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Comment by ramshanker | Hacker News Reader

Once a working computer is available commercially, A mandate would be issued by the central government ministries to 250+ Public Sector Undertaking ( Companies with >50% govt equity) to procure only these RISCV computers. This way we can definitely bring it up to speed real fast.

PS: From my experience working currently for one of those PSUs .

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I doubt this will happen, even if they do issue a mandate.

Indian government computers are still running windows 7 or so and its hard to get them to switch to Linux.

What happens when theyre forced to run Linux and a new architecture ? All of them will just obtain exemptions to continue using windows + x86 claiming some software they need doesnt work.

Teaching a 50 year govt employee how to use QEMU + Wine to emulate x86 and then run a translation layer to run windows software is impossible.

> Indian government computers are still running windows 7 or so and its hard to get them to switch to Linux.

In many ways, switching from Win7 to Linux is more convenient than going with Win 10 and more recent MS products. This is a significant opportunity where real change might be possible.

Many departments in Indian govt using CentOS

How so? Who is going to rewrite decades worth of software to run on linux?

Win7 software tends to run quite well in Wine. Of course some things like document/spreadsheet macros are more problematic, but those are not that common and can be rewritten.

Almost everything is web now. Have friends in TCS, and they get a lot of government contracts.

Almost everything is accessed through web GUIs nowadays.

If the government makes a political decision, it can and does browbeat PSUs into compliance. There will be a lot of teething troubles and loss of productivity. But the thing is it won't matter for PSUs, nobody expects them to be highly efficient. I remember reading years ago that IDBI (A quasi-PSU Bank) switched to Linux for their terminals. The core banking for most Indian banks is powered by Finacle on Linux.

What if it is for mobile phones or tables? Everyone now a days knows to use android phone/tablets.

Sounds more like a push to get a bigger discount out of Microsoft.

Microsoft, Oracle have significant lobbying power within the government and PSUs.

This was true ten years ago. Not aware of the situation now.

Indian PSUs pay millions of dollars for sub-quality software.

And this will give government departments one more excuse to not deilver on time, Computer is not working or too slow.

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