobs is probably going to make less difference to the US than the fact that the several hundred CEOs that are pumped out by the most prestigious university in the world annually, the Indian Institute of Technology, will have grown up on linux.

Dont worry!

[Gaurang]

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.

nuclear-powered desktop flame wars

[bobKali]

From a related article :

Two predictions: (1) Pakistan will soon adopt Linux too (and if India chooses KDE, Pakistan will choose Gnome, and vice versa)

Great, so now they'll have something else to fight over besides religion.

Last Post!

[alpg]

Well, he thought, since neither Aristotelian Logic nor the disciplines
of Science seemed to offer much hope, it's time to go beyond them...
Drawing a few deep even breaths, he entered a mental state practiced
only by Masters of the Universal Way of Zen. In it his mind floated freely,
able to rummage at will among the bits and pieces of data he had absorbed,
undistracted by any outside disturbances. Logical structures no longer
inhibited him. Pre-conceptions, prejudices, ordinary human standards vanished.
All things, those previously trivial as well as those once thought important,
became absolutely equal by acquiring an absolute value, revealing relationships
not evident to ordinary vision. Like beads strung on a string of their own
meaning, each thing pointed to its own common ground of existence, shared by
all. Finally, each began to melt into each, staying itself while becoming
all others. And Mind no longer contemplated Problem, but became Problem,
destroying Subject-Object by becoming them.
Time passed, unheeded.
Eventually, there was a tentative stirring, then a decisive one, and
Nakamura arose, a smile on his face and the light of laughter in his eyes.
-- Wayfarer

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