Open Source is Democratizing Knowledge

In September 1991, when Linux Torvalds, a student at the University of Helsinki in Finland, released 10,000 lines of code on the Internet, nobody could have believed that it would spark off a revolution. In the fifteen years since then, Linux has grown into an enormously capable operating system that contains more than 100 million lines of code that runs on tiny embedded computers to supercomputers and everything in-between. This has been made possible through the contribution of thousands of volunteers across the world working together over the Internet, in what is perhaps the largest collaborative projects in the history of mankind.

Linux is the leading example of the open source movement that is democratizing knowledge and the tools with which we access knowledge. The open source principles of community, collaboration and the shared ownership of knowledge have lead to a transformation in the way knowledge is created and distributed. This has profound implications for India and other developing countries.

Linux was released under the General Public License created by the Free Software Foundation which gives users four freedoms: The freedom to run the program, for any purpose; the freedom to study how the program works, and adapt it to your needs, the freedom to redistribute copies and share it with others and the freedom to improve the program, and release your improvements to the public, so that the whole community benefits. A precondition to these four freedoms is that the source code for the software is freely available.

For millions of software developers across the world, this access to source code and the ability to improve it to meet their needs has been enormously empowering. In the area of supercomputing, scientists have coupled together commodity hardware and open source software to build complex systems that have drastically reduced the cost per teraflop for supercomputers. For millions of users across the world, the ability to freely copy the operating system has meant that they can try it out on their computers for free and pay for value added services like support, customization and training, as and when they are ready. Across the world, governments like China, Brazil, Venezuela and others have been embracing open source because it reduces their dependence on monopolistic vendors and their monopoly pricing structures and restrictive licensing practices. In India, Kerala, West Bengal and Tamil Nadu have declared their intention to use open source software to make IT more widely accessible to their citizens.

Enterprises across India have also been quick to realise the benefits of open source despite the enourmous amounts of FUD (fear, uncertainity and doubt) that proprietary vendors have sought to create. Today, enterprises like LIC, IDBI, IRCTC, IndiaBulls, UTI Bank, Canara Bank, CESC and others use Red Hat Enterprise Linux and other open source software to run their mission critical applications. The SMS voting backbone for highly popular TV shows like Kaun Banega Crorepati and Indian Idol also run on Red Hat Enteprise Linux.

Linux is now well established as a reliable, stable and secure operating system on servers. According to IDC, Linux server sales grew from 4.3 billion in 2004 to 5.3 billion in 2005 as customers deployed it in a wider range of technical and commercial workloads. Over the last few years, Linux has also emerged as a capable desktop operating system with slick desktop user interfaces and an excellent, free office productivity suite in Open Office. Those who have used the Linux desktop have been pleasantly surprised by its capabilities. The Kerala government has decided to move around 12,500 schools to Linux after finding proprietary software to be unaffordable.

It is no surprise that Linux and open source software have caught on rapidly in India. Our traditions of knowledge like yoga and ayurveda have always been free and open to all. We have successfuly built commercial models on top of free knowledge as can be seen from the proliferation of Ayurvedic spas and the fact that yoga is a $30 billion industry in the US. Open source proves that the age old adage that we all grow richer by sharing knowledge still holds true in the Internet era. For decision makers who are implementing IT, it is time to take a long hard look at the long term benefits of open source and evaluate the value it provides on servers and desktops.

Tata supercomputer ranks fourth, runs Linux

I came back from a nice long (and completely unplugged) break trekking around North East India (shameless plug: Check out my photos at http://www.flickr.com/photos/venky7/). Among the many e-mails that were accumulated in my inbox, the one that made me happiest was the news that India has finally broken into the TOP500 Supercomputer List. The icing on the cake is that it runs Linux!

This feat was achieved by the Pune-based Computational Research Laboratories, incorporated as a fully-owned subsidiary of Tata Sons with a mandate to achieve global leadership in the area of high-performance computing systems.

This is wonderful news for the open source community and the Indian IT fraternity!

Suggestions for the National Policy on ICT in Education

My friends at Digital Learning magazine are coordinating inputs for the "National Policy on ICT in Education" to be sent to the Indian Ministry of Human resources Development (MHRD). Today was their deadline and here is what I have sent them.

Suggested Policy Objectives for the "National Policy on ICT in Education."

ComputeRs have emerged as the Fourth R of education, after Reading, wRiting and aRithmetic. If our future generations have to be a part of the global mainstream society, and build upon India's great success in IT and IT enabled services, we have to equip them to be IT literate. Since IT is becoming an all-pervasive aspect of our lives—from booking train tickets to receiving exam results to managing retail cash counters, IT education will help our students become a member of the global information society. This will also help the country by helping us consolidate our leadership position within the global IT and ITES industry and maintain our lead over competing economies.

We therefore suggest that ICT should be considered an integral part of the educational system and that the government must invest in making all students who are a part of the Indian education system IT literate.

Suggested Guidelines for the "National Policy on ICT in Education."

The challenges in ensuring that all Indian are IT literate are formidable. According to the Ministry of Human Resources Development website, India has 888,000 educational institutions, 179 million students and more than 2.9 million teachers. In many villages and cities across India, millions of children have no access to basic educational facilities. And even as the Indian school system grapples with basic challenges such as the lack of elementary facilities like blackboards, along comes yet another challenge—How do we ensure that the next generation are not just literate but also digitally literate? Open Content and Open Source Software can be freely modified, improved upon and redistributed without paying any royalties or license fees to anyone. A venerable academic institution like MIT is using the open source Creative Commons license to share its knowledge with others at its Open Course Ware (www.ocw.mit.edu) site. MIT's web site says:

“MIT is committed to advancing education and discovery through knowledge open to everyone. OCW shares free lecture notes, exams, and other resources from more than 1700 courses spanning MIT's entire curriculum.”

The Indian state of Kerala has adopted open source software to make its students IT literate for the freedom it provides in terms of modifying the source code and making improvements and its cost effectiveness. Governments across the world are now using open source software to modernize their education systems. In India, it has been found that the education system indirectly discourages open source software because the syllabus sometimes mandates the use of proprietary software. In light of the benefits of open source software, we recommend the following guidelines:

1.The syllabus/curriculum should emphasize principles and not products. In other words, it should teach wordprocessing, spreadsheets etc and not a specific brand of software. Endorsing a specific brand is illegal under the Monopolies and Restrictive Trade Practices Act. Also, products may get outdated while principles are eternal. It is therefore in the interests of teachers, students and the education system to rectify this issue at the earliest.
2.Wherever possible, the education system must use open source software. If proprietary software has to be purchased, there has to be adequate justification for such usage of tax payer's money. A wealth of educational software is available freely from web sites like Eduforge (www.eduforge.org) SchoolForge (www.schoolforge.net) and Gcompris (www.gcompris.net) which offer Open Source educational software in for courseware management, school administration and for teaching children in disciplines like mathematics, music, astronomy, languages etc that can be freely downloaded and used by educators. Since the source code is available for modification, educators can customize these software programs to Indian conditions, localize it to Indian languages and make it more appropriate for their students. Open Office (www.openoffice.org) offers students and teachers a high quality office productivity suite which has rapidly become the second most popular office suite.
3.Software developed with taxpayers money should be placed under a suitable open source license. This will allow the larger education community to build on top of existing software rather than reinvent the wheel every time.
4.Content developed by the government using taxpayers money should be placed under a suitable open source license. Licenses like the Creative Commons licenses (www.creativecommons.org) offer alternatives to the restrictive “All Rights Reserved” copyright licenses by offering flexible licensing schemes for authors of content.


These guidelines, if implemented strictly, can save the Indian education system thousands of crores of rupees over the next decade.

Suggested Practices for the "National Policy on ICT in Education."

The Open Source philosophy is catching on in the world of content. For example, Wikipedia (www.wikipedia.org) has rapidly emerged as one of the largest online dictionaries in the world. In a short span of five years, Wikipedia has attracted five million entries from across the world in several languages and is a fantastic educational resource that we should localize to Indian languages. Because it is released under the open source, “Creative Commons” copyright, Indian educators have the freedom to translate Wikipedia into Indian languages and share it with their students.

The Open Source philosophy has proved to be so popular that other disciplines are embracing the tenets of community, collaboration and shared ownership of intellectual resources with powerful results.

Other web sites like Planet Math (www.planetmath.org)aim at creating communities of educators focused on a specific domain to make knowledge more accessible.

Many educational institutions themselves are now coming together to leverage the economic benefits of participating in Open Source development. For instance, leading universities like the University of Michigan, Indiana University, MIT and Stanford are investing up to $1 million in staff time to develop producing open source Collaboration and Learning Environment (CLE) software. Even universities that are not members of the Sakai Project can download the software and interest in the Sakai Educational Partner Program (SEPP) is growing at the rate of 1-2 universities per week.

Thus it is clear that whether it is for creating educational content, managing coursework and learning, teaching a specific discipline or administration of an educational institution, the open source model offers tremendous benefits as a model for the creation and dissemination of knowledge. In a country where 888,000 educational institutions need to be modernized and more than 179 million students educated, the community ownership model of open source can help the country save billions of dollars that would be spent on proprietary operating systems, software and content. Since anything developed under an open source model can be shared freely, it can help in the rapid dissemination of educational materials to India's vast population of students.

