India: Speaking your language
Spotlight project
The Indian government is funding an initiative to distribute millions
of free CDs containing open source software. Around 3.5 million CDs
Tamil-language versions of open source applications and 3.5 million
Hindi-language CDs containing have already been distributed. And there are further plans to distribute software translated into all 22 official languages of India.
Summary
Open source software has been deployed by both the national and state
governments in India, although many of the large scale deployments have
happened in states. However, researcher Rao says there is still a "lot
of Microsoft" in use by the Indian government.
The government of Maharashtra, India's third largest state, has deployed OpenOffice.org on "thousands of desktops" and is using Linux in its treasury management and land record management departments, according to a recent article in The Times of India.
The state of Kerala is using open source software for "many" of its e-Government initiatives, Ajay Kumar, the secretary to the Keralan government said in a conference speech. A number of schools across the state are using open source software on PCs, including over 40 schools in the Kannur district.
Mandriva's chief executive, Bancilhon says it is in talks with an Indian government agency at the moment and expects to deploy Linux on between 10,000 to 100,000 machines.
The Indian national government and the majority of state authorities have a neutral policy around open source. Kerala is thought to be one of the few states to have a policy that formally promotes open source. "The Government wishes to encourage the judicious use of open source/free software that compliments/supplements proprietary software, to reduce the total cost of ownership of IT applications/solutions without compromising on the immediate and medium term value provided by the application," the Kerala government states in its IT policy document.
The Indian government has funded a number of initiatives to promote and research the use of open source, including the foundation of the Open Source Software Resource Center, which aims to...
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Talkback
Funny, I always thought Brazil was located in the western hemisphere. Oh wait! It is!
anti-Americanism ???
Most of the major Linux distributions are American.
So tell me again how using Linux is anti-Americanism?????
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_Linux_distributions
DO NOT click the Times of India link! It threw a bunch of popups right past my blocker, and started trying to install something(!) When I tried to kill the installer, my whole system hung.
The link to the Times of India has been removed.
Thanks for your feedback -- it seemed to work alright in testing earlier, so apologies for it causing problems.
You can ask every serious IT security expert to learn that it is not paranoid to be afraid of backdoors in closed source systems. For example, do you remember the NSA-key in Windows NT which could be interpreted as a backdoor? What about the CIA-made software bug which caused the explosion of a soviet gas pipeline and was the biggest non-nuclear explosion ever? Finally the US-american spy plane which stranded 2001 in China represents the relationship of the USA to China. Now tell me that there are no good reasons for China to distrust the USA! This is not paranoid and it is not anti-Americanism as well. Anti-Americanism is to decline everything from America without a reason. (In fact you are talking about anti-US-Americanism and not anti-Americanism)
F/OSS is pro-American. Where do you get this anti- Americanism from. MS is not the US -- yet -- as much as Gates would like you to think so. Gates has no respect for US laws whether traffic laws or trade laws. No respect for the US DOJ. MS pays little or no taxes and causes billions of damage every quarter through lost productivity in the work place caused by its defective products (downtime, maintenance, viruses, cracking and phishing).
What's more "American" freedom and self governenance which you get with F/OSS? Or the one-size-fits-all, top down Soviet style monolith provided by Microsoft?