There is a reasonably good level of awareness in India regarding FLOSS, its potentials and possibilities, more perhaps in the government and academic circles than in the industry. There would hardly be any public sector department or academic department without some one there being passionate about FLOSS who keeps crusading its cause. Very large number of SMB/SME s survive on use of FLOSS for their IT infrastructure. Web browsers, mail clients, office tools, operating systems, web servers, data bases etc are some of the areas where FLOSS Products are popular and are making an impact. Academic and R&D sectors are also beginning to use popular FLOSS tools in areas like Signal Processing, Design and Drawing, GIS, Library Management, Academic Course Management, etc.
In the public sector in India, FLOSS is felt relevant on the following counts: (I) cost-effectiveness for implementing E-Governance programs, especially at the early stages, (ii) avoidance of risks associated with vendor lock-in , (iii) Security concerns,especially in strategic applications (iv) Ability to modify and adapt as needed for the context,(v) curbing the use of unlicensed software which is otherwise quite high. However, at present there is no comprehensive policy in the government towards FLOSS in India; the various initiatives being taken are centered around the interests and passions of individuals with in the different segments of the governments. These take the form of introducing popular FLOSS tools and applications like Firefox, Thunderbird, OpenOffice, Linux, Apache, JBOSS, KDE, Postgres and MySQL, Perl, Python, etc. It is however the case that none of the various Applications being developed by the government departments for their use are being done in the FLOSS mode; even when there is commitment to FLOSS, it doesn't seem to go beyond using the commonly available FLOSS tools and platforms.
Affordability is the single most key aspect of FLOSS as far as citizens are concerned, as it is this that can make it possible to reach IT and its benefits to the citizens. With the government of India coming up with more and more Internet-enabled citizen-services as part of their e-governance programs, their reach or penetration amongst the masses becomes a central issue that will decide the success of such programs – something which in turn depends on the affordability aspect.
In the absence of any clear policy directives, FLOSS in India is spreading at the rate at which it is doing almost entirely on its own merits,through diffusion, depending on the interests and initiatives of individual players. FLOSS Community, especially the Linux User Groups (LUGs), have played a major role in popularizing FLOSS in India. Various governments have also started working on evolving FLOSS Policies, and these should be in place with in an year or so. As far as the Central Government of India is concerned, such policy pronouncements are however unlikely to take the form of enforceable mandates; they are likely to be rather advisory in nature, indicating some amount of preference for FLOSS and Open Standards over proprietary softwares and standards in government procurements and implementations. Other than the lack of any clear policy directives, the other major bottleneck in the greater spread of FLOSS in India is the lack of trained man power necessary to support and sustain individual initiatives. Availability of trained FLOSS manpower can give a great impetus to its absorption in enterprises, especially in the SME sector, which is why NRCFLOSS has a sharp focus on the issue of HRD in FLOSS.
Globally, India has not been a great contributor to the FLOSS corpus so far; the FLOSS Movement, like much else, has been dominated by the west, and 'outsiders' don't generally find it easy to join in except peripherally and as consumers. India has largely been a major consumer of FLOSS so far, though a number of Indians outside India do contribute to the global FLOSS corpus. But with greater levels of FLOSS competence and confidence building up in the country, this is likely to change and India may also start contributing to the global FLOSS corpus in significant ways. By and large India is likely to follow the trend in the rest of the world in the future use of FLOSS , though with greater intensity and commitment due to the lower cost factor. An area where FLOSS may have a great impact in India is that of Indian language computing where the FLOSS way may be the only available way due to the very low profit margins that alone can be expected in this domain --the potentially huge size of this market segment can be gauged from the fact that only through an Indian language can one reach over 90% of India's 1.2 billion strong population!
India needs FLOSS to enhance its Software and IT innovativeness. India's success in providing Software and IT-enabled services to the western world have been driven largely by its ability to produce a massive pool of computer and IT engineers, presently at the rate of about 300,000 an year, and organise them into a committed work force that was very low cost by western standards. The work content involved in this however has been largely mediocre,at a level suited to the talent level of the work force, and has not called for any great levels of technological innovation and creativity, due to (I) need to work only with black box packages and tools necessary for supplying the services needed, (ii) working for remote markets that the developers were not familiar with. With the low cost advantage slowly vanishing,Indian Software and IT industry can retain the western markets only if its work 'moves up the value chain' – something that needs a work force with better skills and talents as can be produced through the FLOSS route of education and training. Parallely, with the size of the Indian economy expanding, there is a large emerging local Software and IT market with in the country that needs products and services suited for its distinct local conditions – something that again calls for creativity and innovation as is best possible in the FLOSS mode. The key to both these aspects lies in basing software and IT education and training on the tools, techniques and methodology of the FLOSS Movement, a direction that NRCFLOSS plans to explore soon.
www.nrcFLOSS.org.in http://nrcFLOSShelpline.in/web/
NRCFLOSS (India) was initiated in 2005 with a 3-year project funding by the Govt. Of India, and with a broad mandate of FLOSS promotion in India. It is being executed jointly by a government R&D agency called C -DAC (www.cdac.in), and the AU-KBC Research Centre of Anna University Chennai (www.au-kbc.org), the first party focusing on FLOSS Product Development/ Deployment, and the thrust of the second party (ours) being on Human Resource Development in FLOSS.
NRCFLOSS has a broad mandate of promoting the tools, technologies, products, architectures, applications, methodology and philosophy of FLOSS amongst the various sections of the Indian society. As a publicly funded entity, it has two broad objectives – (i) How can FLOSS help sustain and enhance India's standing and strength in the software and IT fields? (ii) How can FLOSS help make Software and IT affordable to the masses and thereby help bridge the “digital divide”? Enhancing the quality of our computer and IT graduates through training them in FLOSS and its methodologies is one of the ways we are trying to address the first question, while large scale promotion of FLOSS tools and technologies is expected to contribute to answering the second question. We have succeeded in getting many Universities to accept the importance of FLOSS and introduce them as formal subjects of study with credits, as a part of the curricula themselves. As availability of having teachers trained in FLOSS is a critical step in FLOSS promotion in colleges and universities, we have particularly concentrated on this and have so far trained over 250 teachers from all over the country. In the last three years, over 2000 engineering students have gone through the formal FLOSS Elective Courses designed by us. We are also exploring as to how entire CSE/IT Degree programs could be designed around the philosophy, methodology and tools of FLOSS, as is presently being discussed in Europe.
As a university- led activity, NRCFLOSS at Anna University also works with the larger goals of promoting ideas of freedom and collective ownership of knowledge through its work. In this dimension, it works closely with the Indian FLOSS Community.
The C-DAC part of NRCFLOSS has been promoting an Indian Linux Distribution ( a Debian derivative) called BOSS Distribution that is especially tailored to meet the needs of E-Governance programs of the government, and having certain Indian Language support features. It is expected that the BOSS platform will be promoted strongly with in the government, providing a common FLOSS adoption environment.
NRCFLOSS project funding is presently being extended by the government, along with efforts to stabilize it financially and institutionally.