On Fri, 12 Apr 2002, Keyur Shroff wrote:
"Linux India Initiatives"
Information may kindly be furnised under the following heads :
- Linux - The need;
- Demand profile segments - such as Home, Education, Research, Govt, Defence, Business, Embedded systems etc.
India is a developing country, and as such, we should look to finding low cost solutions while not compromising on quality. While our software industry has been successful world-wide in providing solutions for business consumers, software as a product remains too costly within our own country. We must also realise that much of the software in use within our country comes from outside. This in turn translates to a large sum of Indian Rupees flowing into foreign companies.
Most proprietary software comes with a licence agreement that restricts the redistribution of the software. Persons who do redistribute the software, in violation of the licence, are labelled as software pirates. While it is accpeted that software piracy is a problem and must be curtailed, it is also possible that we aren't striking at the cause of the problem.
What most software consumers fail to realise, is that software is not a product that one buys off the shelf like a tube of toothpaste. The reproduction costs of software are negligible and there are no raw materials involved. The software industry is therefore falls into the services sector rather than the manufacturing sector. More time is spent in providing support for software than is spent in developing it.
Once this is understood, it becomes clear that the software itself should not be priced highly, but after sales service and support should be charged for.
This is where the GNU/Linux system fits in. The licencing terms of this system state clearly that anyone has the right to obtain and redistribute copies of the system. The software is provided free of cost.
This immediately affects the business of software pirates, as there is no way for them to sell at a lower price that which is already free. Further more, it translates into greater cost effectiveness for the consumer.
There then arises the question of support and services, which is what this sector is all about. As mentioned earlier, software falls in the services sector, and therefore, the primary business for linux vendors is in providing services.
This is one area in which India can play a big role, and provide these services to the rest of the world.
As consumers too, one must realise the difference between support contracts for proprietary software and free software. Proprietary support agreements give you support only for the systems that you have purchased support for. In other words, if you own ten systems, but only have licences for five of them, you will get support for those five only.
With free software, this is not the case. Any software contract that you sign with your vendor is independent of the number of copies of the software that you own. Most vendors will most likely just require that the distribution that you use was one published by them.
There are several segments in which linux can play a major role, and is ready to do so at present.
Linux and other free Unixen like *BSD have been very popular as servers. These systems are robust and have average uptimes that run into years. Add to this the ability of linux to emulate legacy file servers like Windows NT and Novell Netware (using samba and mars-nwe), and you have a system that can do well to replace any server running these systems.
Businesses could do well to adopt it if only on the server side. The reduction in costs would be tremendous, and uptime would increase.
One also needs to consider that a well set up linux system needs almost no system administration or maintenance.
When considering client side applications of linux, we would need to divide the business sector into those that develop software, and those that use it. Software developers may need to use systems for which they develop, ie, someone developing for Windows would have to test his software on Windows.
For persons who simply use software, it is much easier to use a linux based system. All software needed can be installed centrally, with client machines acting as simple X displays. This can significantly reduce the hardware requirements of the company, while also ensuring that a sysadmin needs to maintain only a single machine rather than the fifty machines that the company has.
Most office productivity tools are available for linux. Word processors, spread sheets, and presentation utilities exist with several variants avaialable depending on your preferences. Legacy applications written for DOS or Windows can be run in emulated environments like dosemu or Wine.
For research institutes, the main appeal of linux would have to be the large community that uses it and the spirit of sharing ideas between groups. In many ways, the development of the GNU/Linux system has proceeded in much the same way as science has progressed over the last two centuries. There is open collaboration between groups at distant locations with everyone benefitting.
With large numbers of universities around the world using some variant of unix or linux as their base systems, persons in India could benefit from the existing knowledge and experiences of these.
This large community of scientific users has resulted in a plethora of software written specifically to aid in research, and built to run on linux based systems.
Educational institutes, at least those running courses on engineering and computers benefit for the same reasons. Additionally, students of computer science and engineering benefit from having the source code of a working operating system to look at and experiment with. Regardless of the field of computer science that they specialise in, having access to the source code for the tools they use and possibly try to develop will help them eventually.
Another place where educational institutes can benefit is from the ready availability of projects that can be given to students as classroom assignments or semester projects. By working on an existing project, possibly collaborating with other developers around the world, the student gets a good idea of what it is like to work in a team and develop quality software, rather than writing the same old ten line assignments every year. Building a working software that is actually used by people, and then providing support to them builds in the student a sense of achievement and responsibility.
This can only work towards producing a much more capable work force graduating from college every year.
School education can also benefit from the use of linux. Cost reduction would be the primary reason. Schools would however benefit from the large amount of educational software available for linux. Students of higher classes can even be recruited to write software for students of lower classes. Computers are already taught in school at all levels, but what is taught leaves a lot to be desired.
At present students learn to use specific software, as a result of which, they are none the wiser when confronted with a new system. Giving students some variety in what they learn, or even allowing them to learn how to get the job done rather than how to use a tool would leave them better off later in life.
There is of course a lot more that I could write about this topic, but right now my eyes are closing and I can't stay focussed any longer.
Will try and write something about why developers benefit from developing for free software.
Ciao,
Philip