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Indian State Switches to Linux
pamri writes "In a pleasant and surprising move, the Indian state of Madhya Pradesh, has opted to switch to Linux from Microsoft for its Gyandooth (intranet in Dhar district connecting rural cybercafes catering to the everyday needs of the masses) programme. What is more surprising is that the state's Chief Minister Digvijay Singh personally conveyed this to Bill Gates. A choice quote: 'For us it is not a question of Microsoft versus Linux. It is just a matter of choosing between a free software and a monopoly. We feel that when we are putting public information out in the open, then it should not be through a proprietary software.'"
MP opens windows to Linux
ANIL SHARMA
TIMES NEWS NETWORK [ TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 19, 2002 01:42:20 AM ]
BHOPAL: Madhya Pradesh has shut the door on Bill Gates. The state government schemes will use Linux software. Chief minister Digvijay Singh personally conveyed this to Microsoft boss Bill Gates during an interaction last week in New Delhi.
"For us it is not a question of Microsoft versus Linux. It is just a matter of choosing between a free software and a monopoly. We feel that when we are putting public information out in the open, then it should not be through a proprietary software," Mr Singh told ET.
Nor is it merely a public vs private ideological battle. Germany and Latin American countries, particularly Peru and Brazil, have opted for Linux rather than proprietary software to bring down costs, which keep mounting with successive upgrades in the case of proprietary software.
Madhya Pradesh has two significant programmes that reach out to people in a big way: Gyandoot e-governance, which covers 26 out of 45 districts and won the Stockholm Challenge Award for 2000, and the Headstart programme for computer-enabled school education. For the Headstart programme, the state government is now committed to use Linux.
Microsoft chairman Bill Gates has shown an interest in Gyandoot.
According R Gopalakrishnan, state coordinator for the Rajiv Gandhi missions, the first phase of the Headstart did use Microsoft software, but the next will use Linux.
"This should set at rest any fears that we are anti-Microsoft as such. But we have opted for Linux in this phase, because of the cost factor, and the fact that it avoids costly upgrades and improved versions that are an inseparable element of Microsoft packages," he said.
"It is a considered decision taken by us. We have noted that several governments in the west and other countries too have opted for the Linux software instead of Microsoft because of a host of considerations," Mr Singh said.
Most of the cybercafes in India are used primarily to send email (hotmail, yahoo, rediffmail, etc.) Some are used for chatting (simple messenger programs). For lots of online games, or "fancy pr0n", the cafes simply don't have enough bandwidth.
For simple things like getting info on web, web based email, and simple chatting, no difference between linux and windows.
S
First paragraph. Third sentence.
Chief minister Digvijay Singh personally conveyed this to Microsoft boss Bill Gates during an interaction last week in New Delhi.
That after yesterday's article, Microsoft freebies turn India gov. against open-source. Oh, the sweet, sweet irony!
Bush Lies Watch
Ah...have you seen any Indian cybercafe...I am yet to see one in India running any of the games you mentioned.
Microsoft doesnt raid Indian software blackmarket as they do in Taiwan and Malaysia because they need the next generation of Indian techies to practice and understand its products. And this means a wide availability of all the Windows flavors in most of the towns.
Plus a computer you can get for Rs.30000 and upwards and if you are asking for Rs.10000 (around US$200) for an OS no one is going to buy that.
This is the reason cybercafes are running XP/2000, not because of games.
Tat Tvam Asi
> WINE doesn't run CS, Starcraft, UT, and all the other online games that make third-world cyber cafes profitable.
Wine in fact does run Starcraft. UT (and UT2003) are released natively for Linux. CS I don't know about.
New games (which aren't likely to run on Wine) require the frequently upgraded hardware, which is too expensive for India anyway.
Not that any of this matters; caffes will stop piracy when they get closed down because of it and no sooner. They also won't change the OS because it's simply a hassle.
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I refuse to use
However this really is a moot point. The goal of the rural cyberecafes is to provide access to email and web browsing, not to train a generation of "uber1337" kiddies that can't do anything but cheat in CS.
And eveidently you don't understand what capitalist system is. If it was a socailist system there would be no choice, its one-service-for-all, kind of like how Microsoft wants it, that for every PC you have you have to pay the "Microsoft Tax". Linux is the one trying to break this up so there actually is competition in the x86 PC market.
