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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.'"
If it was McNealy would have a new tag-line:
We're the dot in.. ah.. nevermind.
I guess that was the last Bill Gates contribution to AIDS in India...
Makes one wonder if they really are planning to switch, or if it's yet another scheme to extort free MS-licences from Billy-boy..
Gates: We'll see your refusal to switch and raise you a contribution to
"India will continue to pirate as long as Microsoft leads everywhere else, though having the governor officially reject capitalism is a good step for socialism."
He did NOT reject capitalism, it was the freedom he didnt want to give up. Thats a very big difference.
HTTP/1.1 400
Dammit, who let a man of principle become highly placed in government?
This would never have happened back here in the good ole U.S. of A!
"Provided by the management for your protection."
The Indian government is Karma whoring!
Switch back to Slashdot's D1 system.
I can see it now.. in 10 years on FOX we'll see a "Where are they now" featuring Bill Gates.. you'll have to explain to your children who this bad man was.
Maybe he'll be working for sun in the mail room..?
I can dream can't I?
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.
I would speculate whether or not this is because of the cost or the freedom.
I know they have better things to spend money on than client licenses for MS stuff. I do think its a great push for linux worldwide BUT I would just happen to think the free as in speech part is just a plus for not having to pay (as much w/ TCO).
Either way, I wish our own government would use linux. As it would be a great push away from the monopoly that they "punished".
In related news... The U.S. government flunked a computer-security review for the third consecutive year
Get paid to code OSS
Obviously Microsoft cannot compete on price or flexibility. Microsoft's main advantage seems to be its pervasiveness and it ability to run Office. 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?
I'm just glad to see it when a customer wants something that Microsoft cannot and/or will not provide that they are willing to give Linux a chance. In this particular case, it looks like the decision wasn't made based on cost, but the cost of Linux is what made the decision possible.
It guess people will generally choose freedom especiall when it is free (as in beer!).
I don't practice what I preach because I'm not the kind of person that I'm preaching to.
Since when is Linux pro-socialism and anti-capitalism? I thought the point behind capitalism is that the best product/service wins, without any help from having an illegal monopoly?
And the men who hold high places must be the ones who start
To mold a new reality... closer to the heart
Just to make it more amusing though is the fact that Microsoft retained a large number of Indian coders during the XP 'debugging' cycle; nice to see they're not afraid to bite the hand that occasionaly feeds.
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
Mod parent up +1 Funny
For those who don't understand Hindu (Very, very common religion in India), one of the basic premises of the religion is that people are reincarnated over and over again after they die until they generate enough Karma in the form of good deeds, positive experiences, and general learning and understanding that they reach a state of enlightenment and can proceed on from the cycle of mortal reincarnation to Nirvana-- a state of ultimate contentment with no worries, cares, needs, or demands.
Thats why cows are sacred to Hindus... not because of some strange religious edict or a prejudice against beef, but because cattle seen as a higher, more enlightened life form than humans. While I make no pretense about my love of beef in the grilled-to-a-juicy-medium-rare sense, you have to admit that cows do more for the environment we do on an invidual basis (entire herds and livestock yards can be pretty polluting and are responsible for a lot of C02 emission, tho) and with remarkably fewer cares than a human.
Karma has been westernized to mean the total of good deeds a person has and it's used here on Slashdot to indicate a measure of thoughtful posting, but don't forget that 'real' karma is the unmeasurable enlightenment you have acheived.
The next Slashdot story will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and slashdot the links early!
I've been lurking during this debate over who will (re)colonize India -- Linux or MS -- and am perplexed by one thing, the alleged reluctance of the Indian gov't (which apparently decides some things province by province?) to adopt a scheme like Linux that might not be completely turnkey. Everything I've read suggests that India is one of the biggest producers of computer technical talent, as the Silicon Valley drive for the U.S. to grant more worker visas attests. Also, much of U.S. tech support is being outsourced to India because of cheap fiber optic lines, cheaper tech labor, and the large number of fluent English speakers. (I've read in the NYT that some customer support reps even make up little American lives for chit-chat with unaware clients on the phone.)
... doesn't India have the homegrown talents, and why do they need state visits from RMS and BG to make up their minds? Why does it seem politicians are getting in the middle of all this? (Oops, answered my own question.)
So
WINE doesn't run CS, Starcraft, UT, and all the other online games that make third-world cyber cafes profitable.
Though some of the official stuff, as well as the more family-oriented shops may change to Linux, the vast majority of cyber cafes will still be running pirated games under a pirated Windows.
I doubt it- this is a government sponsored program - they plainly can't allow pirated software for a host of reasons. If it were for-profit shops, I'd agree with you whole heartedly. The effort here is for education of the poor, not profits.
India will continue to pirate as long as Microsoft leads everywhere else, though having the governor officially reject capitalism is a good step for socialism.
Hunh? This 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."
says they reject capitaism for socialism? That sounds very much like an informed, reasoned choice to me. It also will get the poor of India used to the idea of properly licensed software - and may end up curtailing some of the piracy you speak of.
You sound as though you've pre-judged India as a country with no morals, self respect or smarts, since they have no money. I can assure you that this is definately not the case, especially in the smarts department. Educate yourself on what you speak of, please, especially before you attepmt to make such blanket statements.
