Indian Government to develop its own Operating System and anti virus products | Hacker News Reader

Indian Government to develop its own Operating System and anti virus products

pluggd.in

25 pointsrkord34 comments

With due respect to the Indian government (I am Indian and quite a bit of work for the govt) producing a new operating system is a completely misguided effort. And anyway this sounds like a new distribution of linux (the article does say "Derived from debian"), not a new "operating system".

I would imagine the simpler explanation is that a few "scientists" at CDAC need to justify their existence and have convinced programming illiterate politicians/bureaucrats they are doing something useful fo a change.

I agree, re-inventing the wheel is misguided -- and I've never known a government to produce technology (sure wouldn't trust government-made technology).

Forgetting the Internet? How about all the stuff NASA made? How about crypto contributions from NSA? How about GPS from the US Navy?

You're right -- I mean consumer technology. Should've been more clear.

All the stuff I mentioned is used in consumer products...

Even then, the govt pays for the basic research from which any number of consumer products are derived. The government is essentially producing the technology, they just are shrink wrapping it and making a buck off of it.

Maybe they are just crowding out the other guys?

Yes, government did produce few good things which you can count with your fingers. What about the myriad of failures? If you think about all the wastage done by government, these few good things actually cost us a fortune [it's our tax money after all.]

Also, you are under the impression that if it was not for Government, we would have never seen GPS OR Internet or cryptographic progress. I would highly doubt that. I am sure that market would have produced similar (or even exact) solutions without all the waste.

EDIT:

Yes, government provide us with GPS technology but it was free market which made it accessible to everyone. Can you imagine government being able to envision that one can fit navigation tool inside a phone which fits in my pocket?

Respect due for a government?! Wow, yours is a strange and different country...

And from what we can see, it's not deserved.

The phrase looked more like rhetorical device to me.

Giving a govt the respect that it is due does not say anything about how much respect is due.

I wish press would stop phrasing "will customize a Linux distribution for their own use and internally standardize on that" as "will create their own operating system". See also Red Flag Linux, which was described in the press in the same way IIRC.

One is millions to billions of man hours, the other in the low thousands. They're not synonyms.

Building a new OS can come later (if ever) - they first need to build decent websites for the houses of Parliaments - see http://164.100.47.132/LssNew/members/memberdebate14.aspx?mps... (JS Pagination hurts my sensibilities - as does the more than occasional broken HTML).

I've written scrapers to gather data from these sites for my website, and besides dealing with the above mentioned issues, I have to constantly beware of not overloading their servers - as an example, simply fetching the next page for each MP listed in http://164.100.47.132/LssNew/Members/Alphabaticallist.aspx without a timeout crashes their servers :(.

Developing an OS is lame. First, the Govt OS is not going to be usable (compared to the modern OSs). Second, not everyone (even in the Govt) is not going to use it. The variety of apps deployed and being used in the Indian offices is mind-blowing. There is no way the Govt can convince all these offices to switch to a different platform without spending a huge amount as switching costs.

[Tangential: I want the Indian Government to come up with its own cryptographic protocols/algorithms like the NIST in the US does. Even if it is a variant of the prevalent crypto systems, it is better than nothing, at least for the top secret documents.

Anybody know what crypto algorithms/protocols the Govts other than US use for their classified information?]

" I want the Indian Government to some up with its own cryptographic protocols/algorithms like the NIST in the US does. "

Fwiw they do use their own algorithms. I know (and have worked with) people doing exactly this. Like most of the NSA's work in the USA what they do is classified. I am sure every government worth its name does similair things.

I am sure every government worth its name does similair things.

Eh, this is arguably bad. Cryptpography is only secure with massive peer review. The United States manages because the NSA is one of the largest cryptographic organizations in the world. Very few governments have the specialty mathematicians, cryptographs, and computer scientists to establish a suitable internal peer review process. India may be one of those countries, but I'm not sure.

> [Tangential: I want the Indian Government to come up with its own cryptographic protocols/algorithms like the NIST in the US does. Even if it is a variant of the prevalent crypto systems, it is better than nothing, at least for the top secret documents.

