Will the Internet kill Indian languages?

India might be home to six of the top 20 spoken languages in the world, but its languages are languishing in the online world.

When it comes to software exports, India is rightly considered a software superpower. With 86 billion dollars in exports, India’s software industry has helped companies around the world achieve significant improvements in productivity. It is time that the industry’s formidable capabilities are deployed to empower Indian citizens to use IT in their own languages.

In contrast to the healthy state of Indian software exports, the state of Indian languages online is a picture of malnourishment. Hindi is the fourth largest spoken language in the world with 360 million speakers, but, on Wikipedia, it has a mere 101,297 articles, and ranks 49, as on 1st April, 2014. Hindi ranks just below Nynorsk, one of the two official languages in Norway. It should be noted that Nynorsk is not even the most popular language in Norway, a tiny country with a population that barely crosses five million. That honour goes to Bokmål (literally "book tongue"), which is the preferred written standard for 85–90% of the population in Norway.

The state of the other Indian languages is no different, as can be seen from the accompanying table. How has Hindi sunk so low that it is lower than a languages which is not even the most popular language in a country with five million people? Even as the Internet flourishes in India, why are Indian languages stagnating online? What can be done to salvage the situation and give Indian languages the pride-of-place they deserve in the online world?

Why so malnourished?

The average Indian language IT user has to traverse such a vast range of hurdles, that it is a miracle that there is any content in Indian languages at all. The most basic starting point for computing in Indian languages, the keyboard, was not easily available until the advent of smartphones and their software-driven, touch screen keyboards. In many parts of the world, if you buy a computing device, it would come bundled with a keyboard for the national language of that country. Not so in India, despite the fact that the number of speakers in most Indian languages exceeds the population of most European countries!

Then, let us talk of font, the most basic necessity for computing in any language. A really good font is a marriage of art (calligraphy) and technology, and we have no dearth of either skill in India. The average English user probably has a choice of 60-70 high quality fonts to choose from. The average Hindi user has a choice of 3-4 modern Hindi fonts that they have to install themselves. The catch is that most average users would never go through the trouble of installing a font themselves. It is for this reason that there are only two categories of Indian language users online -- journalists who are supported by their in-house tech departments, and “early adopters” who are undeterred by the challenges of installing fonts, keyboards and other bits of software.

In his classic book, “Crossing the Chasm,” technology marketing guru, Geoffrey Moore talks of how there is a vast chasm between early adopters, and the other two categories that follow them on the technology adoption curve -- the early majority and the late majority. While early adopters are willing to put up with imperfections and embrace change, the early majority want to enhance their productivity and want technology to work flawlessly. The Indian language computing market (or Indic Computing, in short) is stuck in the chasm between the early adopters and the early majority.

(Image Credit: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:DiffusionOfInnovation.png)

The early majority and the late majority categories form the significant bulk of users and these users are not going to fiddle with installing fonts, keyboards and other paraphernalia. To entice them, computing devices will have to work out of the box, in Indian languages. In other words, Indic users have to be given parity with the English world, and devices should work in Indian languages with the same ease and efficiency that they do in the English language. A user should be able to unpack his device and get started with using it in Hindi, Gujarati or any other Indian language with a minimum of fuss.

The way forward

India’s Domestic IT industry is dominated by users in the English language, who constitute approximately 15 percent of the country’s population, adding up to 180 million people, in a population of 1.2 billion people. India has around 213 million Internet users, which adds up to a 17.5 percent penetration. To expand the market, and bring the next 300 million users into the digital world, we must empower them to access IT in their native languages. Not doing this could significantly limit the headroom for growth, and stunt the domestic IT industry.

Enabling computing in Indian languages is essential for growing the domestic IT industry. This will unleash the next wave of innovation in the app ecosystem, software product development, Internet services, e-commerce and other related areas.

The Indian Government has a group called Technology Development in Indian Languages (TDIL), which has developed many Indian language technologies like fonts, Optical Character Recognition (OCR) etc. However, these technologies need to be re-packaged in such a manner that they reach millions of users. The software industry has created bits and pieces of the ecosystem, but these efforts are disaggregated and lack scale. A few smartphone vendors have brought smartphones to the market with Indian language interfaces. However, this capability needs to be brought to market at affordable price points. To get the next 300 million users online in Indian languages, industry, government, hardware and software companies will have to work across the value chain to deliver a great user experience. The alternative is to sit back, and watch Indian languages die slowly in the Internet age.

(Note: An edited version of this article appeared in Hindustan Times edition dated June 17, 2014.

Marathi Journalism in the Internet Age

On Saturday, 6th July, 2013, the Observer Research Foundation held a conference titled, "Marathi Journalism in the Internet Age." The conference was attended by around 30 journalists from various Marathi publications, and Satish Lalit, the Public Relations Officer of the Chief Minister of Maharashtra. Dr. Sudheendra Kulkarni, Chairman of ORF welcomed the participants and said that when he was advisor to Prime Minister AB Vajpayee, Vajpayee used to say that IT was "India's Tomorrow." However, those who speak Indian languages have no role to play in India's Tomorrow. This was leading to a new secessionist movement with people moving away from their mother tongues. He added that the grossly inadequate development of Indian languages on the Net was one of the biggest barriers to inclusive development. He said that what is important to India's development cannot be left to the private sector and that the government must actively support Indian languages online. In particular, he proposed that advertising support to online Marathi publications should be stepped up dramatically. 

Anant Goenka, Head of New Media for the Indian Express Group Internet penetration in India is very low and nothing that people need to use the net in Indian languages is easily available. He said that a Flipkart in Hindi or Marathi would be a wonderful idea. He claimed that when Loksatta, the Marathi newspaper of the Indian Express group launched their Android app, they got 10,000 downloads within a week, most of them from expensive Samsung Galaxy phones, proving that the Marathi language audience had purchasing power. 

Lalitesh Katragadda, Head of the Emerging Markets team of Google joined this meeting over a conference call and gave an overview of Google's work in Indian languages and the road ahead. One of the points he made about Indian language computing being taught in schools was taken up by the Chief Minister's PRO, who said that he agreed with this demand and would place it in front of the CM. Incidentally, Prithviraj Chavan, the Maharashtra CM had started a company developing fonts and other Indian language technologies after completing his MS from UC, Berkeley. 

This was followed by an interactive session that was jointly moderated by Vinayak Parab, Editor of Lokprabha and myself, where the participants spoke on the challenges facing Marathi online journalists. Vinayak said that journalists had a huge role to play in establishing Marathi language on the Internet. He said that he was part of a group of 25 journalists who had met the Maharashtra CM and successfully petitioned the Maharashtra government to use Unicode. 

I mentioned that Wikipedia, Red Hat and Google have come together to create the Indic Computing Consortium. I made the point that while Indic scripts are complicated, may other scripts like are far greater in terms of complexity and yet have a significant presence on the Internet. India has all the technical capabilities required to solve the problem but lacked thew will to do so. If we worked in a focused manner to build the tool set for Indian language computing, we can solve this problem, once and for all.

Some of the key takeaways were:

1) Fonts render very differently on different platforms, and this is a big problem for publishers.

