Foss time in India

Foss time in India

February 27-March 10, 2008. As the Secondary School Leaving Certificate (Class x) exams unfold across government schools in Kerala, students appearing for 'it Practicals' key in their answers into a computer that runs on foss, acronym for free and open source software. These students are comfortable with foss usage. As 13-year-old Nalin Sathya, who will sit for these exams next year, puts it, "The system is very easy to use and I can now use it even without seeing the monitor. Python programming language is very easy. I am trying to learn it."

Sathya's confidence emerges from a series of events that began eight years ago.In 2000, the state government asked the state-owned Centre for Development of Imaging Technology (c-dit) to prepare a software for friends--acronym for Fast, Reliable, Instant, Effective Network Distribution of Services--envisaged as a hassle-free facility for people to pay their bills on services such as water supply, power, electricity and telephone. The application was developed by a company called Comtech it solutions in tandem with Microsoft Corporation India Pvt Ltd, and friends took off in Thiruvananthapuram. It was so successful here the state government wanted it extended to the other 13 districts.

Honeymoon turns sour
As friends expanded to district headquarters, Comtech it demanded Rs 13 lakh towards intellectual property rights (ipr) over the software. Remembers Joseph C Matthew, adviser to the state it department, "Microsoft then wrote a letter to c-dit saying Comtech owns the copyright." Comtech also billed c-dit a further Rs 14 lakh for additions to the software. Faced with the prospect of paying up crores of rupees in order to extend friends to all towns and panchayats, c-dit began to internally develop software alternatives. When it refused to pay Comtech it, the latter dragged it to court claiming ipr for the changed software. In 2004, the high court dismissed the company's petition and upheld the government order declaring as 'protected system' the software c-dit had developed for friends. Today, the case continues in the supreme court.

More proprietary trouble
Co-eval with the duration of the case, another state-run programme ran into proprietary software trouble. This was the it @school programme, started in 2002 to spread computer education in government-run and -affiliated schools, and for which the government had tied up with Intel and Microsoft India. Soon after it @school began, Microsoft began raiding schools for using pirated software. "We had asked Microsoft not to carry out raids," says Biju Prabhakar, former it @school project director, "but they did not pay heed to our warnings."

The Left Democratic Party (ldf), then in opposition, took up cudgels. It berated Microsoft for the raids, and for derailing friends. Kerala State Teachers Association (ksta) in collaboration with the Free Software Foundation began a campaign to sensitize teachers on the costs and restrictions of proprietary software, and to encourage schools to shift to open source software.

As a result, the state government was forced to include free software products such as Linux and Open Office in the school curriculum just a year after the project began. The prescribed computer syllabus was also changed; thus, the 2003 it textbook for class ix contained material on both proprietary and open source operating systems, and the corresponding application softwares.

But on the ground
it@school continued its training programmes in the Windows platform in view of conducting the 'it Practicals' exam for class x within three years. In March 2004 the Directorate of Public Instruction introduced, on an experimental basis, an online examination system for class ix students, with a view to applying the system for class x students the next year. Windows 98/2000/xp was used to develop the experimental package and this required installing Windows 98 and ms Office in computers in all government-run and -affiliated schools, even in those that by now had shifted to open source software for their it education.

ksta took to the streets, demanding foss be installed in computers in schools. "Teachers boycotted classes and said they would boycott examinations if the class x 'it Practicals' was held using the Microsoft package," recounts V K Sasheedharan, then a ksta member. The government buckled under the pressure and finally accepted the demand to include foss in the it@school project.

2006 on
In 2006, the ldf came to power in Kerala. It introduced foss in the class viii syllabus, giving students the choice to opt for either foss or Microsoft. The very next year, it formulated an Information Technology Policy providing legitimacy to foss.

"The Government realizes that Free Software presents a unique opportunity in building a truly egalitarian knowledge society," reads clause 2.10 in the 'Vision and Mission' section. "The government will take all efforts to develop Free Software and Free Knowledge and mandate the appropriate use of Free Software in all ict initiatives".

The viewpoint is echoed in civil society in Kerala today. Says Sathyaseelan, master trainer at the blind school in Kasaragod district in North Kerala, "Ubuntu operating system has been very useful to us. The Microsoft software for the blind was very costly. So we could not buy one for each computer in our school. The free demo version would run only for 45 minutes. After that the computer had to be rebooted to use it again. That was very inconvenient."