From a long-term perspective, it is important that the creation and dissemination of knowledge should be a collaborative, community driven process rather than one that is monopolized by a few individuals or companies. In the Indian, intellectual tradition, knowledge has always been considered as a common good treated as a community resource rather than private property that can be monopolized and enjoyed by a few. The need of the hour is therefore a close collaboration between educationists and technologists. The open source model provides a framework that can lead to an open source renaissance for Indian education.

We therefore recommend that India should adopt the best practices of the open source community for creating educational content and software. We further recommend that a working committee consisting of eminent academics, industry and the open source community be formed to guide this process.

Suggested knowledge tools for the "National Policy on ICT in Education."

The Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) philosophy and its accompanying licenses can be powerful tools in the dissemination of knowledge.

For more on Open Source licenses, see www.opensource.org

For more on the Free Software philosophy, see www.fsf.org

A FOSS Foundation for India

Over the last few years, most of us in the community have often discussed setting up a foundation for Free and Open Source Software in India to work on policy, advocacy, promotion and development of FOSS and open standards. I think the time is now ripe to bring industry, government, academia, and the community to gether to create a FOSS consortium. Some initial thoughts on the charter of the foundation and organization structure are given below. I'd love to hear from the community what they think of this.

Charter of the FOSS Foundation

1)Formulate strategies on how India can benefit from deploying FOSS and
implement/monitor implementation of the same.
2)Monitor latest developments in FOSS technologies and ensure global
leadership in key strategic areas like supercomputing, security,
localization, affordable computing, GIS, embedded computing etc.
3)Research and quantify the benefits of using FOSS for India.
4)Work with government, industry, academia and the open source/free
software community to popularize FOSS in India.
5)Leverage FOSS to bridge the digital divide in India through affordable
computing and localization to all the major Indian languages.
6)Encourage research and analysis of FOSS in India through academic
research, market research, white papers, case studies etc.
7)Study the legal implications of free and open source licenses in the context of global patenting and copyright laws and recommending strategies beneficial to India.

Organization Structure

The Org Structure flows from the charter and therefore, dear blog readers, your comments on the above are of paramount importance. There are several org structures that we can consider:

1) W3C, which is one of the widest industry consortia with over 400 members. It also has an inclusive process which allows the public to participate in its debates and discussions.

2) The Linux Foundation

In brief, LF's structure is that each Platinum member can elect a director, subject to an upper limit of ten, Gold members can elect three directors from amongst themselves and Silver members can elect one director. From their web site, I could not figure out what mechanism they have for community participation.

3) NASSCOM

NASSCOM is the most successful industry organization in India. As its web site says, "In 1988, NASSCOM had 38 members, who together contributed close to 65 percent of the revenue of the software industry. Since then, membership of NASSCOM has grown multifold to reach over 1100 members."

We look forward to your inputs on how to create an open, participatory organization that keeps growing along with the FOSS community. Do send me your comments by the end of next week (26th October 2007).

Media replies on the OOXML issue

These are some questions that a media person sent me on the OOXML issue.

Venky
=====

> Q1. Do you look at this development as a decisive turn of events against
> Microsoft in the fight between the open source and proprietary software
> camps?

The fact that OOXML was defeated in India indicates that Indian policymakers are well aware of the importance of open standards and one must give them due credit for this. The open source and free software communities believe that public data should be in public formats. The government is the custodian of citizens data and has an obligation to ensure that this data is not tied to one particular application. Take the case of land records, which need to be preserved for 400 years or more. If land records are stored in a proprietary format, there is no guarantee that it can be retrieved a few hundred years later because the only one who can unlock the file is the organization that created the format.

The only way to assure that data can be stored and retrieved freely is to use published standards that have been built through collaboration and consensus and have multiple third party implementations. The Internet is one of the finest examples of true open standards because anybody can create web browsers and e-mail clients by following the standards published by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).

Open standards are important to humanity because it enables us to share knowledge freely. Both, open source and open standards are inclusive movements and therefore the rejection of OOXML is a great victory for those who campaign for the users freedom to encode and decode their data.

>
> Q2. How important would be the outcome of the final judgement on
> government spending on business software?

Open standards are not just important, they are fundamental to efficient e-governance. Using proprietary standards is akin to handing the keys to the treasury to a third party and is a very unwise step when it comes to citizens data.

> Q3 What are the loose ends Microsoft will have to fix in order to win the
> trust of voting members?

The Bureau of Indian Standards has submitted a list of issues with OOXML that has been submitted to ISO.

>
> Q4 Can you share on some of the concerns raised by the voting members
> regarding OOXML? How relevant are these according to you?

1) Taking the legacy Office file format and XMLising it does not make it an open standard. Third parties should be able to freely implement an open standard without recourse to the author of the document. At 6000 pages OOXML is too long and too opaque to be implemented by third parties. Most of those who claim to have implemented OOXML are parties which have private treaties with Microsoft.

2) There is an existing open standard for documents called Open Document Format (ODF). Creating multiple standards for the same purpose only leads to confusion. For example, in 1995, both Netscape and Microsoft came up with their own extensions to HTML. This lead to a profusion of websites proclaiming "Optimised for Netscape" or "Optimised for Internet Explorer."

The purpose of standards is to unify and not to divide and the best standards like ASCII, Unicode, HTML etc are ones that are created through consensus and collaboration. We have all gained enormously from unified standards for data exchange and the web. Let us ask the industry to collaborate and come up with a consensus unified standard for document exchange. Vendors should collaborate on standards and compete on their implementation. This is the best outcome for industry and consumers.

3) After more than 26 years of pushing proprietary formats, Microsoft is now arguing that it is OK to have multiple standards. Multiple standards for the same task lead to increasing the cost of compliance, testing and implementation for everyone. For developers, it increases the time taken to release an application, which drives up cost. For users it increases the possibility of errors and miscommunication.

For example, the recent delay in the launch of the Airbus A 380 (which will cost the organization €2 billion, or $2.5 billion over four years) has been attributed to the fact that the Airbus fuselage sent from Hamburg, Germany was received at Toulose, France, the workers found that the 300+ kms of wiring could not be connected properly. (See http://www.iht.com/articles/2006/06/26/business/airbus.php). Boeing itself has attributed it to "incompatibilities in the development of the concurrent engineering tools to be used for the design of the electrical harnesses installation." Anecdotal evidence indicates that both these organizations were using different measurement systems derived from the country of their origin. In a globalizing world having common standards helps everyone. International travelers who carry multiple power adapters for their notebooks know this logic well.

In e-governance, let us take a simple case. The revenue department uses data from the land records data base. Unfortunately, this is in a different format and therefore the the revenue department has problem decoding land records data. In such a case, who is responsible for the correct decoding of the land records? As mentioned earlier, the purpose of standards is to eliminate such friction and therefore, BIS should recommend that vendors should work together on unified standards.

The two attached docs will give more info on the subject. My blog at www.osindia.blogspot.com also has ore info. Specially these articles:

http://osindia.blogspot.com/2007/08/policy-challenges-for-open-standards.html
http://osindia.blogspot.com/2007/01/importance-of-open-standards.html

4) There are also serious objections to Microsoft's efforts at "Ballot Box Engineering" which are documented at my blog on www.osindia.blogspot.com

Venkatesh Hariharan
Co-founder
Open Source Foundation of India

FOSS.in makes the right call

Those of you who follow FOSS.in would have noticed that this year, the conference has done a reboot on its call for papers. The web page now says,

This note is going to catch many people by surprise:

As we had explained, over and over: this is a FOSS developer and contributor conference. We are no longer a FOSS user conference.

As was mentioned last year - in the end FOSS is about Free and Open Source Software, and somebody needs to write that software.

FOSS.IN is about demolishing the contention that India is a land of FOSS consumers, with almost no contributors - that we only take, not give back.

I think it is about time that we stopped being a nation of downloaders and started "uploading." TCS releasing WANem as open source is among the great contributions coming out of India, but we need more contributions going upstream given that we produce almost 20 percent of the software developers in the world. Unless and until we start contributing, we cannot have a say in the development of technology.

A couple of years ago, when I saw in Sri Lanka, Sanjiva Weerawarna told me that the island nation has 25 committers to Apache! If Sri Lanka can contribute so much to open source, so can we. Kudos to Atul Chitnis and the FOSS.in team for taking a bold call. I like it because it reminds me so much of one of my favorite sayings, "Hands that help are holier than lips that pray."

While we are on FOSS.in, as a former journalist, I also admire the well written content on the FOSS.in web site.

Policy recommendations on Open Source for India

These are some policy recommendations on Open Source for India. I look forward to your comments on these recommendations. This will be ciculated to e-government policy makers next week.

===============================================================================================

We, the members of the open source software (OSS) community in India, recommend that the Government of India should promote OSS in order to encourage competition and choice, make IT more affordable and bring the benefits of IT to the people of India.

We recommend that the Department of IT, Government of India adopt the following steps which will go a long way in promoting OSS in India.

