Indian Opposition, *and* Indian Government

I wrote recently about the main opposition party in India getting behind open source; it seems that the Indian government has also seen the light:

E-mail system of the Prime Minister's Office was under the grip of a computer virus for three months last year forcing officials to replace the software.

The technical glitch plagued the e-mail communication system of the PMO, which was based on the Microsoft Outlook Express, from February to April in 2008.

Although the extent of damage was uncertain, the PMO said that most of the e-mails addressed to it were not received.

The problem was detected only in late April after which the Microsoft Outlook Express email software was discontinued and replaced by another software - Squirrel mail.

"Squirrel mail" is presumably the open source Squirrelmail: "Webmail for nuts". (Via The Reg.)

Yet More Open Source for South Africa

Yesterday I wrote about India's opposition backing open source more fully, and here's a good update on what's happening in South Africa:

“The move to open source software has not been as fast as we would have liked, but we are now entering a new era. In the past, open source deployments were mostly spontaneous and ad-hoc. We now have a more systematic approach.” In years past many government departments pursued their own open source migrations, usually in isolation from one another, and with varying degrees of success.

...

Now, says Webb, the State IT Agency (Sita) is assuming the role of paving the way for OSS migration by finalising standards and conducting pilot projects to make it easier for all to implement open source software successfully. ... Webb also says that Sita expects all government department websites to be running on open source software “very soon”.

There's clearly a pattern emerging here around the world, as governments their loyal opposition first experiment with open source, and then commit to it whole heartedly.

India's Main Opposition Party Backs Open Source

As I've noted before, you can tell open source has entered the mainstream when political parties try to outbid each other in establishing their open credentials. Further evidence of this trend now comes from India, where The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), the largest opposition party, has released its “IT vision”, document which includes a healthy chunk of openness....

On Open Enterprise blog.

India Fights Patents with Huge Prior Art Database

One of the many problems with the patent offices around the world is that they are often unaware of prior art, granting patents for so-called inventions that are, in fact, common knowledge. In the computer world, there have been a number of efforts to provide prior art to patent offices, either after a patent is granted, in order to have it rescinded, or – even better – as part of the examination process. That's fine for a community with easy access to online source materials, but what about other fields, where prior art exists in other forms like books, or perhaps orally?

This is a particularly thorny problem for the sphere of traditional medicine. Substances derived from plants, for example, may have been in use for literally thousands of years, and yet patents may still be granted – especially in Western countries ignorant of other ancient medical traditions.

Perhaps the best-known example of this is the case of turmeric, commonly used as a spice in curries, for which patents were granted in 1995 on its wound healing properties by the US Patent Office, even though these supposedly novel uses had in fact been known for millennia.

To combat this problem, and to prevent its huge traditional knowledge basis being exploited in this way, India has created the Traditional Knowledge Digital Library (TKDL) database, which was unveiled on 2 February, and is now available to the Patent Examiners at the European Patent Office for establishing prior art in case of patent applications based on Indian systems of medicine.

Here's some background information on how the database came to be created and was set up:

The genesis of this maiden Indian effort dates back to the year 2000, when an interdisciplinary Task Force of experts was set up by AYUSH and CSIR, to devise a mechanism on protection of India’s traditional knowledge. The TKDL expert group estimated that about 2000 number of wrong patents concerning Indian systems of medicine were being granted every year at international level, mainly due to the fact that, India’s traditional medicine knowledge exists in languages such as Sanskrit, Hindi, Arabic, Urdu, Tamil etc. and was neither accessible nor understood by patent examiners at the international patent offices due to language and format barriers.

The TKDL breaks these barriers and has been able to scientifically convert and structure the information available in languages like Hindi, Sanskrit, Arabic, Persian, Urdu and Tamil, in open domain text books into five international languages, namely, English, Japanese, French, German and Spanish, with information contents in 30 million A4 size pages, with the help of Information Technology tools and a novel classification system - Traditional Knowledge Resource Classification (TKRC).

This is a huge, multilingual resource – something that could only be put together with governmental support and resources. It is also fairly specific to the domain of traditional knowledge. Nonetheless, it's a great example of how an extensive prior art database can be created and then made readily available to the patent authorities in order to help prevent patents being granted unjustifiably. It's a pity that we are unlikely to see anything quite like it for other knowledge domains.

Why Outsourcing, not Open Sourcing?