Adds Jayashree Sreedharan, a former chemistry teacher and now a master trainer at the it@school project, "I have been exposed to both the systems, proprietary and foss. This new system gives us a sense of freedom, which we did not have in case of Microsoft. Now we can change it to suit our needs."

What is 'open' in Free and Open Source Software?

» When we buy a proprietary software, we are only buying the licence to use it under certain conditions. The conditions of use are explicitly laid out in the end user licence agreement.

But very few of us go through the elaborate licence agreement because it doesn't make much of a difference to a non-technical user (who is not into programming, for example). The licence agreement prohibits users from taking a part of the software to study how it works, modify, improve or even copy it.

The primary hindrance is that the source code is kept confidential. The source code gives instructions to the computer in a programming language using letters, numbers and punctuations. Therefore, if someone wants to customize the software to suit some special requirements, s/he will not be able to do it.For instance, if someone wants to use a software application in Bhutanese language, or develop a package for the visually challenged, the option is to get the source code from the proprietary software company. The source code in free and open source software (FOSS) is available to the user. FOSS is governed by the general public licence, which makes it mandatory for anybody who makes changes in the software to release the source code.

Features of FOSS include
• Free redistribution The software can be given as part of a package with other applications

• Source code The code must either be distributed with the software or easily accessible

• Derived works The code can be altered and distributed by the new author under the same licence conditions as the product on which it is based

• Integrity of the author's source code Derived works must not interfere with the original author's intent or work

• No discrimination The software should be user friendly for all, including the disabled for example. Also, there are no limitations on its use. People must be able to use the software for any purpose they want to

• Distribution of licence The rights of a program must apply to all to whom the program is re-distributed without need for an additional licence

• Licence must not be specific to a product FOSS should be compatible with all kinds of hardware and software. It must not contaminate other software and must be technology-neutral

How did it come about?

» Richard Stallman initiated the free software movement in the mid 1980s in the US.

In 1971, Stallman used to be a programmer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and it was around that time he worked with a software community using a massive central computer, which everybody shared.

The purpose of the community was to share software, an activity he says was "as natural as eating". A decade later, the members of the community found that they had become "illegal". They were shut out by either non-disclosure agreements or copyright notices that accompanied the operating system software they used. The notices forbade the sharing and modification of the software's source code--the program that made it work. As sharing and modifying the code was what the community was all about, this licence change presented a serious problem.

Stallman then decided that he would have to secure his independence by creating his own computer system if he wanted to write and share software with fellow programmers. He started off by creating Emacs, a programme that was given along with operating systems, and it could be used to change/modify the source code. James Gosling, another programmer, developed the software and called it Gosling Emacs.

Gosling initially allowed free distribution of the Gosling Emacs source code but later sold the rights to UniPress, a company based in Florida. The software was now called UniPress Emacs. UniPress threatened Stallman to stop distributing the Gosling source code, and Stallman had to comply. He later replaced these parts with his own code, and to prevent the free code from becoming proprietary in future, Stallman devised the General Public Licence. According to the licence, one had the freedom to run the software for any purpose, to give copies of the software to other people, to study and modify it and improve it and to distribute the improvement.

ctrl oh!

Kerala's conversion comes at a time when free and open source software (foss) acceptance is upscaling. Consider, first, other states. As early as 2002, Madhya Pradesh introduced foss in its e-governance (Gyandoot) and computer-enabled school education (Headstart) initiatives.

In 2007, Tamil Nadu introduced it in its e-governance projects with C Umashankar, managing director of Electronic Corporation of Tamil Nadu, almost single-handedly pushing for it. In the same year, Karnataka introduced it in its e-procurement projects.

Worldwide, too
In 2004, the local government in the city of Rome migrated to foss use in their desktops. In 2005, the courts in New South Wales started using it. In 2006, Venezuela passed a law mandating that, by 2008, all government infrastructure would migrate to foss. In 2007 Brazil declared a similar shift. In March this year, the European Union declared preference for foss for its new it projects. Around the same time, foss advocates lodged a complaint with the European parliament about its information technology systems relying exclusively on software manufactured by Microsoft.