1)Applications developed by the Government of India should be cross platform and not be locked in to a specific platform. Building cross-platform applications encourages choice and provides implementing agencies the freedom to select the platforms that suit them the best. Since applications have a long shelf-life, building cross-platform applications isolates the application from technological changes in the underlying platform.

2)Mandate that all documents and data created by government organizations follow open standards that are free from royalties, patents and other encumbrances.

3)Encourage the development and usage of Linux and open source desktop productivity applications in government. This move can reduce dependence on expensive proprietary software, encourage choice, promote healthy competition and save the country enormous amounts of foreign exchange. In areas like office productivity applications etc where open source tools match the functionality of proprietary software products, adequate justification must be provided for purchasing proprietary software.

4)Mandate that, by default, software development funded by the government should be available to the public under an open source license. This ensures that the code is available to government agencies for improvements and further enhancements. Since the code is available freely, this also provides an avenue for inputs and feedback from concerned citizens.

5)Create a central repository of open source e-government applications. This move can save India thousands of crores of rupees by facilitating reuse of applications, sharing of best practices, slashing implementation time and reducing risks of project failure. This can be on the lines of the Government Open Code Collaborative Repository (www.gocc.gov) established in the US as a, “collaboration between public sector entities and non-profit academic institutions created for the purpose of encouraging the sharing, at no cost, of computer code developed for and by government entities where the redistribution of this code is allowed.”

6) Create a collaborative community for open source in education. Enormous resources are needed for modernizing and IT-enabling the education system. An open source program for education can create a nationwide community of educators for creating software and content that can be freely shared across the system. This will help rapidly disseminate the latest educational pedagogy, software tools, content and best practices within the system. This can be organized around disciplines like mathematics, physics, chemistry etc. and involve the Indian academic community and software developers.

7) Encourage the use of the open source model which is based on collaboration, community and shared ownership of intellectual resources in scientific disciplines like agriculture, biotechnology, health care research, etc. so that the benefits of such research can reach the public faster.

8) Set up a high-powered think tank consisting of top-notch policy makers, academics and politicians under the auspices of a powerful policy making institution to provide leadership and direction on open source on a continuous basis.

The agenda for such an organization would be:

A)Identify and quantify the political, cultural and economic benefits for India as a result of open source. This would not just be restricted to software but also to issues like IP, content, scientific publishing etc. In other words, the focus of this body would be on how India can take full-advantage of the open source movement to benefit Indian society.1

B)Develop an action plan aimed at making India a global leader in the open source community. For example, India could take the lead in developing and customizing open source applications for developing countries or identify areas where it can make visible contributions to the global open source community. For example, Sri Lanka has made significant contributions to the Apache web server through the Lanka Software Foundation.

C)Leverage the open source development model based on community, collaboration and shared ownership of intellectual resources to bridge the digital divide. This forms part of point A, but is a large enough area to deserve special attention. For example, Indian language software development and localization of open source tools can be identified as a priority sector for funding. This will take IT beyond the five percent of India that speaks English and provide cost-effective software solutions to Indian users, thus bridging the digital divide. another area could be the development of applications and content that meets India's unique needs.

D)Create a road-map for open source software development for India's software export industry. In the long-term, software will be sold as a service. Open Source Software is accelerating this trend which plays to the advantage of India's vibrant software services industry.

Prof. Ashok Jhunjhunwala on OOXML

Yesterday, there was an interview of Prof. Ashok Jhunjhunwala in the Times of India where he supported OOXML. He also repeated Microsoft's statement that users want a choice of multiple formats. Prof. Jhunjhunwala is a very respected academician and prima-facie, the Microsoft line seems to make eminent sense. After all, who can argue about choice? (BTW, since when has Microsoft been about choice?) Let's scratch a little deeper by asking a few questions about choice:

1) When you wake up in the morning and choose which side of the road you drive on? I certainly don't?

2) Did you like the choice of Microsoft's HTML versus Netscape's HTML? Both companies created their own proprietary extensions to HTML that threatened to fragment the Internet. Even today, there are web sites that say "optimized to XYZ browser" and to me that is a sign of bad software design. Ironically, the Bureau of Indian Standards web site says, "Best viewed in MSIE 4.0 and above browsers." If you are developing or redesigning a web site, it would be much better to make your web site compliant to the World Wide Web (W3C) standards (called recommendations in W3C parlance). I am much happier having one single, unified web standard because it makes my life easier.

I therefore urge academics, policy makers and others to push for common, unified document standards, not a multiplicity of standards. The industry and vendors should collaborate on standards and compete on their implementation.

PS: There was one important question that the Times of India journalist missed asking Microsoft. I would have loved to know what the venerable professor thinks of Microsoft's attempts at Ballot Box Engineering on the OOXML issue.

Software Freedom Day

Today is Software Freedom Day. According to Wikipedia:

"Software Freedom Day (SFD) is an annual worldwide celebration of the free/open-source software. SFD is a public education effort, not only to celebrate the virtues of free and open source software, but also to encourage its use, to the benefit of the public."

We don't usually link the two words "Software" and "freedom" together. After all, what does the high tech world of software have to do with freedom? However, freedom is basic to any human activity and software is no exception.

For example, the open standards movement is about your freedom to encode (create) and decode (retrieve) your own data. If you store data in proprietary formats, only the maker of that format knows how to unlock that data and you are now dependent on that vendor. This is like buying house but the keys to the house still remain with the builder. Why take the risk? Actively use open formats like ODF and OGG and avoid using proprietary formats like .doc and .mpeg which are proprietary formats.

The open source and free software movement is about your freedom to modify code and share it with others. It is for this reason that Linux can scale from tiny embedded systems to mighty supercomputers. Wikipedia is about your freedom to share knowledge and information with each other.

Over the next few years this movement will go from strength to strength because the open source and free software communities have shown that we can grow richer by sharing!

Microsoft Certified Ballot Box Engineering in Pakistan?

After some digging around, I found out that there was indeed a committee that met and voted yes for OOXML in Pakistan. It looks like the committee met just once. There was a presentation on OOXML by a Microsoft person to the committee members. From what I hear, no views from the opponents of OOXML were presented. I had e-mailed the directors of Pakistan Standards and Quality Control Authority (PSQCA) and to the Pakistani Minister of Science and Technology, Ch. Nouraiz Shakoor Khan saying that we would like the open source community's views to be presented before a final vote was taken but received no replies. After listening to the Microsoft person, the committee voted in favor of OOXML. Now here is the interesting bit: Out of the 12 committee members, four are Microsoft Gold Partners, one was a Microsoft representative and the rest were academics. After the invalidated vote in Sweden, I am not surprised that so many Microsoft Gold Partners were on this committee. I tried to check whether the open source community's views were taken into consideration before the voting but currently I do not have information on this.

PS: I hear that Microsoft is planning to now offer MCBBE (Microsoft Certified Ballot Box Engineer) course along with its other course. I hear that several Indian political worthies who have specialized in booth capturing are lining up to take this course and upgrade their professional skills!

BusinessWorld on ODF versus OOXML

BusinessWorld magazine has an article on the recent standards battle at the Bureau of Indian Standards over Microsoft OOXML proposal. As you know, the OOXML proposal was rejected unanimously by the LITD15 committee formed by BIS to review OOXML. The ODF Alliance which includes FSF, Red Hat, IBM and Sun worked hard to ensure that OOXML was not approved. The reasons for this can be read at www.noooxml.org

BusinessWorld is now running a vote on its web site asking readers:

"Which documentation standard do you want to vote for?" The link for this article and the vote (see right hand top corner of the page) is:

http://www.businessworld.in/content/view/2458/2536

I request all FOSS supporters to vote for ODF. Next Monday's issue of BW also has an article on this subject and I am looking forward to it.

Now, M$, please stop smoking it!

Despite all the ballot box stuffing, Microsoft's OOXML proposal was defeated at ISO. What does the company that calls darkness as light have to say? It has the arrogance to release a press release titled, "Strong Global Support for Open XML as it Enters Final Phase of ISO Standards Process." The press release quotes Robertson, general manager for Interoperability and Standards at Microsoft Corp as saying:

"Technical experts around the world have provided invaluable feedback and technical recommendations for evolving the format," Robertson said. "The high quality of the Open XML format will be improved as a result of this process, and we take seriously our role in working within the Ecma technical committee to address the comments received.

Excuse me Tom, but India voted unanimously against OOXML. In case that did not register, let me repeat: India voted unanimously against OOXML. Despite all the explanations given by Microsoft, the Bureau of Indian Standards committee formed to examine OOXML marked each of the 200 issues as unresolved. Now, do you still use the words high-quality and OOXML in the same breath?

What this company deperately needs is a moral compass!

Memo to Microsoft: Stop wasting our time!

Finally word is out and the Bureau of Indian Standards has confirmed that it will be submitting a "No with comments" vote to International Standards Organization on Microsoft's OOXML proposal. This brings to a temporary close five to six months of hectic legwork to prevent a sub-standard proposal from getting the coveted tag of an ISO standard.

