Indian Government Chooses Linux for Academia

Nilesh Chaudhari writes "Following the footsteps of various governments around the world, the Indian Government has decided to standardize on Linux and open source software for academic purposes. The Department of Information Technology says, '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).' Going by the high targets they have set for mass adoption of IT, this is a step in the absolute right direction."

Comments

This is really a great thing

[danny256]

I was worried about countries like India and China bringing strong competition to US software development, but if they are all going to be learning Linux programming, I guess they really won't be competing for american contracts afterall.

Re:This is really a great thing

[UnidentifiedCoward]

Actually that assumption is incorrect primarily because it will provide them with simple, powerful tools for writing code/application projects. That, in my opinion is a good thing. I think competition is good for the market place and thiink that this is just a step in the right direction. You do realize that you can do win32 development on a Linux box, do you not?

The reality of the situation is that dollar for dollar, man power, the most expensive resource can be had for approximately 200$ USD a month whereas the same resource here in the States would easily cost you 5000$ USD.

Without drifting too far off topic, Americans are complacent and fat and refuse to remain competitive. Consider for a moment the idea of forming a technical union. Do you think that would increase or decrease overall productivity and creativity? Think carefully.

Language is probably part of the reason.

[RealAlaskan]

Language is probably part of the reason that Linux is catching on there. Look here and here, for a start. They've been working on the problem for a while, and are as likely to make progress as is MS. Maybe more likely; I doubt that MS is very interested in localizing their products, even in Hindi. I suspect that Tamil is a complete non-starter, as far as MS is concerned.

The fact that this decision will help to produce a homegrown hightech industry is a great bonus that reliance on MS would have precluded, but it certainly isn't the only reason for going this route. It's certainly going to be good for us

Re:Language

[cide1]

How is this insightful? Linux is mearly a kernel, which has no interaction with the user. Linux userland apps are made by hundreds of developers, using many differant toolkits. I would say that you might put a dialect into KDE, or gnome, but not into the kernel code.