2) Most of the hits that Marathi newspapers are getting nowadays are from links they post on their Facebook pages. This is because search in Marathi is used by very few users because keyboards and input methods are significant barriers to entry. 

3) Many newspaper have e-paper versions that do not show up in search results. These papers should move to Unicode. 

4) Some Marathi sites are now beginning to leverage YouTube to generate more viewership. During the recent Uttarakhand tragedy, one Marathi newspaper posted videos from Uttarakhand which were in Marathi. However, by translating the videos and captioning them in English, they generated many more hits. 

5) There was a strong pitch from the journalists that Google AdSense and Google News should support Marathi. The web sites of Marathi newspapers are seen as a cost center and are therefore resource starved. I got the clear sense that the online journalists were itching to break out of this rut and were keen on seeing their online editions bring in revenues. Some journalists also asked if we could build tablet/smartphone tools that could convert Marathi handwriting into documents. 

6) Satish Lalit, the PRO to the Maharashtra CM said that the government was creating a new advertising policy and invited the online journalists to sen in their representation demanding support for online publications. He said that the Inscript keyboard had been made compulsory across the Maharashtra government. He said that all Maharashtra government press releases are being sent out in Unicode and a PDF copy of the same is also attached. The CM's Facebook page was recently launched and a blog set up. He said that in his travels across Maharashtra, he has found people in remote districts like Gadchiroli access Marathi news over the Internet because the printed papers would take time reaching the districts. In his role, he said that he used to scan 20 newsp0aers every day at 7AM in order to prepare a daily news digest for the CM. That job has become much easier nowadays due to online publications. He also said that he uses Whatsapp extensively to keep in touch with people. 

7) It was suggested that the number of glyphs in fonts should also be standardized.

Some of the action items that were identified were:

1) Create a forum for Marathi online journalists so that online journalism is recognized as a distinct skill. Since mostMarathi online journalists have received very little training, the group has decided to create a handbook for Marathi onlinejournalists. ORF promised all the support needed for setting up this group.

2) The group will petition the Maharashtra CM and ask the Maharashtra Government to create tools like dictionaries etc and make them available for free, in order to promote Marathi computing. It was suggested that the Maharashtra Government could make a one-time payment to CDAC and acquire their fonts and other Marathi language technologies and release them as open source. 

3) Dr. Kulkarni said that he will also reach out to the newly appointed NASSCOM president, R Chandrashekar, who was former IT Secretary of India, and request him to support this initiative. 

Credit goes to Dr. Kulkarni who has taken up this cause with a lot of passion. The organizing committee consisted of Anay Joglekar of ORF, Nilesh Bane of Maharashtra Times, Vinayak Parab of Lokprabha and myself. This event convinces me that online journalists can be a powerful support group for us in making Indian language computing popular, over the next few years.

RIP Atul Chitnis

One of the biggest names in the Indian FOSS community, Atul Chitnis, is no more. Several months ago, I was saddened to hear that he was diagnosed with cancer and, since then, I have followed his updates on Facebook. I must say that Atul put on a brave face and went down fighting (and cooking!).

Atul was one of the pioneers of the open source movement, popularizing Linux and open source with his numerous articles. Many years ago, as a part of the Mumbai Linux Users Group, I kept hearing of how popular the Bangalore Linux User's Group was and saw its popularity for myself when I was in Bangalore. I don't remember the year, but it was a wonderful feeling to attend the BangLinux meeting and see around a 100 FOSS enthusiasts gathered there. Over the years, I spoke at a couple of Bangalore Linux (later renamed to FOSS.IN) events and sought his help during the policy battles around OOXML and Open Standards.

With Raj Mathur and now Atul Chitnis passing away, the FOSS community has lost two of its pioneers, who will be sorely missed.

A quest for change in education

For the last few years, I have been increasingly interested in the area of Open Education Resources (OERs). MIT's Open Course Ware was one of the pioneers of OER and the manner in which it was used across the world was truly fascinating. Khan Academy took the concept of OERs and made it wildly popular – the 3000 videos on its web site have been viewed more than 133 million times!

Why this interests me is because I believe (as do many others) that education is one of the most critical inputs for India's development. Well, more than an input, I'd say this is the critical factor that decides whether our country descends into chaos in the next few decades or emerges out of poverty and takes a place of pride on the world state as one of the developed nations. Think of it as that moment when an aeroplane gathers speed on the runway and generates enough thrust to break free from the gravitational pull of the earth and soar into the sky. If we educate our youth and make them skilled and able citizens of India, we will soar into the skies. If we don't, we will land with a thud. As simple (and scary) as that.

Over the last few months, I've been trying to understand the education space in India and within that space, how OERs can help the Indian education system. It is no secret that there is a huge demand supply gap with the need for educational infrastructure and teachers not being matched by the Indian education system. Even among teachers that I have spoken to, there are huge gaps in the skills imparted to them. It is obvious that, as a country we still have a tremendous amount of work in terms of breadth and depth – breadth, in creating a network of teachers that reaches the remote villages of India and depth, in terms of ensuring that these teachers are equipped with sufficient skills and knowledge to teach their students. To understand this, I have been visiting educational institutions across India and I will be writing and documenting these experiences as I go along.

One of the first such educational institutions I visited as part of my quest was appropriately named QUEST, which is short for “Quality Education Support Trust.” QUEST is an NGO that works on enhancing quality of education and has its office in Saloni Village in Wada District, an underdeveloped tribal area of Maharashtra State in India. Some of the teachers I met their had done their BEd from premier institutions in India, but I was shocked when they told me that they had no training in how to teach in real-life situations. QUEST has been working to fill that gap.

Saloni village is a two hour drive out of Mumbai and by the time we reached the QUEST office around 9.30AM in the morning, the heat is above a blistering 40 degrees celsius. Accompanying me in the car are Nilesh Nimkar, an educationist working for the last 15 years in tribal belts of Thane; and Rammohan Khanapurkar, a young techie working with the ObserverResearch Foundation. Together, they have implemented Moodle, an open source Learning Management System, which has been customized to Marathi, for the benefits of the teachers who are being trained by QUEST.

Some of the work that QUEST has been doing to improve education quality has been so simple that one wishes more people adopt it. For example, over a hundred teachers affiliated to QUEST are now using the Moodle forum in Marathi, to exchange ideas with each other on improving education quality. I find about 25 of these teachers assembled at the QUEST office in Saloni village for a workshop. When I quizzed these teachers about the benefits of the Moodle forum, they said that many teachers who were too shy to ask questions in a classroom would open up and ask questions online. They found that the forum had an impact on education quality because they could post problems and find solutions quickly. One teacher said that he was struggling with slow learners in his class and the ideas from other teachers in the forum helped him bring the slower kids up to speed. The teachers were so enthused by the online forum that many of them spent their own money to buy netbooks and data cards to connect to the forum. One of the key factors for the success of the forum was that the teachers were given a 15 day training in using the Inscript keyboard in Marathi, which helped them use the online forum more fluently. Khanapurkar says that the usage of the forum shot up once the training was completed. For the Indic computing community, this is a point worth noting, for ensuring the success of Indic computing.