James McGovern has a question (and another brilliant pic - where *does* he find them?):

Why do people outsource when they can open source? For example, if there are 250 P&C insurance companies in the US in which each may have their own claims administration system, why do they outsource individually to India instead of open sourcing the systems that are expensive but otherwise don't provide competitive advantage? Is it the lack of vision within the enterprise architecture crowd?

Watch Out, There's a Meme About

There's a nasty rash of congruent memes going around government circles: they're all coming up with fiendish new ways to wage the non-existent war on terror, all of which unfortunately involve locking down useful technology.

Here's the latest threat - to us, that is:

The Indian government has set up an inter-ministerial panel to trace the activities of terrorists using Wifi networks. The recent series of blasts which has shattered the Indian subcontinent has been characterised by the culprits sending emails about the bombs via Wifi.

Headed by Advisor (Telecom), the Department of Telecommunication (DoT), and members from the Telecom Engineering Centre, the Ministry of Home, the Intelligence Bureau and the Department of Information Technology, the committee will examine international practices and enforceable ways and means to detect the actual user on a Wifi network. It will then prescribe modifications to existing policies and licences.

The decision is prompted by terrorists hacking into open Wifi networks twice in three months to send mails about the Ahmedabad and Delhi blasts to the media. While admitting the impossibility of obstructing the flow of technology, DoT officials say that its misuse must be checked, according to the Times of India.

Loved that bit about "[w]hile admitting the impossibility of obstructing the flow of technology, DoT officials say that its misuse must be checked" - a classic case of "something must be done; this is something; so we must do it."

How long before other governments start following suit? (Via Andrew Katz.)

IBM Fires a Shot Across the ISO's Bows

I've written before about the parlous state into which the once-irreproachable ISO has fallen, particularly with its flagrant disregard of the concerns of major developing countries like India and Brazil during the OOXML standardisation process. Pointing out the ISO's flaws is easy enough, but fixing them is more problematic. It seemed likely that much of the impetus would come from those countries that have been marginalised by the ISO, but things have just got much more interesting with the announcement of IBM's new “IT Standards Policy” which addresses precisely these issues....

On Open Enterprise blog.

ISO's Day of Shame

So ISO has decided it wants to be irrelevant:

The two ISO and IEC technical boards have given the go-ahead to publish ISO/IEC DIS 29500, Information technology – Office Open XML formats, as an ISO/IEC International Standard after appeals by four national standards bodies against the approval of the document failed to garner sufficient support.

Oh, and why would that be?

None of the appeals from Brazil, India, South Africa and Venezuela received the support for further processing of two-thirds of the members of the ISO Technical Management Board and IEC Standardization Management Board, as required by ISO/IEC rules governing the work of their joint technical committee ISO/IEC JTC 1, Information technology.

Riiiight: so there was insufficient support among the technical boards for their dirty laundry to be aired in public. What a surprise. The fact that standards bodies representing the second- and fourth-most populous countries in the world were unhappy with the way the standardisation process was carried out doesn't matter, apparently.

Time for a new international standards body, methinks....

Why Software Patents Are Harmful

Recently I've pointed to a couple of classic texts about the general undesirability of intellectual monopolies. Here's an interesting counterpoint: a text about why bringing in software patents would be harmful to the Indian computer industry.

Despite this specificity, its points are quite general. For example:

In other industries, research continues up to a point where further research costs too much to be feasible. At this stage, the industry's output merelyconsists of replacing parts that have worn out.

However, in the software sector, a computer program that is fully debugged will perform its function forever without requiring maintenance or modification. “What this means is that unlike socks that wear out, and breakfast cereal that is eaten, a particular software product can be sold to a particular customer at most once. If it is to be sold to that customer again, it must be enhanced with new features and functionality.” This inevitably means that even if the industry were to approach maturity, any software company that does not produce new and innovative products will simply run out of customers! Thus, the industry will remain innovative whether or not software patents exist.

(Via Open Source India.)

India's $10 Laptop

Apparently:

"The government aims to provide 10-dollar laptops to students and research in this direction is on," said D Purandeshwari, Minister of State for Human Resources Development in New Delhi.

Well, at that price, it won't be running Windows - unless Microsoft prices it *negatively*, which it might be driven to.... (Via Valleywag.)

Update: A real bargain: only $10, free misprint included.

