> Govt of India plans to provide IT infrastructure to schools
(excerpt and
> link below). India will endup funding MS unless, some of us take a
little
> time of and help educate the powers that be about Linux.
The way in which Indian government works, they end up funding some big guns
and themselves. It is kinda useless to point out the savings that can be
made by using Linux. In fact that can be counterproductive. Ppl in the
Indian government like to spend money and get kickbacks in return. How can
you get a kickback when you use free stuff? With the kind of questionable
practices that MS follows, I am sure that they won't offer their sw w/o
kickbacks!
The only way in which I feel that we can convince the Indian government to
move away from M$ and onto Linux is to use these points:
1. Linux and other OSS products are completely open, so no backdoor can be
put into the software. Anyone can study them. And there are a lot more
people studying them around the world than those studying MS code under the
shared source program. Peer review ensures that backdoors are typically very
difficult to introduce. Even if you can see the source code for MS windows,
are you sure that it is the same source code that is used to build your copy
of windows? Can you find all the backdoors that might have been put into the
code. Even MS QA has previously let some backdoors thru (there was some
backdoor password about netscape users/employees being weenies some time
back in some M$ product).
2. Linux doesn't require any kind of activation to be useful. I don't think
that any government would like to use software that can be disabled by a
powerful country like the US. With MS products that require activation, this
is a real problem
3. By investing in MS products, we are not helping the Indian IT industry.
If we use Linux in govt programs, we can employ a large number of Indians to
work on these products and make them better not only for the government but
also for the country as a whole. If the government sponsors development of
OSS products, then everyone can benefit from them. Using M$ products will
only line the pockets of a company that follows unfair trade practices (as
per the US courts ruling on the various lawsuits against M$ including Stac
electronics, Netscape and Sun)
4. Typically viruses like code red, nimda, slammer and sircam don't attack
linux boxes. You don't wan't a virus like Sircam to email your important
documents to the world. Also since OSS software can be modified and
recompiled by anyone using them, the chances of a generic worm hitting those
systems becomes lesser. This is not the case always, but many security
exploits depend on the actual version of the binary that is running to be
successful.
5. A lot of countries are moving towards Linux. Germany and China are the 2
countries that come to my mind right now.
This is all I could think about the advantages of Linux and OSS as of now. I
suppose we can expand this list further. What we also need is to have a few
industry bigwigs who will promote Linux. After all MS is quite big, and they
are successful. I feel that we should also get the technically savvy
politicians to listen to us and to realize that spending on MS products is a
lot more than wasting money. It can have negetive impact on our nation and
to our IT industry in the long run.
Ambar
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