I doubt if Microsoft realises it, but its actions are only making it the Union Carbide of the global IT industry. Microsoft is the world's largest software company but if you flip through their 6000+ pages of OOXML documentation, you'll be justified in wondering how they grew so big if the rest of their work is as shoddy as OOXML. The extremely flawed proposal certainly does not befit its stature in the IT industry. But, does Microsoft learn from all the feedback given to it or does it learn anything from it. No. Humility and Microsoft are like oil and water--never shall they mix. According to reports coming in from countries that are involved in the ISO vote on OOXML, Microsoft is busy stuffing the ballot boxes. Read Andy Updegrove's blog post The OOXML Vote: How Bad Can it Get? (Keep Counting). Originally, only 30 ISO members were supposed to vote on OOXML. However, as the September 2nd date for the final voting comes close, another ten more countries have joined the committee. Updegrove says:

As someone who has spent a great part of my life working to support open standards over the past 20 years, I have to say that this is the most egregious, and far-reaching, example of playing the system to the advantage of a single company that I have ever seen. Breathtaking, in fact. That's assuming, of course, that I am right in supposing that all of these newbie countries vote "yes."

I guess we'll just have to wait and see a few more days to learn whether that assumption is true. Want to place your bets?

Sitting here in India, it is difficult to influence countries like Malta, Cyprus, Ecuador, Jamaica, Lebanon, Pakistan, Trinidad and Tobago, Turkey, Uruguay and Venezuela in the two days left before the final votes are submitted, but we shall try. I checked with the IT ministry in Pakistan and brought to their attention that Pakistan is now a "P" member of ISO which entitles it to vote on OOXML. This was news to them as they were not consulted on the OOXML issue. I hope that Pakistan's vote will be cast only after thoroughly reviewing the arguements for and against OOXML.

Coming back to India, I am extremely proud of the fact that my country has voted against this proposal. To accept such a poor document would have been to denigrate the very meaning of "standards." The academia, the government bodies, industry organizations and non-profits like the Free Software Foundation spent countless hours debating and discussing this issue. Some of the best brains in India burnt the midnight oli to review this 6000 page proposal and the final consensus was that none of Microsoft's answers to the 201 technical issues raised was found satisfactory. I hope the Microsoft bosses in Redmond take note of this and make a genuine attempt to rectify the issues instead of trying to stuff the ballot boxes.

For wasting the collective intellect of India's best IT brains, Microsoft and ECMA must be blacklisted. Just as a person with a bad credit history has to redeem himself or herself before applying for subsequent credit, any standards proposal submitted by these two organizations should be thoughly vetted before it is even accepted for review or voting in India. India has more pressing problems to tackle than OOXML. Therefore, Microsoft, please do us a big favor and stop wasting our time. Next time, do your homework before you submit something to India.

PS: This is an old joke in the IT industry and shows how little Microsoft has changed in decades.

Q. How many Microsoft engineers does it take to change a light bulb?

A. None. Microsoft declares Darkness(TM) an industry standard.

Policy challenges for “Open Standards”

India's Department of Information Technology has taken a great first step by mandating open standards. Now it must take the next step and come up with a clear definition of open standards to protect national data


During India's independence movement, Mahatma Gandhi said, “Real swaraj will come not by the acquisition of authority by a few but by the acquisition of capacity by all.” Several decades later, Gandhiji's statement rings true in the context of the Open Standards movement which seeks to protect users' freedom to access their data.

One of the unintended consequences of the digital revolution is that users have often found their data locked up in proprietary file formats. As a result, users own the data they have created, but have no control over the format in which they are created. This is akin to a situation where a builder transfers the ownership of the house but retains control over the keys to the house. Software vendors have often exploited this situation by changing file formats from one version to another and thus forcing users to keep upgrading their software. Clearly this is an untenable situation and this is why India's Department of IT (DIT) has wisely chosen to mandate the use of open standards for data storage.

DIT's move needs to be applauded because it addresses serious political and economic issues that concern India's long-term security in the world of IT. The Government is the custodian of the citizens data and it therefore has the responsibility of ensuring that this data is accessible for centuries and is not locked down in proprietary file formats that are known only to the creator of the software. As a sovereign country, we cannot allow data that belongs to the people of India to be controlled by individuals or corporations.

It is a fact that the life of the data is often much longer than the life of the software which creates it. Twenty years ago Unix ruled, today it is Windows, tomorrow it may be Linux and day after it may be a software that has not even been imagined today. If data is tied to software platforms, we will need to recreate the data every time the software changes. This is neither practical nor desirable. For example, land records last for over four hundred years. If we take the average lifespan of a software platform as twenty years, this means that the data locked in proprietary file formats will have to be ported or recreated twenty times for it to be available to future users. The only practical solution therefore is to clinically separate the data from the software that created it. This what the open standards movement seek to achieve by giving users the freedom to encode and decode their own data.

Unfortunately, DIT's mandate has also resulted in several spurious proposals that claim to be “open standards.” Just as we need to be vigilant against adulterated medicines, we need to be vigilant against proprietary standards masquerading as “open standards.” The increasing move to open standards in India and abroad has forced some of the most adamant companies to now seek the coveted status of “open standards.” For example, the maker of a popular word processor that has supported only closed formats since 1983 is now demonstrating indecent haste by seeking to “fast-track” their proposal through international standards bodies. They are seeking to undermine the very sanctity of the term “open standards” by seeking to rush through craftily worded standards and hastily drafted proposal through standards bodies. E-government institutions across the country, and DIT in particular, must avoid being deceived by such wolves in sheep's clothing.

To avoid such situations, the Open Source Initiative has published the Open Standards Requirement (OSR). By implementing standards that follow the OSR, organizations can ensure that they retain full control over their data and avoid paying extortionate royalties and license fees for accessing their own data. The Open Standards Requirements are:

1.No Intentional Secrets: The standard MUST NOT withhold any detail necessary for interoperable implementation. As flaws are inevitable, the standard MUST define a process for fixing flaws identified during implementation and interoperability testing and to incorporate said changes into a revised version or superseding version of the standard to be released under terms that do not violate the OSR.

2.Availability: The standard MUST be freely and publicly available (e.g., from a stable web site) under royalty-free terms at reasonable and non-discriminatory cost.

3.Patents: All patents essential to implementation of the standard MUST be licensed under royalty-free terms for unrestricted use, or be covered by a promise of non-assertion when practiced by open source software

4.No Agreements: There MUST NOT be any requirement for execution of a license agreement, NDA, grant, click-through, or any other form of paperwork to deploy conforming implementations of the standard.

5.No OSR-Incompatible Dependencies: Implementation of the standard MUST NOT require any other technology that fails to meet the criteria of this Requirement.

The purpose of Open Standards is to include and not exclude. As we have seen from the growth of the Internet, open standards bring tremendous benefits with them. Today the Internet has more than a billion people who use it as a platform to socialize, communicate and transact. The common, unified standards like HTML has enabled the Internet to grow rapidly. Since the specifications for HTML are freely available, anyone can create tools that create (encode) HTML and tools that read (decode) HTML. Software developers, web site designers, Internet portals, social networking sites, bloggers, photo sharing sites and many others use HTML as a global means of reaching out to others. This would have not been possible with proprietary standards because that would mean that the data is accessible only through a specific software to the exclusion of other software.

For example, in 1995, both Netscape and Microsoft came up with their own extensions to HTML. This lead to a profusion of websites proclaiming "Optimised for Netscape" or "Optimised for Internet Explorer." Both these companies came up with proprietary extensions to HTML which could be viewed only with their own browsers and this development threatened to fragment the Internet. Fortunately, pressure from the World Wide Web Consortium and users forced both companies to back down and adhere to common standards. Unfortunately, bad habits die hard and we still see organizations optimizing their systems for one particular browser instead of following open standards that can be accessible through any browser.

We have all gained enormously from unified standards for data exchange and the Internet. The best standards like ASCII, Unicode, HTML etc are ones that are created through consensus and collaboration. This promotes choice, encourages competition and brings down cost for end users as companies come up with the best implementation of the standard.

As custodian of citizens' data, the Indian Government must come up with a clear definition of open standards that protects Indian citizens and enshrines their right to encode and decode data. The Open Source Initiative's Open Standards Requirement (OSR) is a good first step for arriving at such a definition. Such a definition will ensure real swaraj by ensuring “the acquisition of capacity by all” and not the “acquisition of authority by a few.”

Venkatesh Hariharan is a member of the Open Source Foundation of India. He can be reached at venkyh [at] gmail dot com.
This work is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution License and freedom is granted to reproduce this article provided this notice is retained intact.

Media coverage of OOXML issue

The media seems to have taken great interest in the OOXML issue. The Economic Times, which is the world's second largest financial newspaper had an article titled, India throws MS open format out of the window. The article said:

NEW DELHI: India on Thursday gave Microsoft a thumbs-down in the war of standards for office documents.

In a tense meeting at Delhi’s Manak Bhawan, the 21-member technical committee decided that India will vote a ‘no’ against Microsoft’s Open Office Extensible Mark Up Language (OOXML) standard at the International Standards Organisation (ISO) in Geneva on September 2.

“We unanimously agree on the disapproval of OOXML with comments. The same will be submitted to ISO,” National Informatics Centre head and BIS technical committee chairperson Nita Verma said after a marathon meeting that lasted over six hours. There was no need for a voting as only Infosys Technologies and CSI supported Microsoft.

