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!

Well, here is a cheerful note on which we start this blog. I won the Linux Asia, "Indian Open
Source Personality of the Year" award. This was an unexpected award and I would like to thank all of my friends in IndLinux.org and the Indian open source community for making this happen. The idealism that I see within this community is really inspiring and I hope that, as a community, we can scale greater heights in deploying open source for India's benefit in 2006.