Another intervention that QUEST has made for improving education quality is the creation of videos that explain how teaching can be done in an actual classroom. In one such video, a teacher is teaching the Marathi alphabet “Na” to a class of kids who are around two-three years old. She uses more than 20 words with the alphabet “Na” in it, emphasizing the “Na” and makes her students repeat the word. Then she asks each of the students to give her one word with “Na” in it and finally tears up a newspaper into pieces and asks the students to underline every occurrence of “Na” in the piece handed over to them. The video serves as a powerful example of how multiple methods of learning (auditory, kinesthetic etc) can be combined to serve the core concepts being taught. The video is barely ten minutes long, but the teachers say that it has made a difference to the way they teach alphabets in their classes. Nimkar tells me that QUEST sometimes uses as many as eight cameras to make these videos, and pay particular attention to capturing the reactions of the students. Such videos can be a powerful means of upgrading the skills of teachers in India.

Most readers will also agree with me that we need a fundamental rethinking of the education system in India. Critics say that India's education system was created by the British to fulfil their need for clerks who could keep the colonial empire running. Be that as it may, our system treats students as inert objects whose only task is to soak in the information dished out to them, and regurgitate/ vomit it at exam time. When I completed my graduation, I looked back on my five years in college, and the ten years in school, and came to the sad conclusion that those were my most wasted years of my life. Therefore, when I saw Kiran Bir Sethi's video on TED, I looked forward eagerly to meeting her and seeing the Riverside School that she founded.

Kiran got a standing ovation for her TED talk and a well deserved one too because she is teaching her kids at Riverside to be doers instead of being inert absorbers of knowledge. If India is to emerge out of this immense morass of corruption and incompetence, we need more people who believe that they can change the world for the better, and then go out and do it. As Indians, we whine about corruption and wallow in our miseries because our education system loads us with inert information but teaches us nothing about what to do with it. At Riverside, Kiran worked on a program called Design for Change that is transforming kids into individuals who say, ‘I CAN’ instead of ‘Can I?’ Riverside kids have lobbied and campaigned for child-safe zebra crossings and for parts of Ahmedabad to be closed to traffic and dedicated exclusively for children.

I believe this kind of education is the need of the hour for India. If we as a nation do not believe that we can make change happen, we will continue living in the mess we have created and that is a horrible thought. If we teach our children how to make change happen, we can emerge as a strong, powerful and well developed nation in the next few decades and rout poverty from our country. Personally, Kiran's work also appealed to me enormously because in the last seven-eight years that I have worked in public policy and advocacy, I have seen with my own eyes that making policy change is not a difficult as people imagine it to be. The Indian government might be a byzantine and complex organism but there are definite ways of making it work. The Design for Change program started at Riverside has now become a global movement encompassing 35 countries of the world, which encourages children to work on challenges like health, environment, education and others facing our world. Search for “Riverside School Ahmedabad” on YouTube and you see some amazing possibilities how our education system can create better students and a better India. I hope these videos become more popular, and more and more educators rethink how they teach their kids.

The good news is that QUEST and Riverside believe in OERs and are willing to share their work with the rest of the world. In that, I see seeds of hope for a better future for India's students, teachers, our education system, and ultimately for India itself. 

The World Foresight Forum: Envisioning a better future

A few months ago, an invitation from an event titled the World Foresight Forum landed in my inbox and the mail said,

we would like to include your speech in the Convention, in the Seminar "Dealing with global challenges: a leadership crisis?", in particular on the topic "Development of a knowledge-based economy."

The invitation added that,

The project, an initiative of the Hague Centre for Strategic Studies, Granaria Holdings and TNO, aims at turning The Hague into the centre of the international debate on “Security, Peace and Justice for Sustainable Global Growth”, being already the de facto judicial capital of the United Nations, where institutions, such as the International Court of Justice and the International Criminal Court are headquartered.

The theme of “Security, Peace and Justice for Sustainable Global Growth” is something that interests me deeply, so it took about a few milliseconds to say yes. I landed up last week at The Hague without much expectations, knowing only that it sounded very interesting, and interesting it was. A few prime ministers, the Chairman of Goldman Sachs, the CEO of Thomson Reuters, Edward De Bono (the founder of lateral thinking), several futurists, the Mayor of The Hague, academics, entrepreneurs and many others attended this event at The Hague, The Netherlands.

My session was moderated by the very jovial and sharp, Dr. Stephan de Spiegelerie. Stephan, as he insisted we call him, hit the nail on the head when he said that what was interesting about our session titled, "Development of a knowledge-based economy" was that it was all about possibilities, whereas many of the sessions at the WFF were concerned with issues of the past. In another session, earleier that day, Glen Hiemstra, Founder of Futurist.com said that (and I am paraphrasing a bit here and may not be exact) that there are two ways of creating the future. One was extrapolating from the present and the other was looking to the future and letting that create the present. Taking a cue from Stephan and Hiemstra, I painted a blue-sky picture (and most would say, a very idealistic picture) of the opportunities thrown up by the Internet. I started with a story about Emperor Ashoka, who was one of the greatest rulers of India, that I had read in my childhood that had a deep impact on me.

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.

I followed that up with another story. As a child growing up in India, one of the first things I learned is a hymn to Saraswati, the Goddess of Knowledge, which says that:

Wonderful is your gift of knowledge

the more we share, the more it grows

the more we hoard it, the more it diminishes

These two stories amply illustrate the fact that there was a moral imperative to sharing knowledge, in Indian traditions. From these stories, I cut to the present where the Internet and the open source model based on collaboration, community and shared ownership of knowledge was leading to tremendous creativity and knowledge sharing, in a manner that Emperor Ashoka might have approved. I cited the example of Linux that has grown from 10,000 lines of code in September 1991 to around 204 million lines of code valued at 10.8 billion dollars and Wikipedia, the open source collaborative encyclopedia, that has grown from a standing start in 2000 to over 13 million entries in 260 languages of the world. Both these examples prove that by through Collaborative Innovation and sharing knowledge, we can grow richer as a society. With the Internet connecting almost 2 billion people, collaborating and sharing is now possible on a scale that no other technology could have enabled.

As the Internet grows and reaches more of humanity, and as it becomes a part of our day to day lives, is it possible that, as a species we will become more of a collaborative species, instead of a competitive one. Like Emperor Ashoka, will we renounce fighting over finite property like land and borders, and learn the value of sharing knowledge? I know that sounds wildly imaginative, but one of the advantages of speaking at an event titled, the World Foresight Forum is that you are not necessarily constrained by the past, and can imagine a future that is discontinuous (and hopefully, much better!) from the past.