The Open Document Format (ODF) alliance, enjoying widespread support from academia and corporates like Oracle, IBM, Red Hat, Sun Microsystems, Google, were in a jubilant mood having succeeded in stalling OOXML from being accepted as a standard in India.

Business Standard, had an article titled, "BIS stumps Microsoft for new language"

Leslie D'Monte / Mumbai August 24, 2007

Microsoft today suffered an initial setback when the Bureau of Indian Standards (BIS)-appointed technical committee did not approve of its Open Office eXtensible Mark-up Language (OOXML) as an alternative standard for electronic office documents to the International Organisation for Standardisation (ISO).

It qualified its disapproval with comments. The BIS can review the decision till September 2, when the same has to be submitted to the ISO along with 123 other country-specific standards bodies.

This article quotes a Microsoft spokesperson saying, "We respect the decision taken by the Bureau of Indian Standards (BIS)-appointed committee. At the same time, it is important to note that all the BIS members unanimously support the need for multiple standards. Going forward, we will work with the BIS and the committee members on the comments noted during the ballot resolution process.”

Well, I attended almost all the meetings of BIS and certainly do not agree with this viewpoint. My submission to BIS is that vendors should collaborate on standards and compete on their implementations. Who in the world wants two different HTML standards? I certainly don't.

Hindustan Times had an article titled, A New Duel.

Friday August 17, 12:54 AM

The biggest IT giants are at war. A war so huge that its magnitude spans almost the entire planet. The bone of contention is who will control your office documents - to be precise, the underlying document formats that run on your computers. It is a bit like what language a national anthem will be written in. It involves pride, sentiments and high stakes.

The rivals in this high pitched battle are Microsoft on the one hand and an influential axis of IBM and Sun Microsystems on the other. The IBM-Sun axis is backing the Open Document Format (ODF) alliance. A veritable who's who of the industry is lined up, taking sides.

India votes no against OOXML

Just returned from delhi where I attended the Bureau of Indian Standards meeting on OOXML. Red Hat is a voting member of this committee and I had the privilege to represent the company on this committee. The committee has voted an unanimous "No with comments" on OOXML. I will wait for an official mail from BIS before saying anything more but thought that I should share the good news with my friends in the FOSS and open standards community.

TCS joins the open source community

This is good news. India's largest software company, TCS, has released its Wide Area Network Emulation product called WANem in open source. The project is hosted on http://wanem.sourceforge.net/

Hopefully, this symbolises a small but significant cultural shift among Indian software exports companies. Traditionally, they have not encouraged contribution to open source projects because their primary focus is outsourced software development.

The Big Bazaar and Open Source

These days, I feel that i cannot pick up a book without stumbling on some mention of open source. I was reading Kishore Biyani's (Pantaloons, Big Bazaar, Future Group fame) autobiography, "It happened in India." Throughout the book, the theme is that of collaboration and partnerships. What was interesting to me was that, in the second last page of the book, Biyani talks of open source.

"In the Creative Economy, innovation will also necessarily come through collaboration. And that is evident from some of the most successful innovations that we have seen in recent years --from the Toyota Production System to the way Linux, or more recently, Wikipedia, has developed,"says Biyani in the book.

It is an interesting book and I would recommend it to anyone interested in the changing business scenarios in India. I wonder if Biyani has read Eric Raymond's, "The Cathedral and the Bazaar?" I am glad to see that more and more industry leaders are talking about open source.

Bill Gates and open standards

In 1997, in my previous avatar as a journalist, I had interviewed Bill Gates. What a different world that was!

That was his first visit to India and the fanfare would have made you believe that this was a head of state visit. Microsoft had just crushed Netscape in the great internet wars and seemed completely indomitable. I was extremely keen to meet the man who sat at the very center of the desktop universe to understand what his next move would be.

One of the biggest changes from 1997 to 2007 is that the desktop rapidly diminished into being a subset of the Internet universe. The focus of users shifted from being limited to their desktops to collaboration and communication via the Net. I remember that my first PC was bought in 1994 and I soon got bored of it until my 1200 baud modem was purchased in 1995. It was as if a whole new universe was now available to me through my rasping, screeching modem. Of couse, none of us, including Bill Gates, expected this universe to expand so rapidly.

One of the factors (and consequences) of the growth of the Internet was that open standards became more popular. The Internet itself would not have existed without open standards. One consequence that I could notice around 1997-2003 was that new file formats for audio and video and other forms of data emeerged that were no longer tightly tied down to the desktop. My term for it, at that time, was Platform Independent File Formats (PIFF). Looking back, the PIFF observation was a good one as far as trends go. However, having file formats that are independent of the underlying platform is not good enough and this is where open standards come back into the picture. If I create a document, the document belongs to me. However, if I made the mistake of creating it in a proprietary file format, the only way I can decode it faithfully is by using that proprietary vendor's application or try my best to reverse engineer that file format. That is like buying a house but while I own the house, the builder owns the keys to *my* house. Not a good idea right?

I have blogged about this in my article "The importance of Open Standards." In a world of truly open standards, monopoly pricing cannot be guaranteed. And that world is not far away because users clearly understand the alue of open standards and the impact it can have on their lives.

Six Questions on MS OOXML

Georg Greve of Free Software Foundation, Europe has come up with a simple set of six questions that policy makers must ask before approving OOXML which has been proposed as a standard.

This is recommended reading for those interested in open standards.

Eben, Kerala and other issues

I had a very long chat with Eben Moglen last week and had gone down to Delhi in this heat wave to meet with him. On Saturday morning, when the temperature was 45 degrees centigrade, around 50 people turned up to hear him talk about the issue of software patents and Microsoft's claims that Linux violates its patents. Eben is a combative force-of-nature and I am glad he is on our side!

We spoke about a number of things that will become common knowledge once the Software Freedom Law Center unveils its plans for India. Before, coming to Delhi, Eben had spent three days in Kerala. We agreed that it was important that Kerala succeeded with Free and Open Source Software because it is one place where there is both, political will as well as grassroots support for FOSS. The plans to set up an academic center of excellence for FOSS in Kerala was another thing that we spoke about. This academy is a wonderful idea and I would love to teach there. Incidentally, I will now be speaking on open source at the IIT Bombay's course on ICT for Development.

The Success of Open Source

I finally managed to read the first chapter of Steven Weber's book, "The Success of Open Source." My first reaction on reading it was, "Wow! Somebody really gets it and can also explain it to others in a lucid way." The first chapter is available online and I encourage you to download it and read it without delay.

"The conventional notion of property is the right to exclude. Property in open source is configured fundamentally around the right to distribute, not the right to exclude."

One reason why open source appealed to me from the very beginning was because of the notion that we could grow richer by sharing. When we began localization of Linux to Hindi with IndLinux.org in 1999, it was exciting to know that our effort would one day reach millions and millions of people could freely contribute and share this work. And mind you, I knew very little about Free Software or Open Source in 1999.

Call it an epiphany or whatever you will but it just felt so right and so good. Starting IndLinux.org was probably one of the best decisions in my life.

In the industrial era, people grew richer by creating private property that excluded others. In the knowledge era, the open source model proves that we can all grow richer by sharing. So, why should we build the foundations of our country on the exclusionary notions of the industrial era?

When we started IndLinux.org, there was never any doubt that we should use the GPL license because our intention was that those who spoke Hindi and other Indian languages should be able to use a computer with the same comfort that English language users enjoyed. We did not want our work to be captured by private interests and converted into a monopoly and the GPL with its "share-and-share-alike" model was the perfect vehicle for a developing country like India.

Our vision was the schools and colleges and villages and the poorest of the poor should be able to use computers in their own language. Our concern was that if such a fundamental tool as the computer was denied to our people, it would only accelerate the digital divide. That was not something that our conscience was comfortable with. Our hope was that more and more people would join us, help us with the translations, improve upon the software and share it freely so that the digital divide could be bridged rapidly. Looking back, our biggest self criticism is that we were not more ambitious and more courageous in our goals. The last eight years has only strenthened our convictions that open source is the path ahead for India.

There is still along way to go before we bridge the digital divide but we can We can look back with some satisfaction and see that the movement has grown quite a bit. I am reminded of the lovely lines of the Urdu poet, Majrooh Sultanpuri:

Main akela hi chala tha jaanib-e-manzil magar,
Log saath aate gaye aur kaaravaan bantaa gayaa.

This loosely translates as:

We set out alone towards our goal,
but others kept joining us
and our caravan kept growing

And since I am on poetry, let me close with the last four lines from John Lennon's immortal Imagine:

You may say that I'm a dreamer
But I'm not the only one
I hope someday you'll join us
And the world will live as one.

Colonizing Yoga

CNN-IBN reports that "According to the US Patent Office, 150 yoga-related copyrights, 134 patents on yoga accessories and 2315 yoga trademarks have been granted." I remeber reading that the US Patent Office is supposed to train the Indian Patent Office on how to grant patents. Makes me feel like someone awaiting a consignment of toxic waste.

Focus on the positive agenda

I have been talking to several of my friends within the Free and Open Source community on the issues around open standards etc. So far, we have been reactive rather than proactive. However, the Open Source community has a positive agenda of democratizing technology and deploying it to improve the lives of people. The access to source code and the freedom to modify it are extremely relevant to developing countries like India.

