India Cool to Microsoft Source Code Offer

indianseason writes "Economic Times, India reports on the failure of Microsoft to sign up the Indian government as part of the Government Security Program. The Print Edition carries a comment by an official: "... there was tremendous pressure on us to sign an MoU (memorandum of understanding) which would allow Microsoft access to all TDIL products (Technology Development for Indian Languages)." The government has gone ahead and put all the project initiatives in the public domain. TDIL recently released Indix : an engine for rendering Indian languages on linux."

Comments

Re:So what's the problem?

[flakac]

They can still access all the technology ...

Uh, no, actually they can't. MS engineers are specifically prohibited from accessing much open-source software (in specific GPL'ed code), without first obtaining permission from the legal department. This is to avoid "contamination" of their source code base.

Well, think about it: if YOU were India...

[crazyphilman]

Would you go with Microsoft? Probably not.

Consider this from the point of view of the Indian government. They can:

A) Let Microsoft come in with low initial prices, taking over the Indian software market and then exerting absolute control later on, or

B) Assign teams at whichever Indian college has the best research facilities, provide them copies of Linux and the BSDs, and have them roll out a purely Indian Linux and/or BSD that can be used across the board as an Indian National O/S. It could be completely pre-vetted for security holes, OpenBSD style, and it could be engineered to support all Indian languages natively alongside English, instead of having them as add-ons. Also it could be used throughout the entire Indian infrastructure, freeing them from any reliance on foreign concerns. Updates could come from the team that rolled it out in the first place. Couple this with a cheap homegrown computer, of course...

Seriously. If you were in the Indian government, what would YOU do?

Re:So what's the problem?

[anandrajan]

Aaah, finally something about which I may actually know something.

I speak and write Tamil. Characters are almost never merged in Tamil and at least to me, the script looks totally different from Devanagari scripts. This statement should hold for other South Indian languages such as Kannada, Telugu, Malayalam and a Pakistani Dravidian language Brahui (unless it uses a Devanagiri or other imported script).

Perhaps the parent poster meant something else by character-merger which I didn't understand. Obviously there could be similarities due to proximate evolution which could be leveraged.