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

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.