Slashdot Mirror
Tamil Nadu (India) Shutting the Door On Microsoft
aprasadh writes "The government of Tamil Nadu, a state in southern India, has begun initiatives to convert all of their IT systems fully to OSS-based software. (The link is a copy of a news item that appeared recently in the Deccan Chronicle, an English-language daily.) The managing director of the IT procurement, consulting, and training agency for the Tamil Nadu government describes the reasons why he has chosen OSS, and also how he dealt with Microsoft executives." From the article: "Initially, 99 per cent of government systems have been running on Microsoft systems but then 2007 will be a watershed year for the state IT sector... We have already dispatched 6,500 Linux systems to village panchayats and another 6,100 Acer desktop systems with Suse Linux operating systems are on their way. We are procuring 20,000 desktop systems for schools, which will run only on Suse Linux... I require at least 500 trainers to train 30,000 state officials across Tamil Nadu in the next six months."
Am I the only one that was excited to read about this, until it said Suse Linux?
I think it's pretty clear that the Tamils should run Tiger.
We recently had heard in the office over one of the Yellow Machine that's made by Anthology Solutions.
The numbers outlined looks good, but then they have always looked good. It really comes down to getting people who can actually make it happen. But if any one country has the IT manpower to make it happen, I'd say it was India... and cheaply too.
I hope there are many eyes on this move. They plan to move pretty quickly and so people will not become quite so bored as when other such projects are projected to take 5+ years and often peter out or are otherwise persuaded not to continue.
I also find it interesting that this particular Indian state seems somewhat uncorruptable. I'm not saying that anyone opting for proprietary software is corrupted, but I am saying that this guy's hard-line lacks any sort of compromise or wriggle room for Microsoft to persuade them against this. If Microsoft can't buy them, I have to wonder what these people are like.
And just to put it out there -- I could probably be bought by Microsoft if I were to find myself in a similar situation. So I have to admire this Indian state's dedication. But I'm guessing Microsoft has only begun their campaign of dirty tricks, leverage and persuation. Rather like one U.S. state's intention to move to OpenDocument, while Microsoft could make the IT guy budge on his plans, they simply when around him and bought his bosses.
But the bottom line is that if these guys are successful, a lot of people will be noticing.
Microsoft has it right that the future is software as a service... well, at least the service part anyway. The software part should not be proprietary.
This is Tamil Nadu in INDIA. The Tamil Tigers (LTTE) are a Terrorist Faction, which consists of a minority of Sri Lankans who speak tamil. Same Language, different people, Just like Americans and British, both speak english.
Have a nice day!
Kerala was the first state to do this - slashdot story (and the oblig. dupe).
But those stories paint Kerala as some hippie commune full of comrades - I've been following the developments in Kerala for a while and in general all that makes sense.
Of course, most of these states are picking F/OSS for economic reasons - but not exactly about freedom and stuff. I've heard whispers from the gubment that it is the support contracts which are deal killers for F/OSS in general, but of late the government has started taking a socialist approach of doing it in-house rather than contracting it out to vendors (well, it doesn't sound socialist when a company does I.T, right).
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum videtur
And since they went with Suse, they're safe from being sued by Microsoft, thanks to the Microsoft-Novell deal.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
Mr. Umashankar, IAS officer is a staunch supporter of open source software. You can see his commitment towards opensource in the EGOVINDIA group. He is the popular member of this active group. I believe his actions are in true spirit.
Hari Sarvottama! Vaayu Jeevottama!
7000 rupees is about $150 USD right? That's not cheap at all. Not for XP volume licensing. Not in India. Not in the US.
Just how many people live in this state anyway?
"Waste not one watt!" - CZ
The Information and Technology Minister - Dayanidhi Maran belongs to the same political party as the one in Tamil Nadu and he is seen hobnobbing with Billy on launching MS products in India
>> Techflock-flock onto the best bits of technology
If you mean the loss of profits from foreign sales (i.e. the export market) this is a completely separate issue. The mere fact that other countries try to avoid buying MS products means that in the long or short term income from this source will dry up. From the point of view of the US, it is probably better that other countries continue to buy US products (Red Hat, Novell) than that they either do not develop an IT infrastructure at all, or develop entirely home grown solutions.
