An alternative to e-governance?

By Our Special Correspondent

THIRUVANANTHAPURAM, JULY 23. Non-proprietary software may emerge as an alternative to e-governance and e-education programmes in the country with the inauguration of the Indian chapter of the Free Software Foundation (FSF) here last week.

The president of the foundation, Mr. Richard M. Stallman, who launched the activities of the chapter, called on the Kerala Minister for Information Technology, Mr. P. K. Kunhalikutty, to impress upon him the need to use Free Software for the Government's computerisation programmes. Mr. Stallman will also visit Hyderabad this week with a similar mission. He will be in India for about a month to promote the use and development of the software. At the moment, governments have only begun to consider Free Software or the similar Open Source software as an option.

The Free Software Foundation, headquartered in Boston, U.S., is dedicated to promoting computer users' rights to use, study, copy, modify and redistribute computer programmes. The software is supplied under a special General Public Licence that allows users to modify the software, subject to the condition that redistribution should be with the source code under the Public Licence. The FSF India is the result of initiatives taken by a group of Government officials and Free Software practitioners and enthusiasts in India.

Speaking at the inaugural function here, Mr. Stallman said computer users deserved the freedom to share and change software, the way cooks share and change recipes.

A government that wants to implement vernacular language in a proprietary Operating System (OS) has no alternative but to go to the company that produced the software in the first place. That company, on its part, will undertake to do this work only if it made commercial sense. On the other hand, with a free OS, the Government could adopt an existing product and produce a custom implementation that can be distributed without any legal problems.

There was no way to figure out what a proprietary programme does, since executable code was not human-readable. Governments, according to Mr. Stallman, were waking up to the fact that Free Operating Systems were much more appropriate for applications of national importance.

Along with the inauguration of the FSF India, FreeDevelopers, a self-regulatory organisation of Free Software developers from around the world, has also set up its branch in India. Free software developers are now gearing themselves to offer a serious challenge to Microsoft by developing DotGNU as a Free Software alternative to the .Net services.

Send this article to Friends by E-Mail

Section  : National
Previous : Pier not the villain in Kadalundi mishap: REC
           faculty