To conclude, I quoted four lines from one of my favorite poems, the immortal "Imagine" by John Lennon. The last four lines of Imagine are,

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

As I concluded, Stephan looked me in the eye and asked me if we all could sing along. We all had a hearty laugh at that and moved along to the next presentation. My presentation was followed by another jovial Dutchman, Jaap Roos, VP of Capgemini, Netherlands. Roos spoke about how words that defined our age, words like "Co-value creation, Exponential globalisation, Collaborative innovation, Prosumerism, The long tail etc" did not even exist five years ago. He said that the web creates a 2 billion person, "no-borders amplification effect." Roos concluded with a final slide that said:

* The web is changing all, people remain central

* Our global society and economy will remain very dependent on raw materials, energy, transportation and industry

* The process of Innovation determines success

* Cyber Security and Identity Integrity are the challenges for the web and our knowledge based future

In the afternoon, I was invited to speak to a group alled, TheYoungTheHague, an important Dutch association of young entrepreneurs. These young entrepreneurs were working on “The Hague's Top Ten Improvements” that they would then present to the Prime Minister, Mark Rutte, Government of The Netherlands. The event was held inside a gorgeous church called the Klosterkerk and the lead speaker was drs. Albert van der Touw, the CEO of Siemens Netherlands. van der Touw spoke about how Siemens gets involved in the cities it is involved in, its work in renewable energy, and areas like desaliniating sea water and making it fit for human consumption, in Africa. van der Touw spoke with a lot of passion about these initiatives and I felt happy to see leaders at his level speaking about their social initiatives, with such conviction. I gave a talk similar to the one I gave earlier in the day, but added the point that technology can enable new possibilities, but building a better society is a human endeavour and we can build better societies only if we have compassion in our hearts.

The many discussions at the WFF around concerns like climate change, security, happiness in society etc, made me recall Gandhi's insightful words that, "There is enough on this earth for everyone's needs, but not enough for everyone's greed." Many of the urgent and pressing challenges that we face in areas like climate change can be solved only if we engaged with them in a spirit of collaboration and sharing, and therefore, the need for compassion and a sense collective good was more urgent than ever. The audience consisted of a group of about 100-120 members of TheYoungTheHague, and I hesitated a few minutes before saying something that has been brewing in my heart and mind for a very long time. Having seen many businesses put private profit ahead of the collective good, especially in areas like open standards, an issue that I was closely involved with in India, I said that I was struck by how the world of business is being treated as a "compassion-free" zone, how it seems to operate as if it is above the norms that govern human society. Today, businesses are the dominant economic and social forces in our society and what they do has a profound impact on all of us. It is therefore even more imperative that businesses be guided by strong moral values like compassion and the collective good. It was very encouraging to see some members of the audience nodding their heads and agreeing with these thoughts. Mr. van der Touw later told me that some of the breakout sessions created for suggesting improvements to The Hague referred to my talk. On the last day, we had dinner at the beautiful Peace Palace, which also houses the International Criminal Court.

Among the personal highlights for me at the event were sessions by Edward De Bono, the founder of lateral thinking, the author of "Six thinking Hats" and many other books. De Bono ran us through the principles of the six thinking hats and said that his ideas were being implemented in schools in India and China and showed significant improvements in learning effectiveness. There were many distinguished people in the audience, but that did not faze De Bono, who went about his task like a school master, using a sharp whistle every few minutes to prod people into changing their metaphorical hats. I also met some amazing entrepreneurs from the Kairos Society, a global network of top student and global leaders using entrepreneurship and innovation to solve the world's greatest challenges. It was inspiring to see these young motivated individuals talk about doing good in a way that makes commercial sense.

One tangible example is a company called ThinkLite run by Dinesh Wadhwani that is helping businesses go green without the upfront costs. ThinkLite evaluates a customer's lighting infrastructure and replaces their old, inefficient lighting systems with energy efficient, mercury free lighting at its own cost, and takes a percentage of the savings as its fees. This is the kind of innovative model that can accelerate the adoption of green technologies in the world. I found the Kairos fellows, lead by Ankur Jain to be energetic and enthusiastic and look forward to seeing them bring their work to India.

There were many discussions around cybersecurity and these sessions were very interesting but not very conclusive. On one hand, we had Christopher Painter, coordinator for cyber issues, US Department of State saying that most people paint security and privacy as issues opposed to each other, but that was not necessarily true. After the session, I tried to probe him further on this and his answer was that the surveillance would be around keywords. Unfortunately, I did not get a chance to dig deeper. On the other hand, was Pablos Holman, a futurist, IT security expert, and a notorious hacker with a unique view into both breaking and building new technologies. Holman who was born in the Soviet Union, was very skeptical about the aims of governments around the world to do 24 by 7 surveillance of e-mails and Internet traffic. He spoke with feeling of of how the Soviet culture of surveillance lead to neighbors suspecting each other and ended up creating a very unhappy society. It would take a 100 years to change that culture now, he said. As a hacker, Holman said that he ran a personal server on every continent, so that no government could get his hands on his e-mail. He sportingly admitted that it was an experiment that he ran purely because he could as hacker and a technology expert. Between Painter and Holman, I am still searching for a common ground between security and privacy on the Internet, and I expect this to be a long search.

At the World Foresight Forum, one of the most interesting persons I met was Rabbi Awraham Soetendorp. A very warm and affectionate person, I was delighted to know that the Rabbi spoke about the role of compassion at the WFF. He shared a Jewish story about heaven and hell that I wanted to share with you. There was a man who wanted to know the difference between heaven and hell. God took him to hell and there he saw people sitting around a table laden with tasty food, but the people all had arms so stiff that they couldn't bend their elbows and bring it to their mouths. God then took him to heaven and he saw the same thing, people with stiff hands who could not bring the food to their mouths. The man said, 'What the difference? There is no difference between heaven and hell." God said, 'Wait my son.' The man waited and he saw that the people in heaven were feeding each other." If we are to really seek, “Security, Peace and Justice for Sustainable Global Growth” we need tons and tons of the spirit of sharing that the venerable Rabbi spoke about.

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Moving on from Red Hat to Google

Last month, I moved from Red Hat to Google. After spending six-and-half years at Red Hat, it was a tough decision to make because I got to work on issues like open standards and open source that have such long-term implications for India. To tell the truth, I had also gotten into a warm comfort zone in my previous job and was wondering what to do next, after we won the open standards fight in India.

In the last year or so, there were several offers, but none of them really excited me because I was looking for a role that has a large social impact. When Google sounded me out, I thought this could be interesting because Internet penetration in India, especially the web in India languages, is one area that can have a large impact. I know that broadband, 3G, 4G etc are on their way, yadda, yadda, yadda, and Internet usage will inevitably grow, but those who have been involved in policy know that there is a great difference between having policies on paper and actually having *political will* behind those policies. For example, every politician and bureaucrat agrees that computing in Indian languages is a good idea, but our so-called software superpower of a country has not made this a reality, even as it relentlessly churns out code for the rest of the world.

Another reason for taking up Google's offer was that I'll be able to continue my involvement in open source and open standards. In some ways, it was also a good time to leave Red Hat because most of the defensive work needed to protect the open source community -- open standards, software patents etc -- have been taken care of. Apart from the FOSS non-profits like FSF and FSMI, the Indian FOSS community now has an layer of non-profits like IT For Change, the Center for Internet and Society, Knowledge Commons and others who look at FOSS from an outside-in perspective and advocate for FOSS as a social good. The setting up of the Software Freedom Law Center's India chapter has also helped give the community some sorely needed legal firepower. I feel that these developments have greatly strengthened the community.

I want to conclude by saying that I see great hope for the future, event though the current policy environment seems so bleak and depressing. is is because, in the last six-and-half years, I have had the privilege of working with many bright, passionate individuals who are working for the larger good. Some of them have left the civil service or the corporate world to work in NGOs, and most of them have the caliber to be successful entrepreneurs or business leaders but have chosen to be involved in the area of public policy. This is an exciting development that will change India's destiny.