The history of every major industry is one of declining prices. This leads to economic expansion, not contraction, whether it is steel, cars, television. Software is not exempt from economic laws.
Pining for the fjords
Am I hearing chairs flying around?
printf($randomline(sigs.txt) \n "-- "$randomline(authors.txt));
-- myself
It was a former Indian PM who got assassinated by LTTE.
As Good as this news in, does the slashdot community have to constantly reminded not only of the benifits of open source but more annoyingly, of every single government and private organisation which switches from Microsoft to oss?
If their "SEO" & "Website builder" strategies are any indication of how their government operates, I bet Microsofts' real reaction to this would be more along the lines of "Don't let the door hit you on the way out, ya cheap bastards !".
Wanna fight ? Bend over, stick your head up your ass, and fight for air.
this would be true if it were necessary 1 trainer for each linux user.
One thing that MS and most people like to forget is that trainers are necessary if you are deploying windows too.
tecnical training and support for windows are not free!!!!
"And so you believe. Who told you ? The chaps who had phantasised WMDs all over the by now destructed place ?"
I am a Tamil, From Sri Lanka.. lets just say I know a bit more than the average person.
Tamils in Sri Lanka have been severely disenfranchised over the years by a few Nationalists.
I was going to write a bit about it, but read up on Black July.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_July is a good starting point.
Tamils have suffered terribly in the years since independence, and organised killing, and rape by groups suspected to be associated or controlled by the Government of Sri Lanka is common.
Although I was born in Sri Lanka, I have lived in the UK since the age of three, having emigrated here since 1979. However, sometimes when I go to Sri Lanka, The fact my passport has my Place of Birth as "Jaffna" I am noticeably treated with suspicion by some people.
The LTTE are seen by many Tamils in Sri Lanka as the only hope for them. In many cases, the LTTE has provided a lot of change in Sri Lanka. However, their overall egalitarian view could cause more issues than solve at this stage. Also the use of killing to achieve the goals is another thing I am a bit objectionable about. This is why they are view by many as terrorists, even though their mandate, and their intentions are Freedom Fighters. Although most of what they do are for self defence, some actions do indeed go far beyond self defence. Certainly the LTTE are NOT on the same scale as Al-Queda, etc.
Yes you are totally correct about the Buddhist Clergy, and certain ultra nationalist factions. A lot of lies and propaganda exist there, were the general populace is hood winkled to believing that Tamils are the cause of every problem.
However, I have many Sinhalese Friends, who are frankly amazing, so maybe now is the time to capitalise on friendships, rather than war. I just feel there is too much bloodshed already, and people have to put behind old prejudices, and actually look forward. I know its not easy, I have been through the heartache of hopes being dashed. Therefore I criticize both the government and the LTTE for not really working hard to capitalising the short lived ceasefire, and showing true leadership rather than rhetoric.
The Problems in Sri Lanka are immense, and rather than tell you everything, I simply invite those who wish to know, to find information, readily available on the Internet from both sides.
One thing for sure, the war back home brings tears to my eyes. Sri Lanka was and in some ways still is a beautiful country, with some very smart educated and intellectual people. Had there not been a war, Sri Lanka would be on a par with Korea and other far east "tigers".
Have a nice day!
Free Land
....just kidding- TN is pretty good when it comes to most things comparitively.
Glad that they went through with this - whatever their reasons may be (empty coffers must likely), the path they have taken is a brave one. There may be some FUD initially, but typically these govt. officials do nothing more than what they are told to do on the PC (i.e. press ALT-P, type, click on OK etc... - of course in TN, everything must be in Tamil as well). So there wont be any complaints like "This new Nvidia card is not working on my PC" OR "how can I get this to recognize my new USB external hard drive"...
Free TV
Free GOLD!!!!
The only complaint is rice is cheap not free - can you imagine paying nearly $0.50 for 10 Kilograms (22 lbs)? Govt. these days....
Congrats SUSE - you got yourself 30,000+ new users who wont complain much. Having said that, everything will get blamed on the "new SW" - including printer jams, network failures - anything.
"I hate two things: bigotry, and the dutch."