India has everything to gain by using open source and open standards. Policy makers from the National Knowledge Commission to the advisors to the Kerala Government and many others are realizing that open source is the fastest and most effective way of bringing the benefits of IT to the people of India. We will do everything we can to accelerate this change. In the next one year, the Free and Open Source Software community will be more proactive in bringing the benefits of open source to the people of our country.

The Kerala Government's decision to migrate 12,500 schools to open source is one such example. There are projects like Vigyaan CD (www.vigyaancd.org) that aim to empower engineering students with a wealth of open source software. There are people within the FSF who are doing some brilliant work on user interfaces for the blind. Instead of being reactive and defensive, we will work on scaling up such initiatives that improve the lives of people. Through open source we can create a just and equitable information society.

Eleventh Five Year Plan recommends FOSS

The Eleventh Five Year Plan for Information Technology recommends the usage of Free and Open Source Software. Section 4.9 on Page 104 says:

4.9 Enhancing usage Free/Open Source Software (FOSS)

Indian domestic market is extremely cost-sensitive as well as language sensitive. As the market expands and volume increases the cost of computer hardware would be coming down steadily. Consequently, the software price would become an appreciable percentage of the total price. It is not expected that the proprietary software owners would reduce the price to increase the volume of the sale. The experience of last few years further strengthens this apprehension.

If computer adoption has to reach from current 1% of population to say 5% in next five years, we have to seriously pursue some other route, viz., that of Free/Open Source Software (FOSS). Today, all basic system software including Operating Systems, DBMSs, Networking and Web Services, various Application Software, etc., are available as FOSS. They are not only free, but in some cases far more efficient, superior, and robust to corresponding proprietary software. What limits the widespread usage of FOSS is the absence of market-driven mechanism of making the end-user aware what is available, where is available, how to use it, and hand holding support for its usage for considerable period. In brief, Indian domestic software users need, in addition to the
availability of FOSS, is the continued service support of FOSS at lower cost.

Further, developing Indian Language software on proprietary platforms is not very commercially attractive proposition in cost-sensitive market of India. The absence of widespread usage of FOSS has, consequently, restricted the growth of software in Indic language, and this in turn, has starved the spread of computer to larger Indian commercial and home segments. This gridlock can be broken only when Government of India takes qualitative steps to make:

* Easy availability of FOSS for few identified application segments (e.g., e-governance),
* Making available all basic software as FOSS with Indic interfaces and make appropriate fund available for the same,
* Service support of FOSS at lower cost to all taluka towns, through Call Centers in all regional languages,
* Encouragement of development of Indic Software (may be proprietary) on FOSS platform through well thought incentive programs, (e.g., no sales tax or service tax).

The travails of being an open source evangelist

Sigh! The travails of being an open source evangelist! While the Mumbai Police has accepted our request of making the Cyber Cafe Regulations open so that it does not exclude Linux, the situation on the ground still needs much improvement.

My friends who are running cyber cafes say that when they showed the GPL license to the inspectors who came to check their cyber cafes, the inspectors still insisted on seeing the cyber cafe names splashed on the screens of the computers. If they understood what the GPL means, this would have been a completely redundant request.

Perhaps we should do a workshop for the police officers to educate them on open source licences?

Venky

Mumbai Cyber Cafe issue update

Last week, we met the police offficer in charge of the Cyber Cafe licensing
and requested the changes. We found the officer quite open to changes. Many
a times, community members feel that people are against us if they do not
recommend open source. However, I find that since open source/free software
is a relatively new phenomenon it is more a question of lack of awareness.
We made the police officers aware about Linux as a desktop operating system.
Given the size of India, there is a lot of work to be done in terms of
awareness building. As Red Hat's chairman, Matthew Szulik keeps saying, "It
is a marathon, not a sprint."

Mumbai Cyber Cafe issue resolved

I called up the Mumbai Police and had a word with the concerned officer. They are willing to amend the regulations so that all legal operating systems are acceptable. Thanks are due to Nandakumar Saravade of NASSCOM for making this possible.

Mumbai Police mandates usage of M$ in Cybercafes!

The Mumbai Police has come up with regulations for Cyber Cafes. Clause 14 of this regulation requires Cyber Cafes to have "Microsoft Open License Agreement." This is the letter that I have been sending out to the Home Minister, Home Secretary, IT Secretary and others.

Dear Sir,

The Mumbai Police has come up with regulations for Cyber Cafes. Clause 14 of this regulation requires Cyber Cafes to have "Microsoft Open License Agreement."

While the government has every right to insist on the usage of legal software, we believe that a government department mandating the use of a proprietary software brand (or any brand) is not in the spirit of a democracy. As you may be aware, Linux has emerged as a very capable alternative to proprietary software and is available under the General Public License. This license has been in existence since 1991 and is a perfectly valid legal license that governs Linux usage.

Usage of the Linux operating systems on desktops has been catching up rapidly. In Kerala many of the Akshaya Internet Centers are running on Linux and around 12,500 schools are also moving their desktops to Linux. For Cyber Cafes, Linux provides a legal and affordable alternative to expensive proprietary software programs.

I therefore urge you to use your influence with the Mumbai Police to get them to recognize the Linux GPL license and remove the mention of brand names in their regulations. This move will greatly benefit the Cyber Cafe owners and the users who access these Cyber Cafes.

I will be happy to meet you personally to explain the benefits of the Linux desktop, the legality of the GPL license and look forward to an appointment with you.

With warm regards,


Regards,

Venkatesh Hariharan

National Conference on Free Software

I attended the National Conference on Free Software at Hyderabad on 3rd and 4th March 2007. Almost a thousand students attended the event thanks to some fantastic work done by Kiran Chandra and his group of tireless volunteers from FSF Andhra Pradesh. Kiran commandeered me into writing the press release for the FSF and into speaking at three back to back sessions on IT and Social Impact, Software Patents and Free Software Business Models. I enjoyed myself hugely because the audience was so serious and interested in the subject. I had assumed that not too many students would be interested in the panel on software patents but the hall was packed with more than 120 students and the questions kept flowing at the end of the panel discussion.

I stirred up some controversy and heated rejoinders from my other panel members Prabir Purkayastha and G Nagarjuna, Chairman of the Free Software Foundation when I said that I see a dichotomy between the way the west treats knowledge and the way the east treats it. My point was that our traditions of knowledge come from a spiritual tradition where there is a moral imperative to share knowledge while western tratment of knowledge springs from commercial traditions which seek to commoditize knowledge. I will elaborate on this theme one of these days.

Many faculty members from the University of Hyderabad acted as volunteers for the event and it was great team work. I enjoyed myself a lot at this event.

BIS and Open Standards

I attended a meeting organized by the Bureau of Indian Standards on standards. During the Q&A session, I asked for a definition of open standards. I did get a reply but felt that more work needs to be done on defining what open standards are. The word is bandied about loosely so I took the opportunity to hand over copies of my article, "The importance of (truly) open standards."

There is lots of work to be done in educating Indian policy makers on this issue.

Venky

OOXML and Open Standards

We can trust Microsoft to be always up to some interesting tricks. They recently tried to get members of the International Standards Organization to rush through approving a 6000 page document on Office Open XML (OOXML) and submit their comments on the same in 30 days! What does one say to this? My colleague Tom Rabon, from our US office put it best when he said that the longer a dead fish stays out of the freezer, the more it stinks.

Microsoft's urgency in putting the sheen of an "open standard" on OOXML may be understandable but for a soveriegn country like India, standards are not something to be decided on a whim. Standards are the foundation on which we build our National IT infrastructure and we need to be careful that we build them on open standards that are free of royalties and other encumberances. If data is stored in proprietary standards, India could end up paying a toll for accessing its own national data.

The Bureau of Indian Standards, which votes on India's behalf at ISO said that they have not received the documents and therefore could not vote! [1]

The ODF Alliance requested ISO to resend the documents with a copy to us. We built up political pressure on BIS to request more time to study the document. The Communist Party of India (Marxist) sent a strongly worded letter to the IT Minister and other policy makers, pointing out that there was no need for an alternative document format since Open Document Format was already accepted as a standard by ISO after a four-year long review process. The Kerala Chief Minister sent a letter stating that Kerala had already decided to adopt open standards like ODF and did not see merit in a single vendor controlled "standard" like OOXML. The Free Software Foundation of India also supported the move for a more thorough review of OOXML.

If OOXML does benefit India, great. But, we are a democracy and in the spirit of a democracy, let there be a debate around OOXML and its merits and demerits. Above all is the question, "Is OOXML beneficial to India in the long run?" Standards that are decided behind closed doors stink and do not merit the title of "open standards."

BIS finally voted on the issue and was among the 19 countries that submitted their vote by the deadline of 5th February 2007. What they submitted has not been shared with us yet. Hopefully, they have asked for more time to review the document. That is the least they can do.

A few days later, 8th February, to be exact, I got a call from a head hunter, asking if I would be interested in joining Microsoft. thanks for the compliment, but the answer is "No. Thanks."

[1] Reminds me of a scene from the eternal classic BBC series, Yes Minister

Hon. Minister Jim Hacker: (in an aggravated tone) "What do you mean, 'we are looking into the matter'?