Paying the Price

One of the problems with handling the issue of greenhouse gases is getting countries to accep their responsibilities. The difficulty is that there are lots of ways of looking at things. For example, although the developing countries like India and China are clearly soon going to be the main culprits here, they can - with justice - point out that countries in the West have been polluting for longer, and have therefore already contributed far more to global warming. The obvious solution here is to use a time-integrated output, which takes that into account.

But it turns out that things are even more complicated:

Economists now say that one-third of China's carbon dioxide emissions are pumped into the atmosphere in order to manufacture exported goods – many of them "advanced" electronics goods destined for developed countries.

That is, in some sense a third of China's current emissions are "ours", and should be added to our already swelling debit.

The good news is that such things can be calculated to come up with fair ways of allocating future cuts; the bad news is that not many countries are going to be mature enough to accept them.

Perhaps the easiest way to handle this would be through economics: if a green tax were applied to every product, there would be strong incentives to reduce their carbon footprint (and environmental impact generally). In this case, China would no longer be producing pollution on the West's behalf unless it could do it as "efficiently" as elsewhere. Unfortunately, that, too, requires a certain maturity on behalf the world's nations to accept such a system. It also probably requires more time to set up than have at our disposal....

Drupal: Big in Afghanistan?

I love statisitcs about open source - not least because they are still quite thin on the ground. Here's some fascinating stuff from Drupal, the free content management system: statistics on user demographics, including each country's current rank and percentage market share. Here are the main figures:

United States 1 (33.12%)
India 2 (5.68%)
United Kingdom 3 (5.14%)
Afghanistan 4 (4.64%)

Now, India as a growing market I can understand, but Afghanistan about to overtake the UK? Hmm, interesting....

Bye-Bye Biofuels...

When are people going to wake up to the fact that biofuels are not the solution, but actually exacerbate the world's problems?

A global rice shortage that has seen prices of one of the world's most important staple foods increase by 50 per cent in the past two weeks alone is triggering an international crisis, with countries banning export and threatening serious punishment for hoarders.

With rice stocks at their lowest for 30 years, prices of the grain rose more than 10 per cent on Friday to record highs and are expected to soar further in the coming months. Already China, India, Egypt, Vietnam and Cambodia have imposed tariffs or export bans, as it has become clear that world production of rice this year will decline in real terms by 3.5 per cent. The impact will be felt most keenly by the world's poorest populations, who have become increasingly dependent on the crop as the prices of other grains have become too costly.

...

Analysts have cited many factors for the rises, including rising fuel and fertiliser expenses, as well as climate change. But while drought is one factor, another is the switch from food to biofuel production in large areas of the world, in particular to fulfil the US energy demands.

And this is just the beginning....

Gobsmacked by Microsoft

I wrote before about Microsoft's attempts to "encourage" India to vote in favour of OOXML. That gambit failed, and what do we find?

At the meeting held on 20th March 2008, we were informed that Microsoft has complained to the Ministry of Consumer Affairs and to the apex office of the country about the constitution of the committee and also cast aspersions on the impartiality of the chairperson of LITD15, Mrs. Neeta Verma. The chairperson was furious and offered to step down from her post. She pointed out that the committee has met numerous times and Microsoft never brought this issue up in front of the committee nor did they check the facts with her or her organization before complaining to the apex office.

Are there no limits?

Microsoft Using NGOs in India to Lobby for OOXML?

If this is true - and I have no reason to think it isn't - then I predict that it will come back to bite Microsoft very badly one day:

Mail from Microsoft India's Corporate Social Responsibility group to the NGO

As per our discussion please find attached the draft letters -­ please cut/edit/ delete and change it any which way you find useful. Also attached is the list of NGOs who have sent the letters. And attached is also a document that details wht (sic) this debate is all about. Look forward to hear from you in this regard. In case you decide to send the letters, can you please send me a scan of the singed (sic) letters that you send out. Thanks this will help me track the process.

Thanks

Form letters on OOXML sent by Microsoft to NGOs

To

Mr. Jainder Singh, IAS
Secretary
Department of IT
Ministry of Communications & IT,
Electronics Niketan
CGO Complex
New Delhi - 110 003

Respected Sir

Please write a paragraph about your organization

Please paraphrase "We support OXML as a standard that encourages multiplicity of choice and interoperability giving us the ultimate consumer the choice. * recognizes that multiple standards are good for the economy and also for technical innovation and progress in the country, especially for smaller organizations like us, who require choice and innovation"

Please write about your work

Please paraphrase "*** also supports OXML as this does not have any financial implications thus releasing our resources for welfare and development of society."