ODF, OGG listed as standards approved for e-governance in India

Here is some good news to kick off the new year. As a follow-up to the Policy on Open Standards for e-Governance, the Department of Information Technology has published the "Interoperability Framework for E-Governance in India (IFEG)."

The draft of the IFEG lists out the standards approved for e-governance in India. The last date for comments on this draft is 27th Jan 2011. The IFEG draft clearly says that ODF and OGG are standards approved for e-governance in India and proprietary document formats and multimedia formats are not mentioned at all. My understanding is that these standards will be included in the future Requests for Proposals (RFP) for e-Governance applications, which means that these standards will be baked-in to all future e-Governance applications.

Indian Open Standards policy finalized--major victory for the FOSS community

After three years of continuous running battles, India's Department of Information Technology has finalized the National Policy on Open Standards for e-Governance. This incorporates many of the key points submitted by Red Hat. Over the last three years, we worked with our friends in government, academic, civil society and the media to push the Indian government in favor of a policy that mandates a single, royalty-free standard. The final policy and the comments that Red Hat had submitted are attached.

In the previous draft dated 25/11/2009, our major objection was to section 4.1.2 of the policy which said,

"4.1.2 The essential patent claims necessary to implement the Identified Standard should preferably be available on a Royalty-Free (no payment and no restrictions) basis for the life time of the standard. However, if such Standards are not found feasible and in the wider public interest, then RF on Fair, Reasonable and Non Discriminatory terms and conditions (FRAND) or Reasonable and Non Discriminatory terms and conditions (RAND) could be considered."

The comments I submitted on behalf of Red Hat reads:.

While the term “Mandatory Characteristics” indicates that section is binding, the usage of terms like “should preferably” conveys the impression that this is non-binding. Since thousands of government agencies, systems integrators and others connected with e-Governance will look up to this policy for guidance, we request that the mandatory characteristics should be laid out clearly and unambiguously. As with the previous section, we feel that the intent and will of the GoI should be clearly expressed in this section. In any case, Sections 4.3, 4.4 and
5 deal with the exceptions.

The term “essential patent claims,” is not defined in the policy and this could prove to be a huge loophole. This term is also a new introduction and it would have been helpful to know the rationale for its introduction. Ultimately, any patent necessary for the implementation of a standard is an “essential patent claim” because a
standard cannot be implemented partially. In this context, I would like to point out that the Chinese government has issued a notification for the compulsory licensing of patents related to standards used in China. An English translation of this notice is attached with this letter for your reference.

Recommendation: We request that the wording of this section should be changed to "ALL patent claims necessary to implement the Identified Standard should be available on a Royalty-Free (no payment and no restrictions) basis for the life time of the standard.” We also request that the following statement, “However, if such Standards are not found feasible and in the wider public interest, then Fair, Reasonable and Non Discriminatory terms and conditions (FRAND) or Reasonable and Non Discriminatory terms and conditions (RAND) could be considered,” be moved to the sections dealing with exceptions. We feel that this section is the heart of the Draft Policy and placing an exception statement in the very heart of the policy will send out wrong and conflicting signals.

As you can see from the extract below, the points mentioned above have
been incorporated In the recently finalized policy. This section now reads:

4.1.2 The Patent claims necessary to implement the Identified Standard
shall be made available on a Royalty-Free basis for the life time of the
Standard.

Overall, I'd say this is a major victory for the Indian FOSS community
and more than three years of hard work have paid off. Now I need a loooooong break!

The challenges in using proprietary standards

Flash Co-Creator Jonathan Gay talks of the challenges they faced in using H.264 standard.

The second challenge was selecting a video codec. We wanted to use the cool new H.264 open standard but Macromedia did not feel they could afford the H.264 license fee. I believe that the capped $5M per year H.264 license fee was similar in scale to the annual Flash engineering budget at the time. The H.264 license fee model is very anticompetitive. H.264 licensing is free for very small users, expensive for medium size companies and inexpensive for very large companies. This model puts the midsize companies who could challenge the dominant companies at a significant competitive disadvantage and is the reason that we implemented the proprietary but affordable On2 codec in Flash instead of the open and expensive H.264 codec. The capped license fee also discourages large companies from building a competitor to H.264 because they can simply pay the capped license fee and know they are managing their patent risk and suppressing their smaller competitors. For example, it would have cost Macromedia $5M per year to add H.264 to Flash but it probably cost Adobe much less to add H.264 because they were probably already paying a substantial fee for their video editing products. You can probably thank the success of Flash video for the fact that streaming H.264 video over the Internet is free for another 5 years. Solving this patent license problem is probably why Google purchased On2. However, if they open source the latest On2 codec as people suspect they want to, it’s much easier to launch a patent lawsuit against them because anyone can inspect the source code. Given the large number of patents in the video space, it may not actually be possible to build an open source codec that does not inadvertently infringe on someone’s patent. The MPEG Licensing Authority solves the problem in a Borg-like way by adding any new patent challengers to their patent pool.

Red Hat's comments on Draft Policy on Open Standards for e-Governance Version 1.1 dated May 2010

These are the comments that I submitted to Department of Information Technology on behalf of Red Hat on the Draft Policy on Open Standards for e-Governance Version 1.1 dated May 2010. Overall, it is a good policy with a few loopholes that need to be plugged. If approved in a slightly improved form, it will be a huge landmark for e-governance in India and for the open source and open standards community.

General Review Comments

Wonderful is your gift of knowledge
the more we share, the more it grows
the more we hoard, the more it diminishes

Hymn to Saraswati, the Goddess of Knowledge

Information Technology, and the Internet in particular, have opened up tremendous avenues for the sharing of knowledge. In the next two years, over two billion people (or one-third of humanity) will be connected to the Internet, making it the largest collaborative network in the history of mankind. Open standards are the most fundamental tool for the sharing of knowledge and we therefore appreciate DIT's leadership in creating the Draft Policy on Open Standards for e-Governance Version 1.1 dated May 2010.

In creating and implementing the Open Standards Policy, we hope that DIT will live up to the best of Indian knowledge traditions that placed tremendous emphasis on the sharing of knowledge. While genuine open standards foster the sharing of knowledge, proprietary standards prevent the free flow of knowledge by treating standards as a priced commodity or as trade secrets, owned and controlled by private entities. We hope that DIT will make a clear distinction between open standards and proprietary standards because this has larger implications beyond e-Governance and impacts the information society as a whole.

We recognize and respect the fact that DIT has a significant challenge on its hands when it comes to genuine open standards because many standards, currently in use, have evolved as de-facto standards that are proprietary in nature. At the same time, we request DIT to recognize the larger historical perspective, which places standards firmly in the commons; and that proprietary digital standards are an aberration of this norm. It is a well established convention of civil society that standards should be treated as a “common wealth” and belong to all, and NOT be controlled by private entities. If standards that we take for granted – like weights and measures – were proprietary standards that required royalties and OEM licenses for usage, the cost and social impact of the same can well be imagined. For example, multimedia standards are some of the most expensive standards in the world. A complete set of playback plug-ins costs around EUR 28 (approximately Rs 1,624). As we deliver e-government services right down to the village panchayats and seek to put computers in every school, the cost of these proprietary playback plug-ins could prove to be a heavy drain on the country's finances, affect IT penetration in India and thereby hinder the spread of knowledge.