Derek Fowlds, Secretary to Jim Hacker: (in an apologetic tone) "It means, 'we have lost the files and are searching for it.'"

Linux Asia 2007 and Microsoft

I was incredibly disappointed to see that Microsoft was included as a sponsor of Linux Asia 2007. This completely shortsighted move on the part of the organizers made participating or sponsoring the event even less meaningful. Our feedback to the organizers has been that audience generation has not been up to expectations. My blunt feedback to the organizers was that when the platform is called Linux Asia, they should not have invited Microsoft. If it was IT Asia or some such title, inviting Microsoft would have been OK, but to invite a company that has done so much to damage the open source revolution was a sell-out.

The agenda was quite stale. For example, there was no presence from Kerala, which has done so much in the area of Free and Open Source Software or around the issue of software patents that has come up specially after the Microsoft Novell deal.

In future, I would rather support community events like FOSS.in.

The importance of Open Standards

A standard truly becomes great when we stop thinking about it and take
it for granted. When we wake up in the morning and drive to work, we
don't spend time wondering which side of the road we should drive on.
Standards eliminate the friction from routine activities and enable us
to focus on more important priorities in our life. When we surf the web,
send e-mails to each other or drive a car, an enormous amount of open
standards enable us to accomplish what we set out to achieve.

In the world of software, open standards is a term that is freely used
but loosely defined. Many companies try to push proprietary standards as
open standards and try to convert the term into an oxymoron. The Open
Source Initiative (www.opensource.org) has proposed a draft definition
aimed at keeping open standards truly open. The definition reads:


1. The standard must include all details necessary for
interoperable implementation.

2. The standard must be freely and publicly available (e.g., from a
stable web site) under royalty-free terms.

3. All patents essential to implementation of the standard must be
licensed under royalty-free terms.

4. There may be no requirement for execution of a license
agreement, NDA, grant, click-through, or any other form of
paperwork to deploy conforming software.

5. Implementation of the standard may not critically require any
other technology that fails to meet the criteria of this
Definition.


Clear documentation is the most basic starting point for establishing a
standard. However, it is not enough that a standard be clearly
documented to enable interoperable implementation. The standard must be
clear of encumbrances like copyright, patents etc. that could prevent
users from making full use of the standard. For example, when we buy a
house, we seek a document from the builder or the seller, certifying
that the property is free of all encumbrances and has a clear and
marketable title and that the seller agrees to indemnify the buyer
against any claims on the property being sold. No bank would sanction a
home loan without such a document. In the world of software, the
consequences of encumbrances can be enormous, as can be seen from the
Joint Photographic Experts Group (JPEG) patent case.

JPEG, as most users of digital photographs know, is a popular format for
saving photographic images that has been widely adopted by makers of
digital cameras, camcorders, PDA, cellphones and other devices. In 2002,
Forgent, a company that owned Patent No. 4,698,672 in the US, ambushed
the industry by suing 31 major hardware and software vendors, including
Dell and Apple Computers. The company alleged that these companies
infringed on its claim to an algorithm used in the popular JPEG picture
file format. It is reported that Forgent's legal assault earned it $150
million before it was brought to its heels by the Public Patent
Foundation that challenged and overturned Forgent's claims.

Dan Ravicher of the Public Patent Foundation who fought the JPEG patent
case points out that 900 patents are issued every week in the US and
fifty five patent law suits are filed every week. While it costs only 39
cents to send a postcard with a cease and desist notice to an alleged
patent infringer, the defendant would have to spend $40,000 to get a
lawyer's opinion and anywhere from $2-4 million to defend a case.

The indiscriminate manner in which software patents are granted hang
like the proverbial Damocles sword over open standards. Tim Berners Lee,
inventor of the World Wide Web and a great champion of open standards
told Wired magazine in an interview on web services that, “My fear is
that significant standards will be covered with patents, and if so it'll
just kill development. A lot of these [proposed] vendor patents are
ridiculous, but the fear and uncertainty over them is there.”

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) that Berners Lee leads, says that,
“In order for the Web to reach its full potential, the most fundamental
Web technologies must be compatible with one another and allow any
hardware and software used to access the Web to work together. W3C
refers to this goal as “Web interoperability.” By publishing open (non-
proprietary) standards for Web languages and protocols, W3C seeks to
avoid market fragmentation and thus Web fragmentation.” Imagine where
the web would be without open standards!

Open standards are the foundation of our IT infrastructure and it is
therefore important that these standards should be free of encumbrances
and freely available to all-—now and forever.

Hariharan heads Open Source Affairs at Red Hat India Pvt. Ltd. Red Hat
is the world's leading open source software company.

Creative Commons India launch

Spent yesterday with Joichi Ito, Catharina Maracke and our very own Lawrence Liang doing press interviews for the launch of Creative Commons India. The launch function was pulled off well by Shishir Jha, who is the project lead and the KRESIT auditorium at IIT Bombay was packed for this event. Since I am an ex-journalist, I volunteered to coordinate this for CC India and I really enjoyed the experience. Joichi is the Chairman of CC worldwide and I was surprised to see that he is so young. For his age, he has accomplished a lot. The interviews went off really well and I learnt a lot from listening to Joichi and Lawrence. Both of them were the star speakers at the launch of CC India that was held on 26th January, which is India's Republic Day.

The launch functions and the interviews went off really well and I hope to see the interviews appearing soon.

A society that shares: India's traditions of knowledge

Intellectual property is one of the defining terms of the 21st century. At a knowledge symposium, "Owning the future: Ideas and their role in the digital age" organized by IIT Delhi and Red Hat, we deconstructed the term "intellectual property" and examined the assumptions beneath it. Since the event was being held in India, it seemed appropriate to examine intellectual property in the context of Indian traditions of knowledge.

Anyone with even a passing interest in India knows that India has a rich
tradition of intellectual inquiry. Over several millennia, India has
been home to mathematicians who calculated the orbit of the earth around
the sun with astonishing accuracy, the intensely evolved spiritual
traditions of yoga, the ancient system of medicine called ayurveda and
many others. India was also home to the first university in the world,
the Nalanda University. Set up in the fifth century, the university had
over 10,000 students and 1500 teachers. Even the word Nalanda means "one
who is insatiable in giving."

Most of the branches of knowledge in India were rooted in India's
spiritual traditions and great value was placed on the sharing of
knowledge. This is seen in the respect accorded to the guru--one who
imparted knowledge--even today in India. Knowledge was even considered
to be one of the paths to salvation.

One of my favorite stories illustrates the importance accorded to the
sharing of knowledge. After the brutal battle of Kalinga, the Emperor
Ashoka was so overcome with remorse that he renounced bloodshed and
embraced Buddhism. As part of his penance, Ashoka went to monasteries
across the country.At each monastery, he would leave munificent
donations of gold coins. At one monastery, the emperor left behind one
solitary gold coin. When his perplexed followers asked him to explain,
Ashoka said that the abbot of the monastery was a great man but he did
not share his knowledge with others.

At the deepest level, this is the ethos that lead to the flourishing of
a great culture where the arts and the sciences prospered. However,
there is a cautionary tale here that illustrates why eternal vigilance
is the price to be paid for liberty.

Anyone with even a passing interest in India also knows that India's
caste system was (and remains) one of the greatest blights in the
history of this country. The traditional system of social stratification
in ancient India categorized people into four classes, Brahmana
(scholars), Kshatriya (warriors or politicians), Vaishya (mercantiles)
and Shudra (service providers). In the initial period, the caste system
was flexible and the caste one belonged to was determined on the basis
of merit. For example, the word 'Brahmin" literally means, "One who
knows Lord Bramha, the creator of the Universe." Thus any individual
could merit the status of a brahmin by virtue of spiritual practices
that helped them realize their unity with the creator of the universe.

Over centuries this meritocratic setup got hijacked and subverted into
an exploitative system where one's status was determined by birth. Thus,
to be a Brahmin, you had to be born into a Brahmin family and knowledge
of the sacred scriptures could be acquired only through inheritance. The
lower castes were considered "untouchables" and were ruled with an iron
hand by the upper castes. Knowledge had now become proprietary and it
was decreed that if a lower caste person heard the sacred scriptures
they should be punished by pouring molten lead into their ears. The
repercussions of this divisive system are still being felt in India
millenia later.

There are two key lessons to be learned from India's history. The first
is that intellectual pursuits flourished in ancient India despite the
fact that the terms "intellect" and "property" were rarely combined in
the same sentence. One of the finest examples of this is the vast
traditions of yoga which have been synthesised over thousands of years
in a manner akin to the "share and share alike" philosophy that governs
most of open source software development. Though no one has a
proprietary lock on yoga, it is still a thriving $30 billion business in
the United States.

The second is that the urge to colonize knowledge and claim it as
private property is an eternal one. We need to be constantly vigilant
about it, especially in an environment where private gain is worshipped
as the greatest motivation for innovation.

