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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."
My assumption would be that this would make a great CS graduation project - and I'm being serious here. "Class, we're going to put dialect XYZ into the Linux code base. Now, how do we do this?"
Practical, teaches a good lesson, and helps make the system better.
52 Weeks, 52 Religions with John Hummel
I think this could be the beginning of something great. India already has thousands of talented coders, and once they get used to hacking Linux, some awesome things will start happening. After all, people who do good work in adding to Linux really get noticed, and their code winds up in millions of machines all over the world. It seems like a perfect opportunity for an Indian programmer to "lift herself up by the bootstraps." (North American and European coders of similar talent tend to get snatched up by companies faster, so there is less need to prove oneself.) Actually, there is nothing special India except maybe that the population really is so well educated in computer science. Brazil and China are in a similar position--and we are already seeing some awesome Linux hacking coming out of Brazil. I can only imagine how much cool code will come from India and (eventually) China. This sort of news really makes you think that Linux might be unstoppable after all.
Outsourcing is precisely what India wishes to avoid in the future. An entire generation of Indian programmers have been taught only the skills needed to work on other people's software. As a result, when the dotcom bubble broke it was Indians who felt it worst of any.
In Indian computer science circles they speak of this as having lost an entire generation, and wish never to repeat this again. By developing and learning with freely licensed software they expect to be a producer of software in the future, and not just a IT sweetshop labor pool for supporting the products of others.
Since India has 42 official national languages, they already decided many many years ago to adopt English as the language of the state as a kind of lingua franca. If someone is at the university level in India, it is all but guaranteed that they speak, read, and write English.
A common language, an irrigation system, and a railroad system are the biggest legacies that India got from the British Empire.
I'm out of my mind right now, but feel free to leave a message.....
Correction: India only has 18 official languages.
Mmmm.. Donuts
I always love hearing the "less restrictive licence [sic]" comment. You realize that you're complaining that you can't take something from Linux's free software community without giving it back if you improve upon it. Do you know precisely who you sound like? Do you *want* to sound like them? And to apply that to academia, too. Just the place that's fighting tooth and nail for exclusive ownership of the next big thing. How do you want all those students to act after they graduate?
That's what I thought. Just making sure.
Intelligent Life on Earth
Perhaps it's because all the technical people from the East end up in the West?
...and the list goes on.
Look at the listing of graduate students in the CS department of any US university, and you notice a high percentage of them do not appear to be native-born.
examples:
The University of Washington
MIT
Stanford
So, it's not that the East doesn't contribute, it's that Easterners come to the West before they contribute; and who can blame them? Wouldn't you rather be at a well-funded school in an industrialized nation that has the latest equipment than fighting off the roaches while hoping the power doesn't go out to the old VAX in some third-world university?
my sig's at the bottom of the page.
If you are a true believer in OS diversity, you won't want Microsoft OSs to go away either... Choice is a good thing. Lack of choice is just as bad whether your only choice is Windows or Linux.
So you're saying: The educated population of country A speaks better english than the general population of country B.
Hmmm.
BTW IANAAmerican
You make the mistake of thinking you can educate the fundamental stupidity out of people. You can't.
Really? I thought India had been known for its rich spiritual heritage that had lasted for thousands of years before any contributions to the software world were made.
It was. And it was also known for its contributions to mathematics. India is known for more than one thing, because India is bigger than an apartment and has more than one person living there...
Igor Presnyakov stole my hat