2009/3/21 scrapo scrapo@saswatabanerjee.com
Debayan Banerjee wrote: I would like to know the ground reality since you are there (I visit bengal may be once in 6 months)
OK. I study at NIT Durgapur. I am a member of the NIT Durgapur LUG. IOTA stands for "Institute of Open Technologies and Applications" < http://www.iotawb.org/%3E. It has been setup by Govt. of West Bengal to promote usage of FOSS on all levels. To this end they spend a substantial amount of money in organising seminars and workshops in Bengal. IOTA has 3 chapters: 1) WBUT 2) Jadavpur University 3) NIT Durgapur
We are the newest one. LUGs dont need a lot of money, unless they work on a grand scale. By grand scale I mean penetrating through to the people far and wide. It means organsing workshops, fests, going to conferences in groups. More importantly IMO IOTA provides funds so we can develop solutions that can speed up the adoption. 2 such rocking projects are 1) Freedom Toaster 2) FOSS helpline
Both are under development. Also I attended a conference organised by IOTA in Kolkata and it was pretty good too. Was my first conference anyways. So if there is a political party that supports FOSS its the communists i believe. Maybe BJP is very tech savvy but I am not sure they give a damn about the philosophy. CPI here on the other hand believe in the philosophy IMO. Having heard the IT minster here DR. Debesh Das speak twice convinced me of this. He is concerned about west monopoly(standard communist ideology) and vendor lock. Also at the IOTA conference in Kolkata the focus was very much on the philosophy and so many elderly people were asking questions purely ont he philosophy aspect of FOSS which I found so interesting.
What exactly has the government done for foss and where has it been adopted ? The entire local govt computerisation program in bengal i saw was windows centric
The best person to talk about govt adoption of FOSS is Indranil Das Gupta from ilug-cal and I am sure most of you know him. Maybe they do end up using Windows for official purposes but what I heard last was that they do invite all parties (including Linux based solution vendors) + MS to bid for tenders such as these. If after those discussions they decide that MS provides better back-up services and maintenance i guess we gotta tell ourselves that Linux vendors need to get their act together. We dont even have a nation-wide helpline inspite of organisation nrc-foss existing. Nothing against them, just that we gotta turn our eyes inward. I mean if even Bengal is not adopting FOSS there has to be some problem with FOSS infrastructure IMO (plz dont hate me :-/)
The only place i have actually seen govt using foss is Bihar.
Yes, Sahana. We will have to wait for a huge flood to come here in Bengal to see if they use Sahana here too :)
regards saswata