The term "intellectual property" reduces knowledge into a tangible
product. In international trade negotiations, when India negotiates on
the basis of the term "intellectual property," we implicitly accept that
intellect can be reduced to property and all that remains is to dot the
i's and cross the t's. We buy into the rhetoric that without the
"propertization" of knowledge, there will be no innovation. And in doing
so, we ignore our own history where astonishing innovations flourished
over thousands of years. In accepting the term "intellectual property,"
we implicitly accept a playing field that is dominated by the commercial
traditions of the West, rather than the spiritual traditions of the
East.

What are the consequences of accepting this playing field? To understand
this, let us shift, for a moment, into another playing field, that of
field hockey. Until the early eighties, hockey was played on grass and
the dominant players were India and Pakistan because of their artistry
and wrist work. When synthetic surfaces began replacing grass, India and
Pakistan lost the primacy they enjoyed. The game became much faster,
emphasizing speed and athleticism over artistry and skill. Secondly,
synthetic surfaces were expensive, and few clubs in India and Pakistan
could afford them, leading to a decline in the game in these countries.
>From 1928 to 1956, India won 6 successive gold medals in the Olympic
Games. The shift to synthetic surfaces saw a permanent decline in the
fortunes of Indian hockey, even though hockey remains the national game
of India.

The selection of a playing field is fraught with economic, social, and
political consequences.

Just as the term "horseless carriage" vanished into history, we may
find, a hundred years from now, that the term "intellectual property"
has faded into oblivion. The industrial era mindset is that, in giving,
we make ourselves poorer. But, in the digital era, we can enrich
ourselves immensely by giving. Indian tradition belives that knowledge
grows through sharing. The open source philosophy, based on the
principles of collaboration, community, and shared ownership of
intellectual resources has much in common with Indian traditions of
knowledge. We therefore owe it, not only to India, but to the world, to
ensure that the sharing of knowledge and not its reduction into
"intellectual property" is the norm.

About the author: Venkatesh Hariharan is an open source evangelist based in India.

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.5/) and can be freely reproduced provided that credit is given to the author.

Mavericks at Work and Open Source

Am reading the book Mavericks at Work, a book on how innovative companies are creating businesses that break the mould and are creating value. Was surprised (pleasantly!) to see a whole chapter on open source. The chapter talks of how a giant company like Procter and Gamble is applying open source principles to open itself to innovations from across the world. If anyone needs proof that open source is becoming mainstram, this is it!

How I stumbled upon open source

If this reads like an article, that's because it is one. I wrote this for Digit magazine.

Venky

Sometimes, one good question is enough to change our lives. For me that
one question came like a bolt from the blue in January 1997, when I
interviewed a distinguished professor, Ken Keniston, Andrew W. Mellon
Professor of Human Development in the Program in Science, Technology,
and Society at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

“Why is it that you produce software for the rest of the world, but very
little for your own country?” Prof. Keniston asked.

The software exports business was in a gung-ho mood, fears of the Y2K
bug was driving business to Indian companies and the domestic IT
industry was a poor cousin of the dollar-earning software exports
business.

Back then, I was a journalist and was trained to ask questions so I
asked the good professor to explain what he meant.

Despite his age and seniority, Professor Keniston was not one of those
Americans who sticks to the safe harbor of five star hotels in Indian
cities. He had systematically visited several e-government projects in
rural Madhya Pradesh, Tamil Nadu and other places and tracked their
progress over the years. A social psychologist by training, Professor
Keniston has a keen interest in seeing how rural India uses computers,
email, and the web to promote development, political transparency, and
social justice.

“Your country is very strange. All software is available only in
English, an alien language spoken by a small percentage of your country.
There is very little software available in Indian languages like Hindi
or Tamil,” replied Prof. Keniston.

My first reaction (like most others, as I subsequently found out) was,
“Why should people who speak Hindi and other Indian languages, need
computers?” To my mind, computers were an urbanized, westernized
phenomenon and the idea of rural non-English speaking people using
computers was an alien thought.

The interview was published and we kept in touch over the Internet,
which was a new media in India at that time. I kept sending Prof.
Keniston news items on language computing that I found on the Internet
and gradually developed an interest in this area. A few months later, on
the front page of my news paper, I read about Harsh Kumar, the General
Manager of Konkan Railways who had developed Indian language fonts that
he was giving away free. Manu Parpia who was then President of
Manufacturers Association of Information Technology (MAIT) liked the
idea. Manu and Vinnie Mehta, Executive Director of MAIT helped us set up
a stall at the IT India/Comdex 97 event in Delhi in December 1997 where
we launched these fonts under the BharatBhasha initiative. That was an
experience that truly brought home the need that Prof. Keniston had so
astutely perceived.

At the event, Harsh and I were giving demos of the Indian language fonts
and those interested could download the fonts from the Internet. But, as
John Lennon said, “Life is what happens to you when you are busy making
other plans.” For many of the people visiting our stall, this was the
first time they had seen a computer working in Indian languages and they
were blown away by what they had seen. They wanted to know how they
could use their own computers in Indian languages and they wanted the
software NOW.

From bearded sadhus to sarkari babus, they all wanted a copy of the
fonts immediately. Most of them went to an adjacent hall in Pragati
Maidan (if you have been there, you know how big a place that is),
bought a whole box of floppies, gave us one and asked us to copy our
fonts onto it. Over the four days of the exhibition, we gave away
thousands of copies of the fonts and got tremendous appreciation for our
efforts at democratizing technology.

When Keniston came back to India in early 1998, he gave me a
recommendation to the Knight Science Journalism Fellowship at MIT and I
spent 1998-99 traipsing the corridors of MIT and Harvard looking for
appropriate, affordable technologies that could be brought back to
India. Most of the professors and students there seemed to be using a
geeky operating system called Linux. Of all the cool, fantastic,
futuristic technologies that I saw, the one thing that really stood out
as being beneficial to India was the collaborative model of open source
software development that lead to the development of programs like
Linux. The idea that sophisticated software programs can be developed by
people collaborating over the Internet and distributed for free was
highly exciting because proprietary software programs were (and, alas,
still are) exorbitantly priced for developing countries like India.

After returning to India, I joined the newly set up IIIT-Bangalore. The
remarkable Prof. SS Sadagopan, one of the most entrepreneurial
professors in the Indian academic firmament encouraged me to continue my
research on bridging the digital divide. It was at IIIT-B that I wrote
an article titled “Why Linux Makes Sense for India,” that appeared on
the popular geek web site, Slashdot. The thrust of the article was that
if the collaborative model of open source was leveraged to localize
Linux and other open source software to Indian languages, it could spark
off a grassroots revolution and truly take IT to the masses. The upshot
of this article was that Prakash Advani, who was setting up a company
called FreeOS, came forward to fund this effort. This lead to the
creation of IndLinux.org, a non-profit that localized Linux to Hindi and
worked with different language groups across the country. We hired a
talented young programmer, G Karunakar, who built such expertise in
localization that he was invited to Iran, Bhutan and Nepal to help with
their localization efforts. The noted Internet entrepreneur, Rajesh Jain stepped in to support IndLinux.org when FreeOS.com was not able to fund the effort anymore.

Looking back, working with Linux seemed very logical because our
objective was to take computing to the masses. The General Public
License, one of the most remarkable documents in the IT industry,
ensured that the work we did would be freely available to the community.
There was no point in even considering localizing a proprietary
operating system because the benefits of that would flow to the company
and not the community. [Even if we did want to localize the proprietary
operating system, who would entertain a bunch of geeks like us?]

Today, Linux and open source software like the Open Office word
processing suite are available in all major Indian languages thanks to
the work of dedicated volunteers across the country and support from
government organizations like CDAC and the TDIL group at Department of
Information Technology. Red Hat has incorporated five Indian languages—
Hindi, Tamil, Gujarati, Punjabi and Bangla—in its flagship software, Red
Hat Enterprise Linux v4 and eight more languages will be supported. The
localized language interfaces are now being deployed in panchayati raj,
rural development, education and other e-government deployments and
helping take IT to the masses. Within the next five years, we will see a
profusion of web sites, search engines, blogs, social networking sites—
in other words, an entire ecosystem—evolve around Indian language
computing.

Looking back, I am struck by the irony of it all. It took an American
coming from halfway across the world to open my eyes to the need for
computing in Indian languages! Such is life.

This work is released under the Creative Commons Attribution Non-commercial Share Alike license and can be freely reproduced. See www.creativecommons.org

Open Source and Sri Lanka

I heard that Sri Lanka also voted Yes for the Open Document Format at the International Standards Organization. Sri Lanka reminds me of Kerala because there is both, a top-down and bottoms-up support for open source.

I gave a talk there titled "Open Source: Creating Value in the Enterprise" at the SEARRC event and also spoke about "Open Source in Education"at Ruhuna University, which is at the southernmost tip of Sri Lanka. Ruhuna is around four hours away from Colombo by car and the road is being redone so it took much longer. The beaches and the sea en-route were gorgeous and I got some nice photographs from my car.

FOSS in Kerala

I am really impressed with the work that Arun and others in the Free Software Foundation have done in creating a FOSS community in Kerala. One simple case--the previous government wanted to
move to proprietary software but the teachers in Kerala went on strike and brought FOSS back and are now using programs like Gcompris and TuxPaint to teach computers to 8th and 9th standard students. Kerala is also one of the first states to develop curriculum for both proprietary software and FOSS. Way to go, Kerala!