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Indian Govt departments opt for open source?
By siliconindia
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Wednesday, 20 January 2010, 19:55 IST
New Delhi: Indian government had proposed a draft to adopt open source technology standards and software for automating different government departments and functions. But India's open source software lobbyists have alleged that the draft might end up favouring popular software solutions from large companies such as Microsoft, according to Economic Times.
ET reports that according to people familiar with the draft recommendations, a meeting of the apex body on Standards for eGovernance was held last week, and the policy is close to being approved. "The modifications made to the suggestions given by an expert committee recommendations would make the policy very weak and not favour open standards," says Dr. G Nagarajan, Chairman of the Free Software Foundation of India, which advocates that the software should be free and open for all.
The policy was drafted by taking suggestions from an expert committee comprising of many IIT professors. The main purpose of the policy is to guide the billion dollar e-governance purchases and tenders across government departments for software and hardware over next few years. The government has already allocated about $6 billion for various projects under the national e-governance plan. The new draft policy recommends that standards which are 'mature and have a large proliferation' will be considered. This is being contended by the open source software community which says that it will favour proprietary standards which have large proliferation amongst masses.
The most contentious point of the policy is that it includes standards which may be royalty free and non discriminatory (RAND) as compared to fair royalty free and non discriminatory (FRAND), which many experts had recommended. "The entire standard should be Royalty Free (RF) and not just the "essential" parts of it. In other words, all patent claims necessary to implement the standard should be RF. Also, RF on FRAND/RAND is self-contradictory. If a standard is RF then it cannot be RAND," says Venkatesh Hariharan , a blogger and expert on open source affairs.