back to article Prostrate yourself before the GNU, commands Indian DEITY

The best-acronymed government department in the world – India's Department of Electronics and Information Technology (DEITY) – has laid out a new policy (PDF) commanding the nation's government to use only open source software. The policy statement is rather blunt: Government of India shall endeavour to adopt Open Source …

  1. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Would The Reg please stop

    mentioning UK government FOSS adoption ? Unless of course you're trying to make us all laugh.

    It's hopeless.

    Here in the part of the world I'm currently living in, the local government is cutting more than 1 billion dollars from their internal spending. Everything gets cut except for money bags flowing smoothly to Redmond coffers. This is the same government who a few years ago went to court to be allowed not to disclose how much is spending on Microsoft licenses.

    1. Christian Berger

      Re: Would The Reg please stop

      Well as usual many coorporations are _much_ worse than that. I used to work in a large appliance manufacturer with a "no FOSS" policy. This is because one of the owner companies was sued for violating the GPL because they didn't respond to a complain within 2 months or so.

      License costs are actually rather irrelevant. What's more expensive is the lost productivity because commercial standard software often is inferior to its FOSS counterparts, plus a certain correlation between not using FOSS software in your mix of software and making rational decisions.

      1. This post has been deleted by its author

        1. Christian Berger

          Re: Would The Reg please stop

          > Do they realise how much FOSS gets used in commercial software these days? Or have they written their own in-house replacement for zlib? Try grepping, (oops, grep must be banned), searching for the BSD copyright strings in some of the windows executables like ftp.exe.

          BSD code is kinda OK. No they don't use grep, they use a commercial tool called "Black Duck" which is hugely expensive.

          > Oh dear, not that easy to escape, is it?

          Yes, but they are trying hard. Instead of Windows, they have a special cut down version of it called "New Office". The top point on the feature list of a release I've seen was "Disable IPv6 support". We could only use IE and with special permission "Google Chrome".

          The situation was so bad, departments routinely got themselves a "shadow IT" where they used some of their budget to buy laptops without the IT department knowing about. Our department even managed to get Internet access.

          1. Anonymous Coward
            Anonymous Coward

            Re: Would The Reg please stop

            > No they don't use grep, they use a commercial tool called "Black Duck" which is hugely expensive.

            Why? "findstr" is the command on Windows.

            > Instead of Windows, they have a special cut down version of it called "New Office".

            This reads more like you have an idiotic IT department than anything else.

            > to buy laptops without the IT department knowing about.

            Regardless of the IT department's idiocy, this is even *MORE* idiotic as it exposes the company infrastructure to active threats.

            You have many more problems than the software stack your company chooses. A well managed Windows deployment will give a performant and smooth running operation.

            1. Anonymous Coward
              Anonymous Coward

              Re: Would The Reg please stop

              A well managed Windows deployment will give a performant and smooth running operation.

              Are you sure about that? Several of our clients either have already moved away from windows or are in the process of doing so all because of problems and costs.

      2. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Would The Reg please stop

        > What's more expensive is the lost productivity because commercial standard software often is inferior to its FOSS counterparts

        I think you have the words "inferior" and "superior" confused.

        There are very good reasons why the GNU project has failed. Most of these revolve around the complete lack of commercial support offerings from professional vendors, lax testing prior to release and the near total lack of proper documentation (never mind translation). And that's before we get into the threats that the GPL poses to IP or the potential to be sued for F/OSS patent infringements.

        If you want to run a successful commercial business, you need a professional partner who will have your back and ensure there are no potential legal threats. If you just want to run a toe-jam harvesting co-operative, then by all means use F/OSS.

        It is a shame that India has taken this retrograde step, they used to have one of the most vibrant IT sectors. Now it will be hampered by a plethora of part-backed solutions and all using different standards.

        > License costs are actually rather irrelevant.

        Completely correct. The cost of training and support are the biggest problems and, as (for example) the Munich report clearly showed, these are massively greater with any F/OSS solutions for the reasons I have highlighted above.

        1. Chemist

          Re: Would The Reg please stop

          "If you want to run a successful commercial business, you need a professional partner who will have your back and ensure there are no potential legal threats. "

          ?

          Do you mean "will have the shirt off your back" ?

          1. ratfox
            Coat

            Re: Would The Reg please stop

            Well, in order to stab it, they must first have your back, ain't it?

        2. mathew42

          Re: Would The Reg please stop

          > There are very good reasons why the GNU project has failed. Most of these revolve around the complete lack of commercial support offerings from professional vendors

          So Red Hat with revenue of $1.5 billion in 2014 is not a vendor you can turn to for professional support?

          Have you tried to obtain support from large commercial software companies? Unless you are Fortune 500 it is very unlikely they will give you the time of day. If you are a Fortune 500 company then you can afford to have a kernel developer or OpenOffice or ... on staff to resolve issues.

