...develop open source software and training programs around such software, and the creation of a Web site to share the government's experiences with open source software.
The President of India, APJ Abdul Kalam, has advocated the use of open source software on a number of occasions. Last year, he called for the Indian military to use open source software to ward off cybersecurity threats and the year before he said it was 'unfortunate' that proprietary software, such as Windows, was so popular in India and called for the broader adoption of open source.
The Indian government's relatively neutral policy towards open source is driven by a desire to keep US companies happy, says Gartner's DiMaio. "The Indian government doesn't want to annoy its clients in US," he says. The technology outsourcing industry is of vital importance to the Indian economy, with the top 20 Indian IT services companies generating a combined $5.77bn from exports in 2003 to 2004.
Rao from AMIC claims the Indian government's attitude to open source has been influenced by "very strong" lobbying from Microsoft. The software giant has also been striking a number of partnerships with Indian outsourcing companies, including Infosys, with which it has jointly invested $8m to develop a portfolio of services.
Bancilhon from Mandriva disagrees that the Indian government is neutral towards open source. "The Indian government has a strong will to promote open source due to the potential to save costs and gain independence. India has a strong software expertise and wants to have the ability to control its own technology by being a partner rather than a customer," says Bancilhon.
Rao says the Indian public sector is more able to adopt open source than other countries in emerging markets due to its supply of skilled technology staff.
"There is a very good pool of IT talent in India. Other countries who have tried open source don't have the talent pool or skill sets, while in India there are a lot of good IT folks," says Rao.
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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?