On the other hand, open standards can accelerate the sharing of knowledge and the Internet and World Wide Web are the finest examples of this. For example, in 1994, Sir Tim Berners-Lee founded the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) at MIT. It comprised various companies that were willing to create standards and recommendations to improve the quality of the Web. Berners-Lee made his idea available freely, with no patent and no royalties due. The World Wide Web Consortium decided that its standards should be based on royalty-free technology, so that they could easily be adopted by anyone.

It is therefore clear that open standards promote the public good, which is the primary responsibility of any government. The ultimate test of any open standard is – does it give us the freedom to share knowledge without any hindrance, without any terms and conditions? We hope that this is the yardstick that will be used to determine open standards for India.

Comments on Specific Sections

Section 4.1.2 of the policy states, “ The patent claims necessary to implement the Identified Standard shall be available on a Royalty-Free basis for the life time of the Standard. If such Standards are not found feasible then in the wider public interest, Fair, Reasonable and Non Discriminatory terms and conditions (FRAND) or Reasonable and Non Discriminatory terms and conditions (RAND) with no payment could be considered.”

We request that the following statement, “If such Standards are not found feasible then in the wider public interest, Fair, Reasonable and Non Discriminatory terms and conditions (FRAND) or Reasonable and Non Discriminatory terms and conditions (RAND) with no payment could be considered” be moved to the section 4.3 which deals with “Non-availability of Open Standard which meets all Mandatory Characteristics dealing with exceptions.” We strongly feel that this sentence is completely out of place, especially considering that it is currently housed in section 4.1 titled, “Mandatory Characteristics.”

We feel that section 4.1.2 is the heart of the Draft Policy and placing an exception statement in the very heart of the policy will send out wrong and conflicting signals. Also, in terms of sequence, the RAND/FRAND clause pre-empts the selection criteria listed in Section 4.4. It should also be noted that standards that are RAND/FRAND should be termed as “Interim Standards” and should NOT be termed as “Open Standards.”

For example, the H.264-encoded Internet Video format is currently free to end users until at least December 31, 2015. Once this period ends, MPEG LA, the licensing agency for H.264 may start charging royalties. Therefore, H.264 is a partially-royalty free standard, but cannot be considered an open standard because users do not have the freedom to encode and decode data and have to adhere to complex licensing conditions. Under the current wording of Section 4.1.2, H.264 may qualify as a suitable open standard for e-governance but this is clearly unacceptable in the long-term. For example, if Doordarshan uses H.264 to transmit a National Address by the Prime Minister of India over the web on 1st January, 2016, it may attract royalty that “...shall be no more than the economic equivalent of royalties payable during the same time for free television."
Therefore, we suggest, once again, that this sentence be moved to Section 4.4 and be modified to read, "If such Standards are not found feasible then in the wider public interest, Fair, Reasonable and Non Discriminatory terms and conditions (FRAND) or Reasonable and Non Discriminatory terms and conditions (RAND) with no payment, AND NO RESTRICTIONS ON REUSE, could be considered.”

4.3 Non-availability of Open Standard which meets all Mandatory Characteristics

Given the strategic importance of open source and its ability to free India from being technologically dependent on proprietary software vendors, we request that the open source community should have a strong representation in the Designated Body selecting the standards. We request that the process of selecting these Interim Standards should be an open and transparent process that seeks inputs from the public. Citizens should be clearly explained the logic for selecting these standards.

5. Exceptions for Selecting One or More Additional Open Standard in an Area

If multiple standards are selected for a particular area, the government should ensure that data is interchanged without any loss of information. If information is lost in the process of exchanging data, it would defeat the very purpose of having this policy. As with many other policies in India, we are seriously concerned that this exception clause should be used only in the rarest of rare cases and that the exception should not become the norm. Therefore we suggest that this sentence be modified to read as, “Such standard shall be compatible and bi-directionally interoperable, without any loss of data, with the already existing selected Standard.”

Going by past experience, we have seen that proprietary vendors who stand to lose their billion dollar monopolies, are willing to do anything possible to exploit every loophole available to them. Therefore, the constitution of the Designated Body is critically important. DIT must ensure that a transparent process is followed to include multiple stakeholders, including civil society in order to prevent institutional capture of the designated body. The constitution of the LITD 15 committee of the Bureau of Indian Standards is an example worthy of consideration.

Annexure Section m: Maturity -- An standard is considered mature if different implementations, commercial/open, are available, widely adopted and have been stable for some time.

We request that this be reworded to read as, “Maturity -- A standard is considered mature if different implementations in proprietary and open source software, are available, widely adopted and have been stable for some time.” It should be noted that open source software licenses do not differentiate between commercial and non-commercial implementations. The two major development models in the software world are proprietary (where the ownership of the source code is closely held) and open source (where users have the freedom to modify, share and redistribute the source code). Therefore, it would be more accurate to replace the term, “commercial/open” with the term, “proprietary and open source.”

A-I-6 Open Source: The term is most commonly applied to the source code of software that is available to the general public with relaxed or non-existent intellectual property restrictions.

The definition of “open source” is not accurate. There are specific licensing restrictions on Open Source Software. The purpose of these restrictions is to preserve the users' right to share, modify and redistribute the source code. We therefore suggest that the Open Source Definition of the Open Source Initiative be followed. It is the OSI that approves the open source licenses. The Open Source Definition is as under:

Introduction

Open source doesn't just mean access to the source code. The distribution terms of open-source software must comply with the following criteria:

1. Free Redistribution

The license shall not restrict any party from selling or giving away the software as a component of an aggregate software distribution containing programs from several different sources. The license shall not require a royalty or other fee for such sale.

2. Source Code

The program must include source code, and must allow distribution in source code as well as compiled form. Where some form of a product is not distributed with source code, there must be a well-publicized means of obtaining the source code for no more than a reasonable reproduction cost preferably, downloading via the Internet without charge. The source code must be the preferred form in which a programmer would modify the program. Deliberately obfuscated source code is not allowed. Intermediate forms such as the output of a preprocessor or translator are not allowed.

3. Derived Works

The license must allow modifications and derived works, and must allow them to be distributed under the same terms as the license of the original software.

4. Integrity of The Author's Source Code

The license may restrict source-code from being distributed in modified form only if the license allows the distribution of "patch files" with the source code for the purpose of modifying the program at build time. The license must explicitly permit distribution of software built from modified source code. The license may require derived works to carry a different name or version number from the original software.

5. No Discrimination Against Persons or Groups

The license must not discriminate against any person or group of persons.

6. No Discrimination Against Fields of Endeavor

The license must not restrict anyone from making use of the program in a specific field of endeavor. For example, it may not restrict the program from being used in a business, or from being used for genetic research.

7. Distribution of License

The rights attached to the program must apply to all to whom the program is redistributed without the need for execution of an additional license by those parties.