~noodle
Even if Office is the best productivity suite available, is it so much better that it is worth the extra cost of the software and the O/S needed to run it?
Damn skippy it would be. Remember, companies don't use OS's, they use applications. This is why SGI used to be so successful even though their stuff was ungodly expensive compared to other solutions, they provided tools to let people get done what they needed to get done in the best way possible. Hell, if you could get your hands on a piece of software that made you 25% more efficient at doing your job (of course this is in absolutely no way implying that office does this, this is just a generalzation), wouldn't you sink an extra $500 to acquire it? In a heartbeat you would.
The main point being that in the end, the OS don't mean squat, its the apps that run on it. "Minor" cost variances in the OS doesn't save you much in the long term if you can't get the apps that will help you do your job better. This is why M$ dominates on the desktop, but is losing more ground in the server room, Windoze is a desktop oriented OS, Linux is (was) not. Linux makes inroads in the server space because the applications available more readily lend themselves to that.
Like many of you, I am very pleased with this announcement - a big step forward for open source in India! Maybe others will agree - I just sent him an email thanking him for his decision. His contact info is below (remove SPAM).
Shri Digvijay Singh
Chief Minister of Madhya Pradesh
Vallabh Bhavan
Madhya Pradesh
cm@SPAMmpchiefminister.com OR cs@SPAMvallabh.mp.nic.in
See also this for a little more about Gyandoot and MS involvement.
Prakash
I'm sure these people will be glad to know that untouchability is not practiced. And I'm sure that all of these stories are just made up.
And of course CNN is well known for making things up. And I'm sure this
guy is just making stuff up also. And last but not least this
Cypherpunks: Civil Liberty Through Complex Mathematics. Those who live by the sword die by the arrow.
I'm just amazed at how much people are getting this wrong. It is not the WHOLE of India that decided to switch to GNU/Linux, but only the state of Madhya Pradesh. Guys, what would you have said if the headline was the American state of Arkansas, has opted to switch to Linux from Microsoft
In case you didn't know, Bhopal has been the site of the world's worst chemical disaster in 1984. A leak from the Union Carbide (an american company) nearby plant has killed and injured thousands of citizens, and the company has denied responsibility for a long time. See here for more info. Somehow, I'm not surprised that they want to avoid the presence of big american companies
Just my two maple-leaved cents
CmdrTypo strikes again. It should of course read ".. convert from Lin to Win".
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If you moderate this, then your children will be next.
I came across this excellent article in an Indian business newspaper discussing the economics behind the use of free software vs proprietary software in developing countries like India. It also touches upon the adoption of Linux in Madhya Pradesh. In a nutshell, the article presents a strong argument in favour of free software mainly from the economic standpoint.
How do you figure? We've all encountered the fact that MSFT products just aren't documented or the documentation is inadequate or just plain wrong. We've all encountered mysterious Blue Screens of Death. We've all encountered Windows 95 and 98 machines that are dying of cruft buildup. We've all encountered "magic" GUI applications that don't have a command line counterpart. We've all encountered installs that require reboots (I had to reboot my Win2K box just to upgrade AIM recently). Just reasoning from first principles, I can say that administering an number of Linux machines will be easier than administering the same number of Windows machines - the admin won't have to physically show up at a linux machine unless something is really wrong with it.
Very honestly, I think that administering a number of Linux machines (number greater than 5) will end up easier and cheaper than the same number of Windows machines.
I'd love to see some "plain economics" rebutting this. As near as I can tell, real information that exists contradicts your position:
I'm calling "FUD" on your position.
Quit playing Monopoly with Bill. Switch to one of many non-Microsoft products today.
Here in the Netherlands, the left-wing green party yesterday also proposed embracing open source. In a quite extensive report on their website (http://www.groenlinks.nl/nieuws/4001428.html, in Dutch). They motivate the proposal quite well. There are a few minor details that they got wrong (most notably, Linus' last name is misspelled and the fact that a closed source format is used for the actual report) but overall the message is that closed source is bad and open source can be beneficial for both economical reasons and other reasons such as security, reliability and openness. Considering the report is written by a non technical person for a non technical audience, the effort should be applauded.