Thanking You

Yours Faithfully

Name Designation

(Via Open Source India.)

Saving Limbu from Linguistic Limbo

There's a fair amount of acrimony flying around the OLPC XO machine at the moment, which is a pity. Because the real story is stuff like this old but still important post that I came across recently:

The development team at OLPC Nepal have been working hard on developing various learning activities for children using the XO. A significant area in which they have been making progress has been in creating activities to help children learn their local dialect.

The first dialect to be setup for use on the XO is Limbu. This is a Tibeto-Burman language spoken by more than 300,000 people in eastern Nepal as well as parts of Myanmar, Bhutan and India.

This is a really exciting development and is a positive counter to concerns that the OLPC project will only serve to homogenise indigenous cultures. In fact, the project may aid the long term preservation and viability of minority dialects and culture which are no longer part of the curriculum in the traditional school teaching models.

I always was a sucker for those Tibeto-Burman languages....

Live Documents and Let Live Documents

It's not really clear whether we need yet another online office suite, but at least Live Documents seems to have understood the importance of freeing users from dependence on a certain offline one:

"From a technology and utility perspective, Live Documents offers two valuable improvements - firstly, it break's Microsoft's proprietary format lock-in and builds a bridge with other document standards such as Open Office and secondly, our solution matches features found only in the latest version of Office (Office 2007) such as macros, table styles and databar conditional formatting in Excel 2007 and live preview of changes in PowerPoint 2007. Thus, Live Documents lets consumers and businesses to derive the benefits of Office 2007 without having to upgrade," said Adarsh Kini, Chief Technology Officer, InstaColl.

Re-booting FOSS.IN

FOSS.IN is "India's premier FOSS event" (well, that's what they say.) So this is a brave move:

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

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

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

Our objective is to enable and jumpstart more FOSS contributors from India.

But most people just don't seem to have understood that, and have submitted user oriented talks (even if they involve development).

...

To fix this, we are restarting the Call for Participation process.

As Open Source India rightly says:

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

I've always believed that India can become a real free software powerhouse: let's hope this bold move marks the first step towards that.

Of the People, By the People, For the People

I'm rather slow in this one, but it's such a good example of how everyone gains from public collaboration - including Google, whose CTO of Google Earth, Michael Jones, is speaking here:

This is Hyderabad, and if you see the dark areas, those correspond to roads in low detail. If you zoom in, you'll see the roads, and if you expand a little bit, you'll see both roads and labelled places... there's graveyards, and some roads and so forth.

Now, everything you see here was created by people in Hyderabad. We have a pilot program running in India. We've done about 50 cities now, in their completeness, with driving directions and everything - completely done by having locals use some software we haven't released publicly to draw their city on top of our photo imagery.

This is the future, people - your future (though I do wonder about the map data copyright in these situations).

Mind Your Own BusinessWeek

Extraordinary column in BusinessWeek:

While Microsoft leads in India and China, Linux is mounting a strong challenge in both nations. The Linux community has signed a deal with Beijing to make Linux the default operating system for computers used by the Chinese government and many parts of the Chinese educational system. In India, the prices of Windows and Office are so high that Linux is the only practical, affordable choice for most of the population.

In this context, applying Western IP enforcement policies to stem the flood of illegal copies of Windows in China and India risks winning the battle (to deter and punish IP infringement) while losing the war (to become the dominant standard operating system on the desktop). As long as Linux remains a serious rival in China and India, Microsoft should welcome pirated copies of its software. Illegal versions of Windows are free, which helps Microsoft offset the initial cost advantage of "free" open-source software.

Every pirated copy installed on a Chinese or Indian computer brings one more person into the Microsoft ecosystem. This strengthens Microsoft's market for third-party developers of applications, tools, and other complementary products. Equally important, it denies Linux that next new customer who would strengthen the open-source ecosystem against Windows.

Maybe it's to be expected that arch-capitalist tool BusinessWeek would be offering free advice to Microsoft on how to crush that commie open source stuff. What I find harder to comprehend is the fact that the author of this piece is a self-styled "authority on open innovation, open business models, and more open approaches to intellectual property management" - all with a view to stamping it out, apparently.