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Indian President Advises Open Source Approach
geo_2677 writes "The Indian President Dr. A Kalam has advised defense scientists to go for open-source software for software security, rather than be stuck with insecure proprietary software. Being a scientist himself, he surely knows what's good for his country." Speaking at the Indian Navy's Weapons and Electronic System Engineering Establishment, Kalam argued: "Open source codes can easily introduce the users to build security algorithms in the system without the dependence of proprietary platforms", though continues: "We should take maximum care to ensure that our solution is unique to protect our own defence security solutions implemented on open platforms." We previously reported on Richard Stallman's meeting with Dr. Kalam earlier this year.
...can be found on sarovar.org... it's one of the biggest public GForge sites out there.
The Army reading list
Being a scientist myself, I had to control my laughter and climb back into my chair before posting this.
Perhaps geo_2677 could explain to the researchers with whom I used to share an equipment room why a) you need to close the lid of a refrigerated centrifuge and b) why, if you're too freaking lazy to do a) at least don't run the goddamn thing with a foot of condensed water in it.
Yeah, if you want good, pragmatic common sense, ask a scientist.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
Please explain.
Support the First Amendment. Read at -1
...Indian's political structure? I seem to remember that a woman was just elected as Prime Minister (a big leap for India!). How does the Prime Minister relate to the President? What is their area of power? Is there a Parliament or Congress?
:-/
AFAIK, Prime Ministers have always been used in Monarchies instead of democracies. So I'm a bit confused here...
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
Unfortunately I doubt this will heavily impact any nations/businesses tech policies outside of India. But at least it's a step in the right direction
Almost.
Uh oh. Somebody needs to get a visit from Bruce Schneier next! I suspect that his proposed unique solution would be better off if it was Open Sourced for peer review.
This is not a sig
I thought that said Indianan predident. I was about to start planning my campaign for Viceroy of Georgia.
At the very least, he should have publicly decried open source as an anti-Hindu plot. Pakistan would jump on the bandwagon immediately.
Bill Gates: I am here to let you know that we are prepared to slash prices to keep you as a customer.
President Dr. A Kalam: Thank you! Come again!
Bill Gates: But you haven't bought anything?
President Dr. A Kalam: Thank you! Come again!
At least the tech support will be a local call for them...
There is no mod option "-1: Disagree" for a reason. "Overrated" is not an acceptable substitute. Post something instead.
Perhaps you didnt noticed but the president of india is a moslem.
Incidentally his official website runs Apache/2.0.42 (Unix) PHP/4.2.3. A couple of brief excerpts from his bio here:
After a fairly secure childhood, during which he is said to have read as much as he could, he studied at the Madras Institute of Technology, where he specialised in Aero Engineering.
He has worked in leading defence and space organisations in research and managerial capacities. He contributed in a major way to the development of the Satellite Launch Vehicle (SLV) III, which put the Rohini Satellite into orbit. He has also been chairperson to Technology Information, Forecasting and Assessment Council (TIFAC).
A vegetarian, his interests include playing the veena and writing poetry. He has written two books, Ignited Minds: Unleashing the Power Within India and India 2020: Vision for the New Millennium.
Till now, Abdul Kalam has been best known for his key role in the nuclear tests at Pokharan in the Rajasthan desert on May 11 and 13, 1997. With most parties choosing him as their presidential candidate, he has become the 11th Indian to join a very select group.
An Indian-American Hindu committed to non-violent thought/speech/action alarmed by the global explosion of radical Islam
From the article --
Even today Kalam is in huge demand. He is Fellow of Indian National Academy of Engineering, Fellow of Indian Academy of Sciences, Bangalore, Vice-President of Astronautical Society of India, Fellow of National Academy of Medical Sciences (India), Honorary Fellow of Institution of Electronics and Telecommunication Engineers and an ISRO Distinguished Professor!
Wow, that's just too good. I'm quite speechless.
Okay, I just have to ask... what is condensed water? Is it like condensed milk; Water with most of the water taken out?
___
It's the end of my comment as I know it and I feel fine.
1) India has less income that the Europe and US per capita, but lots more people. If India has a choice, it makes sense for them to go with OS (which requires more labor but less money) than with proprietary solutions such as MS (which require more money but (perhaps?) less labor).
2) Using nonproprietary solutions allows countries to develop indigenous software industries; for now, and for awhile, this will probably foster OS in lots of ways. In the pharmaceutical industry, India has started out making lots of generics, but are now looking at developing and selling their own blockbuster drugs. If a similar path is followed by India in software, at some point they will have their own MS; at that point, the continued use and nurturing of OS is not assured - as the relative cost of labor increases, commercial solutions might become more attractive.
While it might be best for India to follow an open source pathway, this is not because it is always right to do so, but because it best fits their current circumstances.
