Slashdot Mirror
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."
English is an official language of India. If some user wants his own little dialect to be supported, the code is open for him or her to modify.
Slashdot already covered this story last week here.
Not only that, the original story was also posted by timothy. Is his memory so poor that he's incapable of remembering what he posted less than a week ago?
If you say "I'll probably get modded down for this..." then I will mod you down.
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.
Having spent a great deal of time there (while not actually being from there) I find that the majority of the educated population has a better command of English than most Americans. Furthermore, many of the schools are English medium, not Hindi, which may come as a surprise. While the accent may at times be difficult it is in no way a barrier when you are dealing with a CLI.
Here are some screenshot of GNOME in hindi:
http://rohini.ncst.ernet.in/indix/
XTerm in hindi:
http://rohini.ncst.ernet.in/indix/
Mozilla in Hindi:
http://rohini.ncst.ernet.in/indix/
Project for Linux in Hindi:
http://rohini.ncst.ernet.in/indix/
Emacs has been supporting hindi even before Linux came out.
Another Indian project translating GNOME to hindi:
http://indlinux.org/hindi/gnome/index.php
Another project for translating Linux documentation to hindi:
http://lli.linux-bangalore.org/
I could go on and on...
Also English is one of the official Indian languages, spoken and written by any educated Indian. Still support for Hindi on Linux is not something that is non-existant.
I think it is a very good decision. It will help the whole world to embrace Linux. The only problem is the standardization. I hope that will not hurt Linux. I hope this news is really true, because most of the other SlashDot posts are very biased and doesn't reflect the whole truth.
"player 4 hit player 1 with 0 stroms"
Easy. Just run the code through this.
Slashdot: Failed Car Analogies. Amateur Lawyering. Anecdote Battles.
Read the content on the screen and you will realize that most words are in English written in Hindi script. Almost every educated people (even in non-english medium) knows english script. So the only benefit of Hindi-Linux is that you don't need to learn English grammar. Hindi Linux doesn't provide much benefits and not many people will use it.
Tamil Linux shows the effort to provide a Thamizh version of Linux.
x _scrsho t.gif
i sc /screenshots/
Mandrake supports Thamizh out of the box. Dunno about other local languages
Screen shots
http://illusion.ece.vt.edu/anbu/tamil_linu
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/tamilinix/files/m
There is a lot of effort going on in localising Linux to various languages.
Um, what exactly would be the point of this exercise? Internationalization is a very well understood process. There's essentially two steps:
Replace hard coded literals with lookups into a resource bundle. So strings like "Error on line x" become "%ERROR_ON_LINE {$1}" where %ERROR_ON_LINE gets looked up for whatever language is being displayed and {$1} gets filled in with the numeric x.
Translate all the bits like %ERROR_ON_LINE.
The first part is heavy monkey work. And it only has to be done once. If the application supports even two languages, it's probably been done already. The second part doesn't even involve programming. It requires someone fairly fluent in the language.
This is a less useful proposition than having everyone pick up litter in the park (which would at least go to some benefit) and teaches about as much about programming.
I come from India. All, yes all, the computers that i have come across in India are running pirated copies of Windows. Not a single license, even at one of our biggest IT companies :( . India also churns out tons of talented engineers every year, which include the likes of Sabeer Bhatia (the creator of Hotmail), Azim Premji(2nd richest man in the world, at some point last year) etc etc etc. The IITs from India, IMHO, are the *best* set of engineering colleges in the world. I am not taking anything away from MIT and company, but i firmly beleive that given MITesque resources, IITs will probably produce better graduates. Infact, just have a look at the number of people at MIT from the IITs. The main reason for this post graduate US migration, was the lack of money in India. The avg IIT grad got a starting pay Rs 4000 /- a month($80). This is certainly nowhere near what they would get abroad. Hence, there was significant brain drain. Getting back to the point, India has all the capacities of becoming a software superpower but there are a few stumbling blocks.
The first and obvious one, is the sagging economy. If the Indian economy does not improve, the brain drain will continue and India(not Indians) will get nowhere.
The second problem is the lack of people capable of teaching Linux. If one has bandwidth, one is capable of learning Linux by ones'self. But given the bandwidth in India, learning Linux online is not an option. The only solution is that people who know it already be willing to teach it to others. But even there, there is a huge ratio problem. The number of people who know linux is far too little comapred to the number of engg grads we produce. For instance, Maharashtra, the state whose capital is Mumbai(Bombay), has, according to counter.li, 521 people who know Linux.Maharashtra has roughly 100 M people. It has at least 100 engineering colleges, due to the presence of Mumbai and Pune. Even if we assume that all 500 are gurus, we still have only 5 linux gurus per engg college which has atleast 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 sys admins who know linux, and you will be left with very embarrasing ratio. I know this is a typical chicken and egg problem, in that the number of people who know linux wont increase if no one is ready to teach, but there are very few people capable of teaching. But something has to be done to address the issue. Without adressing such issues, the govt's decsion to move to Open Source, will sit like a white elephant in its own backyard.
I am not providing any solutions here, cause frankly, i have none.
-- Reality is just an extended dream.
There is all kinds of slang and of course, as I indicated the accent can be tough for outsiders. It took me forever to get used to the fact that my coworkers in India continually use the phrase "revert back".
Afterall it, it is not American English it is King's English. They were colony remember?
English is the link language. Indian states were formed mostly based on language. The states have their own cultural/language identity. Hindi and it's various dialects are spoken mostly in northern parts of India. There are hundreds of other languages which don't have the status of official language. As of now it will be very difficult/impossible for India to function in a federal level without English. Language is a big cultural/political issue there.