And now I find them combined in one handy
Whence? Hence. Whither? Thither.
"Just learned to count"? I know the US educational system has a bad reputation, but isn't this a bit of an exaggeration?
What exactly do you mean they can't beat Linux?
Linux is still a tiny proportion of consumer desktops and isn't rising at a measureable rate.
Then again with that attitude it probably won't.
Microsoft is in a "can't lose" situation with VISTA in the developed world - OEM systems will all be shipped with it no questions asked, and most businesses will drink the TCO cool-aid and go with what they think is safe. But the margins are much tighter in the developing world, making proprietary software unaffordable. Their choice is either piracy, (and MS is really putting the squeeze on that) or FOSS.
If FOSS can do the job at all they will use it, even if there are a few warts to deal with. The windows install base will start to erode not in America or Europe as expected, but in the emerging markets. MS themselves knew that when they came out with those international editions of XP at fire sale prices, but they were deliberately crippled in how many applications they could run.
My rights don't need management.
Aside from your obvious racist attitude, the concept of zero and the rules governing it for modern mathematics were first described in India. Since this is the first axiom for natural numbers it could be argued that the Indians were actually the first to be able to count as we understand it today.
Bob
Listen to my latest album here
More examples: Indian Railways reservation system runs unix/vms and it's online sales are the highest ecommerce sales in the entire AsiaPac. Jet Air runs it's in flight video on demand system on a customized linux which is good enough to eat. Over 200 terminals with touch screens, streaming over 100 video options from a single server (cluster). Always reboots during takeoff for some reason though. That's when you can see identical console messages flying by on every screen. All High Courts (over 30 i think) and the supreme court are on RH (judges laptops dual boot to windows for 'watching movies' & voip .... )
Somehow, the cost factors and convenience of fiddling with the system is very attractive to Indians. Don't like to take too much pains to contribute back though.
There used to be some excellent local distros too which died off since there was no quick (as in 1-2 years) revenue models
Is this not essentially the same argument we heard three decades ago when consumers on the coasts started buying smaller, cheaper, higher quality Japanese cars instead of the gas hungry, shoddily built, creations from Detroit that cornered like buckboards? It's not MY fault that Detroit didn't start delivering cars that (sort of) met my needs until the 1990s. The American Automobile industry wasn't killed by its consumers or competitors. It commited suicide.
It's likewise not MY fault that Microsoft is not delivering superior products with accessible source code at reasonable prices. If Microsoft's perception of its long term self interest is flawed (and I think it is) why blame the messengers?
You can't see ANYTHING from a car, You've got to get out of the goddamned contraption and walk...Edward Abbey
...it'll be India.
I know a lot of us have experienced the despair of offshore IT "help desks" and many of those are in India. But they're just cowboys jumping on the outsourcing bandwaggon. Their days are numbered, for the most part.
This part of the business gives a false impression of what the state of IT expertise in India is *really* like. It's pretty darn good. There are plenty of highly competent IT people there and, yes they generally have a huge advantage in terms of cost-of-living vs. expected-income. However, despite the rhetoric about the Internet making geographical location irrelevant, I don't see it happening just yet. For most of my work I still have to fly to the client's site.
But, in their own back yard, Indian IT workers are in a position to do what the hell they like. They have the expertise, culture and work ethic to make it work and there is no way that anyone can force a second-choice solution on them. And if they see MS as second choice...
The prostration starts with rampant piracy and ubiquitousness of Windows and Office. Then there is a whole bunch of idiots developing everything on Visual Studio (again, mostly pirated).
Microsoft indulges in heavy influence peddling by donating to schools, states' education programs etc. by one or other means. Their motto is to catch 'em young.
The media is mostly bought off with huge spends on Microsoft ads, and journalists hardly know the difference between Free Software, Open Source and their own hindsides. (If it weren't for the FSF India chapter, which is based in a state dominated by Communist parties, software patents would have crept in unnoticed when the Indian polity prostrated to the US' WTO hegemony in IPRs.)
Corporates will be corporates, and choose that which gives them the quickest advantage. Profits always beat ideology, or if I rephrase it, profits are the best ideology. If Microsoft gives the most integrated solutions with widespread support, they will naturally not want to squander their resources on experiments.
