Advertisment

Will open source outgrow MS bashing?

author-image
CIOL Bureau
New Update

TV Mahalingam, CNS

Advertisment

 



Open source gatherings are fast gaining a reputation of being boring and officious. A motley collection of people turns up at such conferences — bureaucrats, educators and people with NGO backgrounds. But there is something common about most of them — they bash Microsoft and its offerings at the drop of a hat even as many of their laptops continue to run on MS Power point.

The national conference on open source software organized by MAIT in Bangalore was no different.

"Why should software not be open, when all other great inventions are mostly free? " asked Sanjay Singh, Secretary for IT for the Madhya Pradesh government. He was speaking at a panel discussion that discussed the feasibility of open source software for government use. Always a contentious issue, the views expressed by the panel lived up to the mark.

Advertisment

"When we decided to explore the open source alternative for the state, we did it not for the love of open source movement but for the total cost of ownership advantage that it offered," Singh made a more business-like comment. That the likes of MS are not losing much is betrayed when he said, "Also states often experience a paucity of funds and open source might be the answer." In the same breath, he added that open source and proprietary software are complimentary. That’s perhaps an indication of the vacillation of governments when it comes to taking a stance on choice of open source platforms.

Going by what some of the bureaucrats had to say on key technology issues faced by governments, the ability of state governments to arrive upon appropriate technology decisions is questionable.

"We spent about 3.5 % of the total cost of Bhoomi project (land records computerization) on the operating software part. Software costs in e-governance are very less and the important thing here is to choose something that has a good amount of support from the vendor. In the Bhoomi project, we used the Simputer that runs Linux. But that does not matter. What matters is what the Simputer does for me and not what runs on its back end," said Rajeev Chawla, Secretary e-governance for the Karnataka government.

Advertisment

"Security is an important issue when it comes to opting for an open source platform for a government project. It is said that open source software can be ‘hardened’ for security. but I’m not sure whether such a thing is possible or whether such technical capabilities are present with the states today," he added.

However, a recent announcement in the US is quite the opposite. The US aeronautical agency NASA is using Linux with the Bastille Hardening System on its servers. The US Department of Defense (DoD) is also conducting a separate Linux "hardening" program with the objective of developing a version of Linux that meets DoD security standards for military use.





There were also some meaningful suggestions that came out from the discussion. One of them was that the government should keep in mind open source alternatives when they call for large tenders.

"Government tenders instead of calling for a proprietary CPU or a Pentium or a Windows platform should just focus on the job to be done rather than specifying in detail the architecture required," said Rajesh Jain, Managing Director, Netcore Solutions.

With state governments lacking the ‘skill sets’ to make the right technology choices, they might be better off outsourcing some of their technology functions to private parties who can provide end to end solutions.

As Prof. Sadagopan, Director IIIT —Bangalore said, "It is quite inconceivable that most of the world outsources their technology functions but the Indian governments are still wary of doing so. Perhaps its time they got rid of the technology functions to private parties and stay focussed on the core activity of delivering good governance."

tech-news