With the upcoming election in January, I hope this will be one of the election themes.
Jilles
Sorry, but HINDU is not a common religion in India, Hinduism is. A hindu is one who practices hinduism.
Also, Karma is not enlightenment. In the strictest sense, karma just means destiny (also means action or deed), that's all.
Lot's of people claim that anti-MS sentiment is just sour eggs/jealousy of Gates and his success. I've always held that this was bullshit due to having a myriad of reasons to hate the company that have nothing to do with Gates himself. Now I find myself thinking the same thing, only it's of people throwing rocks at RMS. He is, if no longer _the_, certainly _a_ principal GNU developer. Where exactly has he claimed he's the principal Linux kernel developer? Credit where it's due, Linux as we know it would not exist but for the earlier efforts of RMS. So what are you're real reasons for not liking him? The way he looks? Because GNU/Linux sounds stupid? How he won't back down from his ideals? What?
------- from gnu.org:
Richard Stallman
Biography
Richard Stallman is the founder of the GNU Project, launched in 1984 to develop the free operating system, GNU.
Richard Stallman is the principal author of the GNU C Compiler, the GNU symbolic debugger (GDB), GNU Emacs, and various other GNU programs. Stallman currently serves as president of the Free Software Foundation.
Linux and GNU/Linux
The GNU Hurd is not ready for production use. Fortunately, another kernel is available. In 1991, Linus Torvalds developed a Unix-compatible kernel and called it Linux. Around 1992, combining Linux with the not-quite-complete GNU system resulted in a complete free operating system. (Combining them was a substantial job in itself, of course.) It is due to Linux that we can actually run a version of the GNU system today.
We call this system version GNU/Linux, to express its composition as a combination of the GNU system with Linux as the kernel.
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"Gold still represents the ultimate form of payment in the world." - Alan Greenspan, 1999
Well, they are. (Topic aside.)
Example: check their coverage of the so called "Gulf War". Blatant lies and propaganda all-day-around.
______________
OTTERS RULE.
I've been using Linux a long time, and as far as I know, the statement "linux had journaling filesystems before NT" is absolutely, utterly false. NT 3.51 had journaling.
Linux didn't have journaling in the mainstream kernel until the ext3 patches were accepted. You could probably have gotten some journaling under Linux with manual patching and installation of beta software in the NT 4.0 timeframe, but I don't believe the mainstream distros offered journaled filesystems until after Windows 2000 shipped.
Further, NTFS is extremely robust and resilient. It's EXTREMELY unusual to lose data from an NTFS partition. Compare that to reiserfs, which has had many, many, many problems over the years. (I believe it is considered stable now.)
Admittedly, to some degree, NT *had to* have a great filesystem, because it was unstable. And Linux could get away with the horrid ext2 filesystem because the OS was so reliable that the filesystem was very rarely shut down incorrectly.
But, regardless, NTFS got journaling and ACL's really *right* long, long ago. Between the two features, it's a lot better than anything Linux offers (yet). Linux is improving rapidly, but filesystems and permissions are core NT strengths and should not be casually dismissed.
"Sic Semper Tyrannosaurus Rex."
The point he was making that in windows it's often not documented, so it often ends up with trial and error, hours of kb searches, or just reinstalling with fingers crossed. In Linux, you have the source and the configuration files are human readable, you just need to find the beginning of the yellow brick road and follow it.
/etc/inittab and follow the rail of scripts, first the script on the 'si:' line, then look at the 'default:' line, and follow the 'l?:' line with '?' the runlevel. You'll probably find most your start and stop scripts in /etc/init.d, and /etc/rcS.d with links from /etc/rc?.d
/etc, and per user ones in '.*' (hidden) files or directories of the user's home directory.
/etc/postfix... duh.
"bringing up Runlevels,"
Start at
Most other configurations are in
Sendmail problems? Try postfix, you'll love it. Easier to configure, easier to understand, and better security track record. btw, configuration is in
Got a kernel panic and it's not because youre using the 2.5.x unstable kernels? -> Most probably hardware that is breaking down.
--- Hindsight is 20/20, but walking backwards is not the answer.