Why? They could just use the standard algorithms that have been proven hard to crack in the open.

Nothing New.

BOSS, the Debian-based Linux flavor mentioned in the article, has been available for quite some time (atleast 3 years). IMO, haven't seen anybody using it (including majority of people who developed it - NRCFOSS and C-DAC)

The Indian Govt. first needs to provide electricity to run electronic devices. Once they have figured that, and a million other basic necessities, maybe they can go ahead and waste some scientists on stuff like this.

Umm, I can't see a single source mentioned in the pluggd.in article, or the TOI article.(http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/tech/enterprise-it/infras...), or whether its a press release my Ministry of IT, or a blog post by an employee.

This is a very badly written article. We are not familiar with the kind or degree of attacks a government's information systems (in this case, Indian Gov) may be facing. We are also not familiar how many other governments have already done or are doing this (This stuff is generally not public).

When the defense ministry of the fourth largest military power is involved, there are reasons.

I can vouch for pluggd.in but not TOI, trust me. Refer http://www.pluggd.in/party-uid-the-big-opportunity-it-servic... and http://www.pluggd.in/iit-jee-engineering-education-in-india-... as some the most internationally appreciated coverages that this blog has done.

Govt. in India has had a poor track record in technology and overspending too.

Comparing TOI with Pluggd.in is a terrible parallel. TOI (Times of India) is world's largest read english daily with very high reputation in the country.

That said, I do agree with you that Indian Gov have had some past cases of overspending. But when things like 9/11 (New York) and 26/11 (Mumbai) happen, it's the Government we blame first. India is shifting towards a massive (given the population) National electronic ID infrastructure, security is needed.

Moreover, creating an OS is hardly a significant expense in a country's budget. After an event like 26/11 and given the fact that India is about to host multiple worldwide sporting events in next 1-2 years, this hardly looks like a waste.

Refer this: " Moreover, creating an OS is hardly a significant expense in a country's budget. After an event like 26/11 and given the fact that India is about to host multiple worldwide sporting events in next 1-2 years, this hardly looks like a waste."

That is one confused assessment of reality dude. Are you like saying guzzling down millions means nothing for a poor country like India?

And dude saying "TOI is world's largest bla bla" and then commenting The articles are badly written does really prove your mental state, is it?

The estimated Union budget for India this year is 10,20,838 Crore Indian Rupees (1 crore = 10 Million). Yes, building an OS is hardly an expense.

I was commenting on Pluggd.in article being written badly.

It sounds like they're doing it simply because they have a lot of break ins.

How is a new operating system supposed to ensure better passwords? 99% of break ins are because of really lame passwords, isn't that true?

Creating your own OS is for that reason like inventing your own type of house because you never remember to lock your door.

You could get away with passwords. There are some zero-knowledge protocols you can do with humans, instead of handing over a password.

You would probably not need a new operating system, since revamping logins (and similar) stuff would suffice. But you could get rid of passwords.

Please, the needs of a multi-lingual Asian government is vastly different from, what is popularly construed, the popular choice.

For e.g. Harfbuzz - the unified text layout engine for Linux. The competing technology is SIL-Graphite, which supports Smartfonts and compound alphabets. So what does Harfbuzz say ?

For established scripts though, there is not much reason to prefer Graphite over OpenType.

I am Indian and support this exercise - maybe 90% of it will be waste, maybe 10% wont be. Maybe finally we will have a Linux Desktop Summit in India, which is potentially the biggest market for open source software.

Maybe operating systems are something governments need to worry about. I would be happy if the National Security Agency submitted security patches.

SELinux was an extraordinary contribution by the NSA, and is now pervasive in Linux distributions.

Honestly creating an OS 40 years after desktops appeared on earth is a dumbass approach. And that not the desktops are dying too! It seems purely a plan to drain out taxpayers money as it has been the case in past for India anyway!

so tomorrow will they make their own cars because the driver couldn't keep off an accident.

What a waste of taxpayer money.

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