Indian Government adopts an open source policy
opensource.com
opensource.com
Here are recent Indian Government (or Indian States) Projects:
1. Cheap 35$ laptop. We all know how that turned out.
2. Here a App developed by a State Government with Multi Million Dollars budget recently: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.apgov.apsp...
Yes it has only 1000 downloads after multi million dollar budget and not even localized to local language. This is by a state CM's personal pet project who claims to be pro Technology.
When Governments like this announce any initiative, look beyond headlines, Someone is making merry of tax payers money.
To cite just one example - BOSS Linux was installed along side Windows (dual boot) in the free laptops given to students by the Tamil Nadu govt. This alone helped introduce thousands of students to linux.
Why is that so good, and so worth lots of government money?
It encourages tinkering which is especially important for students.
Also, many other general benefits that open-source brings. For example, open source code is more trustable than closed source.
For many organizations, Windows is actually monetarily cheaper than Linux, particularly organizations that need to deploy non-web GUI applications for users who are never going to be comfortable on a terminal.
In general, this is just intent. I am not sure how the government plans to implement this. Government in India is huge and complex and most of the arms run independently, which is great for IT services vendors like IBM, TCS and others since they make money by selling the same stuff over and over again.
People who I know and are working in various organizations with the government are pretty frustrated with the pace and lack of intent on the ground.
Most Indian FOSS projects like BOSS Linux are pretty lame and they don't have any real community behind them. I think they took down the forum on the BOSS linux website, because there were no questions asked. Some of the other "successful" services like Spoken Tutorials (http://spoken-tutorial.org/) are pretty bad too (though I see websites have improved).
As a tax paying Indian citizen, I really hope all this changes.
Their answer is always take the product in the market and throw a few million dollars at it to make it do what we want. And then ignore the fact its software, and needs constant maintenance and vigilance and they could get that all for free if they were participatory rather than off on their own.
Thank you. URL changed to that from http://tuxdiary.com/2015/11/02/indian-govt-adopts-open-sourc....
1. Where is the source for Boss Linux. It's based on Debian, but couldn't find the link to view the source. It's all nice to talk about embracing open source, but shouldn't CDAC also publish the source for Boss Linux?
2. What is the update mechanism? How frequently will this distro be updated?
They just jump on that desktop and go.
Why do government workers always need formal retraining? Every job i've ever worked involved constant intake of new skills without dropping tools and attending a class. For a new OS in an office environ that generally boils down to "Here is your new OS. Play around with the colours if you want, but that memo is still due Thursday."
Yes, the UI is different, but the concepts you're dealing with are still the same and if you know the concepts then a new UI is just a small and temporary inconvenience, rather then a barrier.
The biggest problem will actually be incompatibilities, which happen for example with advanced usage of Excel documents, but you know, in such cases it's better to switch to portable formats that work across multiple products (i.e. ODF) and it's better to do it sooner rather than later, because as a freaking government you should keep your documents accessible for everybody. And if you switch to portable formats and a set of features supported in both Microsoft Office and LibreOffice, you don't even have to move everybody to LibreOffice at once. So on the whole I feel that this is a red herring.
Like if they can't read the tiny font in the file menu. Then they google it, and discover they need to "sudo apt-get install unity-tweak-tool." Then they manage to actually find a terminal window and run the command, and install the tool, and turn up every available font rendering option, and it still doesn't solve their problem.
That is just one real world example. Linux is an operating system used and built primarily by people who are willing to put up with a little bit of crap to get 99% of what they want, and live with the rest. Imagine if Windows or OSX required you to open a terminal and install a third party lib to increase your font size. People would call them insane.
Just to be clear: I use a linux desktop every day. I love it and it would require a substantial increase in compensation for me to switch back to a Windows machine. But saying that computer illiterate/naive workforce can switch operating systems with no retraining costs is demonstrably false.
My experience is that there is no substantial difference in the amount of "fucking around" you have to do with Windows or Linux. I had to install custom graphics drivers from third party sites, install custom keyboards, mess around with random settings, especially after upgrades between different OS versions.