8. License Must Not Be Specific to a Product

The rights attached to the program must not depend on the program's being part of a particular software distribution. If the program is extracted from that distribution and used or distributed within the terms of the program's license, all parties to whom the program is redistributed should have the same rights as those that are granted in conjunction with the original software distribution.

9. License Must Not Restrict Other Software

The license must not place restrictions on other software that is distributed along with the licensed software. For example, the license must not insist that all other programs distributed on the same medium must be open-source software.

10. License Must Be Technology-Neutral

No provision of the license may be predicated on any individual technology or style of interface.

A-II-6: What is meant by maturity? An Open Standard is considered mature if different implementations, commercial/Open, are available, widely adopted and have been stable for some time.

As with Annexure M, we request that the term, “commercial/open” be replaced with “proprietary and open source.” We would also like to suggest the addition of the following sentence, “The date on which the open standard came into existence will be given priority when it comes to making a choice between two competing open standards.” The reason for this is that an open standard that has been in existence longer is likely to be more mature.

Open Source offers more to CIOs

An edited version of this article of mine appeared in the April 2010 edition of IT Next magazine in India, in their "Moneywise" column. Please feel free to translate, rewrite and publish it in your local geo to promote the message of open source. If this gets published elsewhere, kindly send me a copy/the link.

Open Source offers more to CIOs

“Quality. Price. Service. Pick any two,” said a very succinct placard in Damodar's tailor shop. Back in the days when clothes were tailored, Damodar was one of the best in the business and he definitely knew what he was talking about.

However, in the software industry, the emergence of open source software (OSS) has turned this dynamic on its head. It is no longer about, “Pick any two,” but “Pick ALL three.”

Take quality for a start. Studies by Coverity, have found that the number of defects per thousand lines of code is lower with OSS than with proprietary software. One of the most famous sayings in the OSS community is that “Many eyes make bugs shallow.” The open, transparent, community driven development model of open source has lead to the creation of some of the most robust software systems ever built. Those who have migrated from proprietary server operating systems to open source systems will happily testify to this fact. Is it any surprise that 446 out of the top 500 supercomputers in the world run on Linux? Or that mission critical applications like telecom billing solutions, stock exchanges and others are increasingly moving to Linux and other OSS systems?

On the price front, the industry has had to deal with the forced upgrade cycles, vendor lock-in and hugely bloated software licenses imposed by proprietary software vendors. While the development model of OSS is community driven, many commercial vendors have built business models around service and support for OSS deployments. Many top-notch system integrators around the world routinely incorporate OSS in the solutions they offer to their clients. Unlike their proprietary competitors, OSS vendors do not have to incur huge development costs and this enables them to offer high quality software implementations at prices lower than proprietary software vendors. The good news for CIOs is that OSS is no longer restricted to infrastructure software categories like operating systems and middleware, but has expanded to encompass application areas like CRM, ERP, Business Intelligence, Enterprise Portals, Content Management Systems and many others.

On the service front, everything boils down to how well the software is implemented and supported. In OSS, commercial vendors usually sell their services in the form of annual subscriptions that have to be renewed. The quality of services rendered to the client determine whether subscriptions are renewed or not. This gives OSS vendors an inherent incentive to offer good quality services. Therefore, CIOs should actively consider OSS while procuring software, especially where the OSS option is mature and meets their functional requirements.

Given the recent downturn in the economy, cost has been one of the reasons for more and more CIOs to turn to OSS. However, to be moneywise, CIOs should focus on all three aspects--quality, price and service. It may be tempting to go with OSS vendors who are the cheapest, but CIOs should evaluate the quality of skills available within the vendor organization before taking a final call. As I sum up, I cannot resist quoting from another placard in Damodar's tailor shop. “I have no quarrel with competitors who charge less. They know the value of their goods and services.”

A quick visit to China

I made my first China trip last week and spent two days in Beijing. I explored the possibility of working with the Chinese open source community on policy issues of mutual interest like open standards and software patents. India and China (and other emerging economies like Brazil) are already coordinating with each other on policy issues around climate change, therefore my suggestion seemed practical to the people I met. A longer trip to China is planned for April or May and I hope to work out a more concrete action plan during that trip.

Assam government includes FOSS in state IT policy

Yet another Indian state government made open source an integral part of its state IT policy. The policy is because it mandates open standards and ODF, in particular, which has been advocated open source supporters the open standard for office documents (instead of Microsoft's proprietary .doc, OOXML and other data formats). It also extends beyond software and says that all generic hardware purchased by the government should have support for open source software. The section mandating that source code developed for any State Government body shall be duly archived in a repository, indicates that the policy makers also understand the power of the open source development model. Overall, it is a good policy and worth forwarding to all the government policy makers that we are in touch with.

The full text of Section 3.12 of the Assam Government's state IT Policy says:

(a) The Government would promote use of Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) in all the departments and State agencies, bodies and authorities.

(b) The State Government would promote manpower development and training in use of FOSS, especially in day to day office works.

(c) The State Government would promote imparting training on FOSS in schools and colleges.

(d)Entrepreneurs/ companies using FOSS for application/website development would be given preference over those using third party packaged applications.

(e)All source codes customized/developed for any State Government body shall be duly archived in a repository, and shall be made available freely to other Government departments.

(f) The Government departments and bodies would ensure that Open Document Format (ODF) is adhered to in creating and storing editable documents, data and information and all applications developed by the respective departments adhere to ODF and other Open Standards and are largely independent of Operating Systems (OS) and web browsers.

(g)The Government departments and bodies would ensure that any generic hardware procured has support for multiple Operating Systems(OS) such as Unix, Linux, Opensolaris and other open source platforms.

To download the full text of Assam's IT Policy, click here.

Even slaves were considered property: South African Minister

I re-read the address given by Geraldine Fraser-Moleketi (video), Former South African Minister for Public Service and Administration, at the third Idlelo Conference. This part, especially, gave me goose pimples.

We cannot be in Dakar without being painfully aware of the tragic history of the slave trade. For three hundred years, the Maison des Esclaves (Slave House) on Gorée Island, was a hub in the system of forceful transportation of Africans as slaves to the plantations of the West Indies and the southern states of America. Over the same period people were being brought as slaves from the Malay Archipelago and elsewhere to South Africa. The institution of slavery played such a fundamental role in the early development of our current global economy, that by the end of the 18th century, the slave trade was a dominant factor in the globalised system of trade of the day.

As we find ourselves today in this new era of the globalised Knowledge Economy there are lessons we can and must draw from that earlier era. That a crime against humanity of such monstrous proportions was justified by the need to uphold the property rights of slave owners and traders should certainly make us more than a little cautious about what should and should not be considered suitable for protection as property.

It is good to remember this at a time when organizations aim to justify the privatization of knowledge and ideas under the guise that this is essential for promoting innovation.

In the area of software patents, this is nothing but a land grab, a conversion of was in the commons into a private enclosure.

FOSSCOMM Meeting this Sunday (11th October, 2009)

FOSSCOMM (FOSS Community of India) will hold its third meeting in Mumbai at the Homi Bhabha Center for Science Education, Mankhurd (Near BARC/Anushakti Nagar).