As it is, IMHO you definately put the ass in assume.
Soko
"Depression is merely anger without enthusiasm." - Anonymous
I find this quote quite fascinating. India is a nation-state where the top 5% of the population own all the wealth
Unlike the US, where the top 5% of the population own something like 80% of the stocks, bonds and real estate.
essentially they have a monopoly on the other lower castes.
I'd be very careful about using the word "caste" if I were you; there's a lot of misinformation about what "caste" means.
All the public infrastructure is publicly owned (trains, electricity).
Unlike, say, Europe?
The last week reading slashdot will convince u India is majorly into Linux. *Being and Indian* lemme tell you, this isnt happening here.
The main reason is
1. Piracy is rampant here. Ms Win costs Rs.0($0)
2. Both being free, Windows is easier to use.
3. Tools(MS VStudio) is also free.
All the stories u see in slashdot are exxagerated.
95% of developers in India target MS Win.
thats it. simple.
Life is just a conviction.
Just out of curiosity, we hear a lot about people migrating from various solutions over to Linux, but I don't hear much about people doing the reverse. Is this because this just isn't happening (doubt it) or that it's just not publicised? If it does occur, I think it would benefit the community greatly to feature them even more so than those who switch TO Linux. I think the reason is obvious, if someone is switching away, then there is something to be learned. It may be features, it may be economics, or it may even be politics, but I think that we would learn from these turncoa^h^h^h uh, people.
Labor is cheap in India, especially compared to software licenses. Not to mention the fact that the government gets to tax Indian wages, where money send to Redmond is gone from India's economy.
Besides, at least here in the States, Linux admins don't make more than Windows admins. The studies I have seen show that the pay is quite comparable.
The site www.mp.nic.in is running Microsoft-IIS/4.0 on NT4/Windows 98.
Configuring Unix for security is harder than windows because windows offers you niceties such as the group policy editor and heavy use of ACLs. While various linux filesystems support ACLs, no one is using them yet. I'm sure it's coming, though, which will go a long way towards ease of administration.
On the other hand, it's pretty easy to write some simple scripts, institute logrotation, and so on which will make Linux (or any other Unix) fairly self-maintaining. In my experience the Unix system administrator's job tends towards hardware maintenance and upgrades, and software upgrades, but very little maintenance beyond keeping up with security. Various Linux distributions have offered a number of methods for solving this problem. I personally prefer gentoo's, and if you did a little work on the gentoo build system and an automounter config, you could do frequent centralized updates with it; Of course various other distributions actually have systems in place to do these things for you, as they are shipped. This is just an example of the simpler, smaller tools which come from the Unix mindset (reusability through pipes) making system automation much easier.
A basic Linux distribution is in no way more complicated than windows. In many ways it is simpler; No mucking with the registry and all the pain that it entails is a big step in the right direction. Linux had journaling filesystems before NT, too, and it has faster and more advanced filesystems now (though who can say what is in store for NTFS in the future?) In the end Linux's primary attractions are twofold; The first is that it is free(beer) and the other that it is free(speech). To most of the world, those things are significant in that order, as well.
Unix tends to just work. Windows tends to have little bells and whistles (like a *usually responsive gui which also happens to be easy to use and does a hell of alot) but you don't need those things to do work. There are various adequate file managers for Unix which let you get real work done without bloat. They don't do everything Windows does, but you don't need to. The glitz and glimmer of windows is nothing but candy. I like to eat candy (Mostly in the form of Tactical Ops and Mechwarrior IV) so I still run Windows XP on the desktop, and Linux as an appliance...
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
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.
Configuring Unix for security is harder than windows because windows offers you niceties such as the group policy editor and heavy use of ACLs. While various linux filesystems support ACLs, no one is using them yet. I'm sure it's coming, though, which will go a long way towards ease of administration.
This is nice if you are trying to protect your system from your own users.
However, if you are interested in protected it from remote attacks, linux is MUCH easier. Iptables (for firewalling) is built in for free, and scripts to configure it are freely available. Security updates are quickly available and easy to apply. Linux wins, it is a no brainer.
A competent admin can make either OS secure, from local or remote attack. My subjective estimate is that Unix/linux admins can handle far more boxes per person than Windows admins, though.
We've all encountered Samba, Sendmail, and Kernel panics too. We've encountered varying ways of bringing up Runlevels, frontends that configure stuff, but you don't know WHERE it configures 'em.
Pot, I'd like you to meet kettle, BTW, you're both black."Draco dormiens nunquam titillandus."
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.
While corruption is not unknown in the US, these are usually exceptions
You are deluding yourself if you think that this is even remotely true. Corruption is the absolute rule in our government. Explain DMCA, Patriot act, Mickey Mouse Protection act, Homeland Security (alone and with all the riders) in any other way.
In India, the honest politicians would be the exception.
Here we apparently had one left who is now dead.
Wellstone was the one dissenter to the Patriot act.
Anyone who voted in favor of that showed their hatred and contempt of the constitution, freedom, and basically everything America says that we stand for.
If you disagree try and come up with an actual reason that I'm wrong.
It's sad that you can have proof piled upon proof that the US government is completely owned and corrupt yet you are afraid to face the truth.
I'm not singling you out. Most people in America are afraid of facing reality. That is out primary problem.