Still, it is a good sign that sane voices within various State and Central govt. bodies are being heard. Southern states are more open to FOSS, Gujarat also seems to be heading that way, but Maharashtra, which is the new IT destination seems to be leaning towards Microsoft due to the aforesaid lobbying.
Perhaps Vista and its strict DRM/License enforcement will turn more people away from free software to Free software, within a year or two. More eye-candy introduced to Linux with Compiz and Beryl will certainly help, I believe. Now we need more games and driver support for 3D in Linux. Oh, and a unified package installation system.
Wishful thinking, I know.
Chat with other atheists http://secularchat.org
The Tamil Tigers are not terrorists. They have an Air Force.
---- "XML is like violence. If it doesn't fix the problem, you aren't using enough."
The proper solution for governments, indicidentally, is OPEN SOURCE SOTWARE, that is OPERATING SYSTEM NEUTRAL/AGNOSTIC. That is to say, it should run equally on Windows, Linux and Macintosh without too much problem. the operating system is not an interesting question (in fact, it can be OSS but microsoft only... i dont care) any more than the mouse is. the open-ness or closed-ness of the application software itself - that is, the bits of code that embody government policy about voting, welfare, whatever are the important bits to be OSS as long as we have reasonable trust that the underlying OS is fair (and, despite whatever hyperbole you might see here on slashdot, windows and osx are both certainly 'fair' in this respect - microsoft has not created any OS hooks that anybody knows or reasonably suspects to, say, detect voting software running on xp and change the results even though the software itself is correct).
... every time an IT system is converted from Windows to OSS, a chair in Redmond gets its wings!
I used to run Linux as my desktop 95% of the time. That was for about 4 years. Then I switched back to windows.
Quicken is much better than GNU Cash. On windows, I can choose between Photoshop Elements and GIMP. On Linux, I can only run GIMP. I can also run Open Office on windows.
Same for PostgreSQL, JBoss, Eclipse.
I got busy and no longer had time to figure out why when I upgraded my OS software, my CD burner didn't work anymore or my sound driver, or my digital camera program stopped working.
Also, Eclipse works, but you can't use it to print (this was over a year ago) on Linux/Unix.
Yet another feature.
The final kicker was when my system failed and I needed to get a new computer up and running quickly. Do I re-create my triple boot system out of the Windows box I bought?
I had just gotten Fedora Core with SELinux properly configured (which took some doing back then) just before the crash.
Another big annoyance was trying to do my taxes and doing something simple like reports of transactions for a given category.
The OSS answer: learn Scheme and write your own reports. Yeah right.
With windows, I spend a whole lot less time keeping my desktop going. I have more software options. I can buy hardware without searching the web to see if it is compatible.
"We can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them." -- Albert Einstein
In India we fly carpets, not chairs.
More than mere navel gazing.
I think he was just making a joke. Whether it was appropriate or not is a matter of opinion.
It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning
And coming back to India - that's brilliant news. Think that India has over 1 billion people. All of them will be Linux users. And finally they will come as cheap labour (IT support) to UK/US to promote FOSS. And don't forget about opportunities of opening cheap Linux support call centres there.
By my calculation we're talking about 0.003% of those 1 billion people. And Indian call centres for linux will likely be pricier than their Windows counterparts (smaller pool, rising demand). Those call centres are already rising in cost anyway.
Not that it isn't a promising sign... but to suggest all of India will embrace linux seems unrealistic.
MS et.all are toast. And with them out, our IT staff becomes second-rate as they become irrelevant.
Your perspective has drifted and needs to be fixed. You seem to equate M$ with US and US technical excellence. Most people would throw away a meter like you, but a new faceplate and a few twists should have you back in operation.
Developers and IT staff at IBM, Red Hat, Novel, Ubuntoo, Mepis, Chrysler, Lowes, GE, and so on and so forth, would tell you that M$ and those who know only that are already second rate. They would not share you assessment of "our IT staff," nor do they fear foreign "competition". In their world, the more the merrier. American excellence does not have to be anti-social.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
The only difference between the typical terrorist and the typical freedom fighter is which news report they're on.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"