          > It is a shame that India has taken this retrograde step

          I would suggest it is a very positive step. If Indian companies can become experts in supporting open source software then they have the technical skill to provide consulting to the entire would.

          1. Anonymous Coward
            Anonymous Coward

            Re: Would The Reg please stop

            Sure. And there is a lot of proprietary, non FOSS software running on those RHEL, believe me... Oracle to start with. A lot of them just replaced Solaris when the latter became a dead end.

            You can get support - usually you have to pay for it, but you don't need to be a "Fortune" company to obtain it. It is true for RHEL too.

            FOSS ha been able to cover some horizontal needs - some, not every - but many vertical markets can't be covered because FOSS is not good at covering them, there are not enough companies interested in those products as byside ones but still paying developers working on them, or a wide enough "community" to sustain development for professional-grade applications.

            It's good anyway that India is moving to FOSS, I hope proprietary software development will move away form India, and return to proper developed software by proper developers, and not the crap actually coded in India - the really lack the proper culture to develop good software... good luck to FOSS projects, when those developers will start to turn it into crap too...

        3. Doctor Syntax Silver badge
          Pint

          Re: Would The Reg please stop

          "If you want to run a successful commercial business, you need a professional partner who will have your back and ensure there are no potential legal threats. If you just want to run a toe-jam harvesting co-operative, then by all means use F/OSS."

          This reminded me of the time when the client's invoicing run broke on the second successive Friday lunchtime (see icon) by blowing up the database engine. Although it was a proprietary application we had the source code to most of it so, after repairing the damage, I spent the rest of the afternoon going through the it & rung up the profession partner, i.e. vendor, to tell them how to write code that didn't cause to engine to keep taking bites of memory without releasing them. Free or not there's a benefit to having the source.

        4. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: Would The Reg please stop

          >>Most of these revolve around the complete lack of commercial support offerings from professional vendors, lax testing prior to release

          Oh really - you've described Microsoft's business model perfectly there. Unless you're a Fortune 500 company good luck trying to get any support from Microsoft. I have painful memories of being inflicted with beta software from them over the years starting with Win 3.1.

          At least the FOSS developers don't take your money and pretend to offer you a "product".

          It's so nonsensical - what Microsoft does that should be charged under the RICO act (racketeering and profiting).

      3. thames

        Re: Would The Reg please stop

        @Christian Berger - " I used to work in a large appliance manufacturer with a "no FOSS" policy. This is because one of the owner companies was sued for violating the GPL because they didn't respond to a complain within 2 months or so."

        Was that an IT appliance manufacturer, or a kitchen appliance manufacturer? If the latter, they must really have struggled to find a way to violate the license. Even for the former they must really have worked at it because the number of actual FOSS copyright lawsuits that I have heard of can probably be counted on the fingers of one hand (mainly Busybox in embedded systems), and those have always taken years of ignored lawyers letters from the copyright holders before they took the step of going to court over it.

        And I have to wonder just how sympathetic Microsoft or Oracle would be to pirating their software if you simply ignore their complaints. Those companies sue loads of people all the time over license violations.

        Anyway, their IT setup must be interesting, because they can't use Java since that's open source (GPL) and loads of Java libraries and frameworks are only available as open source. Their heads must be ready to explode now that Dot Net is supposedly becoming open source.

        If Microsoft drops out of the phone OS business, they are going to be rather limited in their choice of mobile phones since both Android, Apple, and Blackberry phones all have substantial FOSS bits that can't be removed.

  2. Michael Thibault
    Trollface

    Nice fit

    Pantheism and linux distros. What can possibly go right/wrong?

    1. frank ly
      Thumb Up

      Re: Nice fit

      "Pantheism and linux distros." A perfect cultural match :)

    2. launcap Silver badge

      Re: Nice fit

      > Pantheism and linux distros. What can possibly go right/wrong?

      Steady on - the systemd developers accept no other deity than them..

  3. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Stallman just got a post card from the Indian govt. saying "Having a great time, VishGnu were here" ;)

  4. Spaceman Spiff

    The DIETY has spoken!

    "Thou shalt use free and open source software, when possible!" - key in sound of thunder...

    Actually, that sounds good to me! Sometimes you need to use proprietary cruft - all of my software is FOSS except for my software engineering tool Sparx Enterprise Architect. At least the cost is reasonable, and it runs well on Linux with Wine.

    1. Doctor Syntax Silver badge

      Re: The DIETY has spoken!

      +1 for EA

POST COMMENT House rules

Not a member of The Register? Create a new account here.

  • Enter your comment

  • Add an icon

Anonymous cowards cannot choose their icon

Other stories you might like