Tiffs within IT sector over govt.'s open source policy

NEW DELHI: IT industry is having a difference in opinion over government's draft policy on open source standards for awarding e-governance projects. The policy aims to adopt a single and royalty-free standard for awarding $9 billion e-governance projects, including the national ID project, reports the Economic Times.

While IT majors like Red Hat and Sun Microsystems are praising it, industry associations like Nasscom, MAIT and Microsoft are opposing the policy as it may hurt business interests of some companies.

The draft policy will guide the multi-billion dollar procurement of IT software and hardware across departments to ensure interoperability among disparate IT systems. The policy will ensure that India does not suffer a technology denial or lock-in of data (like electoral rolls or citizen data), in case of sanctions on India, like in case of a nuclear test.

Supporting multiple technical standards is a very complex task, according to the policy. It says, "Adopting a quadratic number of en-converters /de-converters - one for every pair of available standards, is a very naive approach. All this will lead to unstable and unreliable systems, defeating the purpose of standardization for e-governance."

It adds,"The way out is a single internal standard to which other choices (of software and hardware) can be bi-directionally converted and/or interfaced. Judicious choice of this particular standard is very critical."

For large projects like the Unique ID project, adopting a proper standard is very crucial, which is estimated to be over 20,000 crore, as they may involve interfacing with many ministries. Data like electoral rolls, birth date, age, address will also need to be maintained over scores of years, without the fear of locking.

Narayan Murthy, Chairman, Infosys had earlier supported multiple standards for the IT industry. The company is currently in a silent period due to the upcoming quarterly results. Industry body, Nasscom is fiercely opposing the idea of a single and royalty-free standard.

"Ways can be worked out commercially to make a large e-governance project viable. Making everything patent-free may not be a commercial proposition as there might not be good standards available. On the other hand, adopting a single standard may constrict the country to adopt an old standard, if a new and better standard emerges in future. We support multiple standards which ensure interoperability at zero cost," said Rajdeep Sehrawat, Vice President, Nasscom.

Microsoft opines to stand by multiple standards.