In the us state of Mississippi, three counties and 30 agencies use an open source based management system to administer all law enforcement and homeland security forces. Birmingham City Council, uk, too, has shifted 1,500 computers and associated server infrastructure to Linux and other open-source software.

In China, according to their ministry of information industry, almost 70 per cent of all software purchases between 2004 and 2005 were of Linux-based products. The South Korean postal service, too, has shifted around 4,700 desktop computers from Microsoft Windows to Linux.

FOSS works
Security is a major reason for this shift (see box Why?). Another major reason is cost. In 2004, the California Department of Transportation initiated a project on identity and password management. The rollout required hardware and software worth about us $500,000. They decided to run the software application on an open source operating system. The cost was reduced to us $220,000. The experience of K P Abhilash, computer operator of the Khadi and Village Industries Board, Kerala, is similar. "We have saved Rs 10 lakh in the first phase of our shift to foss and hope to save Rs 20 lakh in the next one. We have also installed our home computers with foss. It is much more convenient. We have not faced any problems since we installed it." (see table open profit)

Open profit
Using FOSS has led to huge cost savings
Organizations	Projects	Cost savings
IDBI	Introduced FOSS in 900 computers	Rs 1 crore (a)
LIC	Replaced computers with thin clients running Linux and Mozilla	Rs 10 crore (a)
Franchise Tax Board (US)	Database of clients	US $330,000 (b)
Kerala, Department of Education	School computers in FOSS	Rs 41 crore (c)
Sources Compiled from various sources (a)- Express Computer, August 25, 2003 (b)-‘Why open source software/free software, look at numbers’, a report by David A Wheeler, 2007 (c)-Report of the Education Department, Government of Kerala, 2008

Why is foss cheaper? For proprietary software an individual has no choice but to buy one software for each computer. One cannot copy it or use it in more than one computer. That is one of the conditions of the licence agreement between the proprietary software company and the user. foss, on the other hand is governed by the General Public Licence, which says that a user can make any number of copies of the software and can use a software in any number of computers.

Is that a problem?
Interestingly, foss's increasing global acceptance coincides with perceivable dents in Microsoft's dominance. In Europe, especially, its behaviour is being questioned on a number of fronts (see box Giant cloud). Every tack the company takes seems to land it in more hot water.

The company in 2007 developed a software called Office Open xml (ooxml). It is a document format used to save files. The company wanted it to become a standard open format; for this, it needed certification from the International Organization for Standardization (iso), Geneva. India had earlier rejected the format saying it was neither compatible, nor inter-operable with existing formats (see 'Hard on Microsoft', Down To Earth, April 15, 2007). But the iso approved ooxml as a standard format at a meeting in Geneva on March 31, 2008.

Many grey areas here
The format was approved by 24 of the 32 countries that voted at the iso. Countries like the uk, Japan, Germany and Switzerland supported ooxml but India, China, Brazil, Cuba, South Africa and Venezuela opposed it. The voting process, participants say, was marked by absolute secrecy, accusation of manipulation of votes and hectic lobbying.

A Danish participant pointed out there was a lot of criticism against the format in his country and so couldn't understand why his country had approved ooxml. Steve Pepper, the chairperson of a Norwegian technology committee, which studied the format, has filed a protest against his country's decision of approving the format as an international standard on March 31. In a letter to the Norwegian Ministry of Trade, Pepper alleged serious irregularities behind Norway's go-ahead at the meet. "This decision does not reflect the view of the majority of the Norwegian committee where 80 per cent of the members felt that Norway should vote against ooxml," he adds.

Pro-foss groups of course do not buy Microsoft's claims. They see it as an attempt to subvert their movement for free and open sources. "They are not working with the 'open' community of developers but with a few companies that provide services to customers. They have not heard what the community is asking for. They only want the community to say what they want to hear. Clearly, this is an attempt to subvert the movement which is fast gaining ground internationally," says Ashish Gautam, country leader of ibm team on open standards.

option shift

"While about 65 per cent of servers use foss, about 90 per cent of personal computer users still use Microsoft in India," says Sunil Abraham, director of Mahiti, a small-scale software enterprise in Bangalore, pointing to a skew in the culture of computer use. What explains it? "It is still difficult to get services for such a software. The service providing companies for foss have not come of age," feels Rajiv Chawla, secretary, land survey department, Karnataka. But pro- foss groups argue it is not surprising considering most engineering colleges train students on Microsoft software. "Just the iit s train students based on concepts, others do not know anything but Microsoft," says Abraham.