Please show me an actual study instead of talking about personal anecdotes.
I do not think you are truly interested in changing your mind.
But at least I can ssh into their rigs after the fact and fix them remotely. Trying to get them running teamviewer every time there is a problem on Windows is a nightmare.
Also consider the #1 reason I get called is because people install some virus or spyware or clickjacker by clicking and running random stuff off the Internet. On any Linux based distro none of that stuff works so what ends up happening is my repeat customers every 2-4 months are Windows users and the dozen or so clients I have using some flavor of Ubuntu might email me once a year like "can I run X?" and I just go look on playonlinux if its supported or not. Libreoffice opens all the old Doc and XLS files fine, their printers work, their wifi works, they can use their crappy 1995 webmail client from their ISP no problem, and they even get neat perks like having their phone rings show up in their desktop notifications if they use KDEConnect.
Again, it's just one example. Others are far worse: try to figure out how to play a song or some other audio into a skype call by piping data directly into the mic input channel. It's pretty trivial in windows, and there are third party tools with easy to understand GUIs if you can't figure it out on your own. On Linux you'll be futzing with jackd configs for hours.
I don't like arbitrarily changing UX either, but it's not like Windows doesn't have that problem. I had massive switching headaches moving to the new "ribbon" based stuff in Microsoft Office.
Of course neither side is perfect, but I am thoroughly unconvinced by the "unusable" argument. THere are definitely biases with ignoring the headaches that Windows forces upon users.
For your first example ctrl double swipe on my trackpad works pretty much everywhere and ctrl +/- works everywhere except my terminal where ctrl-shift +/- does the job.
As for your second. This is not a common use case that any non-technical person would even think of trying. If you needed to I would suggest ignoring jackd (whatever that is) and using the gui for pulse audio control.
The second example is used by people who play video games all the time. People do it for skype/ventrilo calls during gaming sessions constantly. It may not be a common use for _for you_ but it is not as rare as you appear to think.
>discover they need to "sudo apt-get install unity-tweak-tool."
This is disingenuous, they would just install it through the app store like on a phone.
In my experience, the big problem in organizations are legacy documents and formats. Especially Excel. LibreOffice is good but it's not going to run the macros that were created 10 years ago by guys that are now retired in some beach.
The other big problem is specialized software (already amortized) that only run in Windows.
The funny thing is that kind of problems happens even between different versions of windows.
In fact, I see about 5 times as many Windows issues as Linux issues. And it's easier to fix a Linux machine.
This story that you are telling about how Windows is easy and Linux is hard, and about how there will be this big transition cost, is just bs.
Let me address the most common sentiment.. Why BOSS when we already have Debian, Ubuntu, Redhat etc.?
Support - gov bodies moving to linux need guaranteed support at optimal cost.
Localization - if you are working with Indian languages primarily, BOSS linux provides a better experience out of the box.
Some customization - some depts. request and get further customized versions.
Some gripes about BOSS:
(1) On the BOSS Download page, the download button downloads i386. Why isn't the 64-bit ISO listed there ?
(2) Why are there no torrents for ISOs ? Don't they know how bad Internet connection in India is ?
As far localization, my experience had been that BOSS is no better than Debian.
This way, they do not have to re-invent the wheel, but focus resources in the localization efforts for the OS, as well as the applications supported in the OS.
There would have been a meaningful contribution upstream.
One other point about you comment is that, while being succinct is excellent (something I need to learn), I couldn't really see what point you were trying to make. Sometimes it seems obvious to you, but to someone else your comment really could mean anything at all.
So, what were you trying to communicate on the topic?
If you see this in the light of the rest of the world they seem to be leading. But that's not the only measure. There have been discussions going on on this forever. It took them a really long time to formulate a policy. BOSS linux has been around for 8 years now but none of the govt divisions supported it. The most frustrating was to see the Income Ta department insisting (maybe not officially but my uncle who is a tax consultant told me they can't use anything else) on Microsoft Word documents to file tax.
So I think all the resources were there but only the policy and political will was lacking.
Why not downvote it? votes are for improving the signal to noise ratio, was your post signal or noise?