Bridging India's Digital Divide With Linux

Kinnu provides a pointer to this story about India's increasing use of Linux. They mention a battlefield PDA running Linux, making Linux the standard OS for students, and some more about the Simputer.

Comments

Woo, background info on the front page!

[garcia]

It is unlikely that Linus Torvalds, creator of Linux, ever intended this open-source operating system to be put to military use.

You're absolutely right. He wasn't looking to make money off of Linux. If he had, military use would have been the first place he would have brought Linux to.

Called SATHI (short for situational awareness and tactical hand-held information, and Hindi for buddy), the 875-gram device helps soldiers coordinate with one another on the battlefield. It is one of the many spin-offs of a low-cost computer developed indigenously, the basic version of which is available on the market for about US$200.

So a two pound device that has some sort of communication and GPS capabilities? Something like other handheld GPS units like the Garmin Rino which shows your location and the locations of others holding Rinos while having FRS radios attached. Crazy!

While I applaud their efforts in creating these devices (supercomputers, educational computer, inexpensive computers for the masses, etc) this wasn't terribly informative or interesting. More well-known background information that could have been left off the front page.

Re:Woo, background info on the front page!

[anactofgod]

Hmmm...you were able to glean, from that "...press release with pictures of nothing..." all those facts related to "non-battlefield uses".

So, apparentlly there *was* some information in that press release, after all. Who what other information can be gleaned from that "brochue" (Encore's spelling, not mine). *grynn*

As for the "...it's nothing more than a PDA with GPS" comment -- my laptop is nothing more than a PDA with a faster processor, keyboard, bigger screen, more memory, hard drive, FireWire, etc. etc. Your point?

*My* point in providing that link was to show that this is low-cost, ruggedized, general purpose computer with features that may (or may not) be useful to coordinating soldiers in the field. At the very least, if the Indian Army does decide to deploy these units to the individual soldiers, the soldiers will all have access to a fully featured, ruggedized computing platform that can be configured for a variety of uses.

Contrast that with the experience of some friends of mine in the US military, who had to provide their own laptops (mostly for personal use, though some did find "unofficial, official use"), many of which failed after a relatively short period of time due to conditions on station.

The US military is itself researching the development of battlefield computers that can be deployed at the unit level. It's stated goals are a lot more ambitious than the relatively modest ones of the SATHI developers. But I'd be very surprised if they aren't going to be viewing the Indian military's experience in this area with more than a little interest, if for nothing else then to gain some "lessons learned" from real-world, field deployed units at someone else's expense.

For these reasons alone, I'd say the development is interesting enough to warrent reporting. And the fact that SATHI uses Linux in the provision of a real-world solution, and not a proprietary OS, is also interesting enough to warrant reporting, IMHO.

If gentle readers will indulge me further, let me make some observations intended to actually advance the discussion, instead of holding in back thru trivialization. In observing the approaches being employed by the US and Indian military approaches to computerizing the battlefield, there appears to be an interesting divergence.

The US military appears to be following an approach where they are building up a centralized command and control computerized structure, and then rolling out integrated systems down the chain until, eventually, the individual soldiers and sailors are integrated in the chain. The Indian military appear to be working from "the bottom up". They appear to be putting general purpose "battlefield computers" in the hands of their units without first thinking thru how to integrate all those units into a centralized backend.

If true, it was interesting to me to hypothesize why this is the case. Even more intriguing, I think, is continuing to observe how the two systems develop, to see which method results in a more effective overall platform. It seems to me that the US military's approach is more likely to follow the mantra of "this is how we want our people to use the system, so these are the features we'll provide." The other is more likely to follow the mantra of "this is how our people actually use the system, so how can we support that?" Now, I think that *that* is very, very interesting, *especially* since this is a military organization we are talking about. The success of the latter approach will be predicated on smart people actually getting continual feedback from the end-users, and incorporating that feedback into an incremental development cycle. Sound familiar to anyone?

And, lastly, in a related, but slightly off-topic issue... ...someone still needs to solve the battery problem.

If they can do it, why can't we!

[untwisted]

This sort of thing really needs to hit america. Its really hard to convince americans (even computer science students) to even look at linux. They have windows so pounded in to their heads they won't even look at something else. I'm glad that the rest of the world is starting to pick up the ball though, eventually we won't be able to avoid it here in america (unless it ends up like the poor, poor metric system)

Good for OSS projects

[bvankuik]

Imagine if the vast armies in Bangalore and Hyderabad get to know Linux and open source software in general, and all start scratching their personal itches. This could mean a giant boost for both existing and new open source projects.

Kind of interesting...

[Sheetrock]

That 80% of development jobs are being outsourced to India but don't seem to pay enough for developers to buy their own product.

It'd be just desserts if this sinks the companies involved. They want employees to understand that a "world economy" creates natural downward forces on jobs in affluent nations but want every customer to pay like they live in the U.S.

Irregardless, managing for long-term viability is a dead concept.

Re:India should use OS X, not Linux

[Orgazmus]

Impossible learning curve of Linux?
I made an 80 year old man run linux on his first ever computer. He was writing, managing and printing documents after a couple of hours. I think it might be you doing the sucking, not linux.

Recall that...

[GillBates0]

The President of India Dr. Abdul Kalam is a nuclear physicist, and a renowned scholar who advocated open source in a speech given at the Indian Navy's Weapons and Electronic System Engineering Establishment last year.

Richard Stallman also visited the President and interestingly, the President had prepared for the meeting by downloading and reading Stallman's biography from the Internet."

For the curious, the President of India's website runs Apache/PHP on Linux.

More Info

[tanveer1979]

Since you want more info, here it is. And it is not your gps+mobile. I have played around with the device and it is actually a very very capable handheld. A friend of mine did the body design, the the specs were simple. We intend it to be used in vilages, so it should be immune to drops from about 4 feet and also immune from dust and little rainfall exposure :)