The first meeting held in Bangalore started to process of getting the FOSS Community of India working together. After the second meeting held in Delhi in July 09, FOSSCOMM started making interventions in areas like open standards, school education etc. I hope that the Mumbai meeting will lead to the creation of working groups that will provide leadership to FOSSCOMM's efforts to accelerate the growth of Free and Open Source Software movement in India.

Those interested  working with the community are invited to attend the upcoming FOSSCOMM Meeting on 11th October, 2009.

Dilbert on Patent Trolling

You know that patent trolling has become big business when Dilbert runs a comic strip!

Patent Woes: Speechless about the Word judgment

This is one of the times when you rub your eyes in disbelief, speechlessly gape at the screen and read the same e-mail over and over again. Pranesh Prakash of the Center for Internet and Society forwarded an article titled, "Judge: Microsoft can't sell Word anymore." The article says,

Judge Leonard Davis, of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Texas, ordered a permanent injunction that "prohibits Microsoft from selling or importing to the United States any Microsoft Word products that have the capability of opening .XML, .DOCX or DOCM files (XML files) containing custom XML," according to an announcement by the plaintiff, Toronto-based i4i Inc.

Judge Davis ordered Microsoft to pay $290 million in damages. The abstract of the i4i patent reads,

A system and method for the separate manipulation of the architecture
and content of a document, particularly for data representation and
transformations. The system, for use by computer software developers,
removes dependency on document encoding technology. A map of metacodes found in the document is produced and provided and stored separately from the document. The map indicates the location and addresses of metacodes in the document. The system allows of multiple views of the same content, the ability to work solely on structure and solely on content, storage efficiency of multiple versions and efficiency of
operation.

While I am not a big fan of Microsoft, even I have to admit that this is crazy. But wait a minute! Didn't Microsoft get a patent last week for "Word-processing document stored in a single XML file that may be manipulated by applications that understand XML."

The abstract of the Microsoft patent reads,

A word processor including a native XML file format is provided. The well formed XML file fully represents the word-processor document, and fully supports 100% of word-processor's rich formatting. There are no feature losses when saving the word-processor documents as XML. A published XSD file defines all the rules behind the word-processor's XML file format. Hints may be provided within the XML associated files providing applications that understand XML a shortcut to understanding some of the features provided by the word-processor. The word-processing document is stored in a single XML file. Additionally, manipulation of word-processing documents may be done on computing devices that do not include the word-processor itself.

So, is someone playing tit-for-tat or an-eye-for-an-eye? Mahatma Gandhi said, "An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind." In the weird, wonderful world of digital technology where greedy corporations can convert standards (that should rightfully belong in the commons) into private property, anything can happen.

The Power of Open Source Development

This article of mine appeared in the August 2009 edition of Network Computing's India edition. Please feel free to translate, rewrite and publish it in your local geo to promote the message of open source. If this gets published elsewhere, kindly send me a copy/the link so that I get some sense of how useful this is.

The Power of Open Source Development

Using open source development methodologies, John O'Hara, of JPMorgan developed a standards-based alternative to expensive proprietary middle ware

By Venkatesh Hariharan

Most literature around open source focus on using open source software. While the benefits of OSS are gaining increased recognition, some smart organizations are going a step further and applying the Open Source Development Model (OSDM) to solve problems that proved to be otherwise intractable. OSDM is based on collaboration, community and the shared ownership of knowledge and Linux is one of the best examples of how this model works.

In September 1991, Linus Torvalds released 10,000 lines of source code for Linux and licensed it under the liberal General Public License that gave anyone permission to copy, modify and redistribute the code. The only condition was that anyone making improvements to the software and redistributing the changes had to share the improvements with the rest of the community. This liberal license attracted thousand of contributors over the years who contributed their bit to improving the code base of Linux. A Linux Foundation study found that Fedora, a community Linux distribution has now grown to contain almost 204 million lines of code.

There are two reasons why Linux and other open source software have demonstrated such explosive growth. One is the growth of the Internet, which is the largest collaborative platform in the history of mankind, connecting 1.4 billion people across the world. The other is the open, participative, distributed development model of open source where users are actually encourage to contribute to the development of the software. This is in sharp contrast to proprietary software that allows very limited rights to users.

Some of the most savvy technology users are embracing the participative nature of open source software to build technologies that suit their needs. For example, John O'Hara, senior architect and distinguished engineer at JPMorgan launched AMQP (Advanced Message Queuing Protocol) as an open source project after being frustrated with developing front- and back-office processing systems at investment banks. “It seemed to me that we were living in integration Groundhog Day - the same problems of connecting systems together would crop up with depressing regularity. Each time the same discussions about which products to use would happen, and each time the architecture of some system would be curtailed to allow for the fact that the chosen middleware was reassuringly expensive,” says O'Hara.

In 2003, O'Hara embarked on a quest to standardize MOM (message-oriented middleware) technology, to enable mission critical enterprise applications to send messages to each other in a reliable and scalable manner. He decided to break from the past by using OSDM to start the AMQP project and sought Red Hat's expertise in governing open source projects. “Red Hat took the lead in establishing the legal framework for the standard; it, too, understood the issues in managing open intellectual property. The key part of doing this is to ensure that everyone contributing has the authority to do so and that there is a paper trail from every potential owner of IP through to the group effort, and that the intent to share is clear even in draft revisions of specifications. The result was a contract that clearly committed the members of the working group to promote unrestricted open middleware through AMQP.” For developing the software, O'Hara tapped iMatix, a boutique European development house that had clearly demonstrated a commitment to open source.
The AMQP project is a perfect example of what Prof. Eric Von Hippel, Professor of Innovation at MIT's Sloan School of Management calls, “user-driven innovation.” In his book, Democratizing Innovation, Von Hippel says that open source software projects are exciting examples of complete innovation development and consumption communities run by and for users. Today, users like Credit Suisse, Deutsche Börse Systems, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase Bank Inc, the TWIST consortium and others partner with IT leaders like Cisco, Red Hat, Microsoft and others in the AMQP consortium.

Ultimately, the proof of the pudding is in the eating. AMQP today has several implementations in open source and proprietary software. Imatix built an open-source implementation called, OpenAMQP. The beta version went live in 2006 and by the following year it was supporting 2,000 users on five continents and processing 300 million messages per day. Today, there are several open source and proprietary implementations of AMQP, including OpenAMQ, the original open source implementation. In a powerfully interconnected world, the open source development model used to build AMQP demonstrates the the power—and value—of collaborative software development.

Delaying tactics from industry associations?

Update: Last week, NASSCOM invited me to meet them and I am trying to work out a suitable date.

I am told that industry associations have asked for more time to submit the views of their members and therefore Department of IT has postponed the next meeting of the Apex Committee to review the Draft Open Standards Policy. The meeting was to have happened on 15th July, 2009 but will now probably be held in August 2009.

Now here is the interesting bit. The industry associations asked for more time so that they could go back to their members and ask for their opinions. And here, I am trying to break down the doors of NASSCOM to submit Red Hat's opinion and what do I get? Dead silence. I hear that their deadline was June 7th and then extended to June 15th and I don't know if there is a new cut-off date. But I do know that despite writing to NASSCOM, I haven't heard back from them.

Is this one more ploy to delay a policy that has already been long delayed?