Woohoo!
What really shocks me is why so many countries are still using MS at all in their gov't infrastructure. I've always wondered about the following scenario. (Note: Tinfoil hat required.)
MS is closed-source and rife with a constant stream of what are effectively root exploits being stumbled upon. What if some agency wanted to cozy up to MS and carefully craft backdoors and such, inject them into the OS and have them released into the world? Windows is so ubiquitous that your task has now become that much easier.
Furthermore only the random stumbling of a security researcher/hacker has a chance of discovering it. Probability == low in most cases. In which case "Oops, release patch (add new backdoor)".
Then there's the less nefarious scenario - an agency just sitting on little-known accidental root exploits and keeping them in their classified root kit.
Either way it strikes me that linux in particular (and open source in general) would give sovereign nations some peace of mind. Not bulletproof, but having a global community reviewing the source and tracking exploits openly would sure seem to me to be a better way to safeguard my country's secrets than relying on a huge foreign company with a crappy track record for security.
(You can now remove your tinfoil hats. No, wait, NEVER remove your tinfoil hat...)
Being a scientist himself, he surely knows what's good for his country.
If this is the case, I guess non-scientists can all remove themselves from politics. But would the world really be better off if William Shockley were president? If Edward Teller were in charge of arms control?
Imagine how much harder physics would be if electrons had feelings! -Feynman, maybe
Essentially, yes.
Being modded +1 funny will not increase your karma
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you lose -1 for the troll
if you post a comment that half the moderating population think is -1 troll but the other half think is +1 funny and keep jumping between +4 and +5 funny, for example, then you end up just losing and losing more karma the more you are moderated down, despite also being moderated up
Is it me, or does India continue to make LOGICAL political decisions?
They invested in education and social programs and created a workforce capable of doing our high-paying jobs. They then set up an economic environment where those jobs would come over, including investments in infrastructure and utilities.
Next the middle class over there starts to take off, and they make a national effort to help make sure that the benefit of the boom is extended to the less fortunate, so they can make more of the country self-sufficient.
They've managed to stay out of international conflicts and have sent peace ovetures to Pakistan. Now they're jumping all over Open Source as a way to improve their own efficiency and self-sufficiency.
All this, and I doubt India's federal gov costs anywhere near what these asshats over here who seem to actively work against us cost.
Between Colin Powell telling the Indians that there will be no attempt to curb outsourcing by American companies on the part of the Bush Administration and the following account of Tom Donohue's (CEO of US Chamber of Commerce, really good friend of Bush Administration, kind of like Ken Lay) speech in San Francisco:
Donohue acknowledged the pain for people who have lost jobs to offshoring - an estimated 250,000 a year, according to government estimates. But pockets of unemployment shouldn't lead to "anecdotal politics and policies," he said, and people affected by offshoring should "stop whining." - AP Newswire
Personally, I say we go build a freaking guillotine, cause as far as I'm concerned, he might as well have said, "let them eat cake".
Anyway good luck to India and how much to run our Federal government?
Arrogance is Confidence which lacks integrity. -- me
Okay, once again, I'm failing to see the benefit the article claims.
How exactly does open-source code make for a more secure government? It would seem to me that giving the source-code to your encryption away, that you are practically begging others to learn how to hack it. At least proprietary software has a tiny measure of defense. It would also spread your possible leak-sources from the responsibility of one entity, the corporation that made it, to pretty much the entire world.
I believe, in the interests of National Defense, it would be best to have any sort of security source code until very tight lock and key.
Am I wrong here? Can someone tell me why?
-The Libra
"Please be patient--The future will begin momentarily."
Being a scientist himself, he surely knows what's good for his country
Yeah, like CalTech physics Ph.D. John Poindexter, who obviously knows what's best for America, e.g. Iran-Contra, Total Information Awareness...
If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you can possibly imagine.
I can think of several I wouldn't trust....
pseudo-scientist
Christian Scientist
Computer Scientist
Marine Biologist
Botanist
Archaeologist
Food Scientist
Paranormal Scientist
In fact, can you name a type of scientist that you would trust with knowing what is best for a country?
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
Either the paper's "Special Correspondent" took poor notes from Dr. Kalam's speech or Dr. Kalam doesn't know WTF he's talking about. Or maybe there's a language problem...
Roll-your-own security algorithms are a very bad idea, as most of us know. Get a professional to do it. Don't design your own ultra-secure AES alternative based on an "introduction" gained from looking at open-source code.
"Ensure a unique solution... to protect security" sounds like a euphemism for "security through obscurity" if I've ever heard one.
"has advised defense scientists to go for open-source software for software security, rather than be stuck with insecure proprietary software" Because open-source always is secure and proprietary always is insecure, right? -E-
In my experience, most scientists, while generally brilliant (from my perspective) in their field, tend to lack a lot of practical knowledge and common sense about the outside world.