Microsoft strategy
Microsoft introduces students to its software at a very early stage in their lives (also see box Patent fears). They have invested hugely in computer education in India-- us $421 million since 1991--and trained students by giving them free copies of cheap starter versions of their operating systems. In 2001, Microsoft sponsored an Intel project in which teachers would be paid around Rs 4,000 per month to learn computers using Microsoft software. They set up benchmarks for the teachers, who had to train a minimum of 20 other teachers. If a teacher trained 200 teachers, s/he would be paid Rs 1 lakh and given a pc. By 2006, Microsoft trained 540,000 teachers; by 2008-end they plan to train a million. "We have made unquantifiable investments in the market and are committed to developing the local software eco-system," says Karan Bajwa, director, public sector, Microsoft Corporation, India.

G Nagarjuna, chairperson, Free Software Foundation of India, is against such practices "If they want to work with the community they must stop interfering with the computer education. They are interfering by signing mou s with universities, colleges and schools to promote their technology," adds Arun M of space, which trains government personnel in Kerala. "Microsoft also has agreements with Indian it companies and hence they become the default service providers. The ties prevent them from shifting to foss."

Thus, Indian it companies are loath to shift they service their clients in the us, and if the clients want a solution based on Microsoft the company is forced to keep that. "The entire outsourcing in India stands on the huge amount of programming that has to go into proprietary software," says Nitin Desai, chairperson of Internet Governance Forum, a un body.

Business sense
Yet Abraham feels trends are changing. Organizations see business sense to switch to a new system, that now is more user friendly. "Computer software development is simple logic. Once you learn the language, it is not difficult. Many of the contributors to software development in the foss movement have been non-technical people," says Arun.

The view that foss is only for geeks and not for average pc users is also changing; a big catalyst here is its introduction in schools. Parents of children familiar with foss now demand computers be loaded with foss, so hardware vendors who earlier regarded Windows as the default operating system are starting to keep technicians trained to handle foss. "The dearth of people to service computers loaded with foss is gradually disappearing in Kerala," says Anvar Sadath, executive director of the it @School project. Teachers are also being trained to operate foss in the state. They in turn train it instructors in schools, he adds.

D C Mishra of National Informatics Centre says he hopes every village will have a training centre where people can come in their free time and participate in the development of the software. "It should become a part of the culture," he says. While the hope is fast becoming a reality in Kerala, there is still a larger population of computer users, as well as a market, that needs to be captured. How can this be done?

A national policy?
In January 2006, India took a small but important step towards the recognition of open source software. Recommended India's Knowledge Commission "Because of the enormous size and scope of e-governance effort in India and because of the availability of globally recognised software talent of Indians, we must actively encourage wherever possible open source software implementation". The report of the seventh round table of Ministers in Charge of Panchayati Raj, held in Jaipur in 2004, also said foss should be used in local self governance projects. But there is no policy yet.

Industry insiders attribute this to a divide between the National Informatics Centre, the technical wing of the Department of Information Technology (dit), and the administrative heads at dit. According to officials, dit spent Rs 1,000 crore to buy proprietary hardware and software for projects all over the country in 2007-2008. But, as Rajesh Aggarwal additional ceo of National Internet Exchange of India, puts it, "We have been saying that the government should make it mandatory to install foss in every computer. That will surely save a lot of money."

The current stand of the Indian government is they cannot exclusively recommend foss. How appropriate is this neutrality? "This will not do. foss is like a science-made, owned and consumed by people and hence should be promoted by the government," says Nagarjuna. "This indicates the government is promoting proprietary software." Tenders, for instance, are an appropriate representation of the government's mindset, characterised by a mixture of ignorance and perceptual bias (see box Biased tenders). It could be argued that there's no harm in government being politically correct. But here's a default question why is a proprietary regime with monopolistic tendencies ruling the roost in the country still when there are cheaper and more independent options available?