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

[Trusty Penfold]

What are they going to do about languages? Linux doesn't support any of the Indian dialects; only European languages.

Lots of people in India speak English; but it seems kind of unfair to lock them out of using their native language.

Re:Language

[u19925]

majority of educated people in india has better command of english only because, the majority of education offered in india is in english. govt subsidizes education in india to the extent that private education is a niche market and govt offers mostly english only education. i studied in one of the IITs (india's premier technology undergrad colleges), and there wasn't a single course (not even a language course) in non-english.

most schools not english medium, but since the higher education is in english, elite class people send their children to english, thus in cities, english schools are comparatively more. no more than 10% childrens today recv education in english, and one generation ago, the figure was 2-5%.

in addition to govt subsidizing education, various laws make private education very un-profitable and hence it is nearly impossible to get higher education in non-english. besides, in india, most stuff is govt controlled where english is the official language (in india, govt controls everything from temples, slaughterhouses, hotels, electronics companies, electricy, transport, textile mills, ...). since most money is concentrated in india in english speaking society, lack of non-english support in linux is not going to be an issue there.

Re:Language

[fault0]

I have to agree with the grandparent poster's comments. I'm of Indian origin, but was born and brought up here in the United States. I went to good schools, took good classes, and always got good grades, but my education was no where as rigorous as my parents' was in India. This was especially true in the math and sciences. I think my English education was probably better than that of my parents, but if I had never taken accelerated/honors/AP courses in K-12 education, I doubt this would have been so.

Re:Language

[The Cydonian]

I speak five languages, three of them Indian (see my siggie for more information). I understand that people like me are quite common in India; "someone very low on India's social/ literary echelon" speaks more languages than I do.

Point #2: There was a story sometime back on /. on how illiterate slum kids figured computers for themselves. One interesting result in that exercise was that the slum kids created metaphors for themselves that didn't quite correspond to Microsoft-suggested ones. ("Arrow Pointer" versus "trishul" for instance). And here's something more damning:- after the experimenter changed the English interface to a Hindi one, they didn't know how to operate the computer! All their traditional metaphors were gone; indeed, any native Hindi speaker would laugh if you say "karyakram ko bhaago" instead of "run the program". It's just too silly, a bit like Coca Cola's alleged mishaps in translating its company name into Chinese.

Bottomline: The process of internationalization as you describe it is definitely not going to work in India. People there are waaay more multi-lingual than your traditional West European or East Asian.

Open Source Contributions.

[jericho4.0]

This isn't meant to be a troll, but has anyone ever noticed the lack of GPL projects/work coming out of the 'east'. (this was a /. topic some mos ago), or the lack of commercial projects?

I know there are some exeptions (red flag linux comes to mind), and that there are economic barriers in place that preclude growing up with the 'hacker ethic'. But still, it's a shame that all those skilled programers are doing boring projects for multi-nationals for crap $$.

My bet is that this desicion will wind up having a huge impact on linux and related projects.

Re:Am I the only one...

[Quixote]

This could be a coincidence, but Bill Gates just announced that he will be going to India early next month. In fact, GoI's Linux announcement seems to have come out the day after Bill announced his trip. Ouch!

Heh! :) Way to go India!

[carlmenezes]

I just got back from India a month ago and had advised a guy over there who was going to start his BE to start learning Linux as by the time he graduated, it'd be pretty big. Who knew something like this was over the horizon? :)

Anyway, on a more serious note, it's a really good thing. Previously software piracy was rampant basically because of the reason that buying software legally was just working out TOO expensive to the home user. Shifting to open source and Linux will kill two birds with one stone :

1) It will drastically reduce piracy since students will now want Linux on their home machines and the majority of the home computer purchases in India are done "so my kids can use it".

2) It will produce a HUGE amount of software solutions for Linux in the long run (when these kids graduate) that will go a long way to helping the idea of open source.

India has always been known for their contributions to the software world and I have a feeling that this is finally a chance for something realy good to come out of it - why there's even talk of developing an Indian version of Linux!