It could just be me though.
Not everything is analogous to cars. Car analogies rarely work.
It looks like what happened here is that Stallman went to India, had a talk with their President, talked to him about open source being a good idea, and the President bought it.
This doesn't necessarily say that the Indian President is a brilliant leader; one possibility is that he was swayed by someone's argument, the same way that many other leaders are swayed by Microsoft's argument.
I'm not saying that I'm disappointed, but it's one thing to have a leader be swayed by someone that gave him a convinving argument, and it's entirely another to have that leader come to the conclusion on his own.
Now, the thing is the Indian President is clearly a really smart guy, and he's an accomplished scientist, etc. I don't mean to imply that he ACTUALLY just bought Stallman's line without thinking about it. What I mean to say is that there are plenty of people who would point at the Stallman visit and try to use that to suggest that the Indian President only made his recommendation because he's parroting someone else's words. This is a means for them to dismiss his recommendation.
It's much more satisfying when someone figures out that Free Software is a good idea without activism being involved, so no one can imply that he didn't understand what he was saying.
Argh. I'm having a really hard time expressing what I mean. Oh well.
I am sure this has nothing to do with Microsoft, Oracle, PeopleSoft, Sun, Adobe, and Apple being American companies.
Saying Java is nice because it works on all OS's is like saying that anal sex is nice because it works on all genders.
A bit colonial isn't it to automatically assume that the Indian president needs an emissary from the US to tell him about open source?
Do you really think that Kalam has never thought about open source? After all he is not the president of the US - he actually has proven that he can think independently as a scientist. If you knew academic scientists you would know that they understand the value of open-source better than anyone.
A much more likely scenario is that Dr. Kalam wanted to meet with someone to discuss some technical details and get some feedback and maybe some publicity for his ideas of implementing open source. As there were noodles before Marco Polo went to Cathay and there was open source before Stallman went India...
If you have lots of people and no money, you go for solutions that use manpower (what you have) and avoid expensive equipment (that you don't have or can't afford). If you have lots of money but few people, you buy solutions, because your time is more valuable than your money.
You use what you have - if you have lots of people, then you use them. Where money is tight, you only buy what you can't get another way. Since with software India has a choice (commercial or OS solutions), they can throw programmers at problems and save their money for situations where they don't have another way. They can afford to be inefficient with people, but not with money, so even if the solutions aren't efficient, if they save money they make more sense than efficient solutions that cost lots of money (that they don't have).
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Here's the proof:
Article from the Times of India. A blurb
TIMES NEWS NETWORK[ THURSDAY, MAY 29, 2003 12:06:03 AM ]
PUNE: President A P J Abdul Kalam on Wednesday urged Indian IT professionals to develop and specialise in open source code software rather than use proprietary solutions based on systems such as Microsoft Windows.
Stallman's visit reported in The Hindu and elsewhere:
Kalam, Stallman discuss open source software NEW DELHI, JAN. 31. The President, A.P.J. Abdul Kalam, last Thursday played host to two radically divergent poles of the global software industry.
Though the second link does not say 2004, I'm sure it was earlier this year, and a Google search should help you confirm that. Also the URL is dated 20040201.
The above information renders your argument incorrect and w/o H20.
An Indian-American Hindu committed to non-violent thought/speech/action alarmed by the global explosion of radical Islam
If things go by as Dr.Kalam envisioned , Im pretty confident that Open source will gain the biggest momentum worldwide.This is because
reports that there are very few linux users when compared to linux friendly nations.ofcourse i agree this may not be prefectly linear relationship in reality.Neverthelss , a reasonable estimate
1. A majority of Indian techies, might start using some variant of linux in the upcoming years.Rigt now,Most of them are still using Windows only.{ I observed that India ranks very poor in the number of registered Linux users.}
http://counter.li.org/reports/place.php
3.Once Linux Fever is caught up in India , we could expect a good increase in the number of open source projects , growth in popularity and confidence of open source projects.This will impact other developing nations , if they would realise the vast savings of the decision.
4.MS share in India will dwindle big time.. This would affect its revenue as India is such a huge market.
5. Indian colleges then would advance to use and advocate open source platforms and resources.This would help the indian progammers extend their scope and may improve their knowledge standard.Right now , most colleges in semi urban areas use proprietary operating systems.
May be im over optimistic..
Downside:
1. MS is silently attracting the techies and indian public by offering donations to the poor,AIDS victims etc..These will go down eventually.
2.This mite stir up some greedy and filthy politicians who get good bribes from corporate leaders and may work for delay in progress.
It's still a challenge for India to come up in technological arena with the onus of poor political stress on it.
Lets see where this takes !!!
Hello , this is my way.
Which way is yours ?
btw there is no right way