On Sat, Jun 27, 2009 at 5:58 PM, Nikhil Marathe wrote:
Nandan Nilekani is to start the process of issuing every Indian citizen an identity card.
A very ambitious project and one that rather would have more of IT coming into governance, hopefully not 'bound' to Microsoft Internet Explorer. :P
But are the platform/readers and so on based on open source standards, such that you or I can verify that it doesn't have flaws or hidden backdoors which can be misused?
I couldn't find anything on Google. Anyone has any ideas?
Two ways to think about it. One: If it has to do more business, earn more money for stakeholders, get more "so-called" cheap labour, then it'll go the Microsoft Way! The three IT biggies have Microsoft everywhere! Don't they? XP runs irrespective of the needs and usage of the person using the computer. Perhaps, 'volume-licensing-costs' helps. ;)
Two: If the costs incurred have to be less, have some amount of "voluntary" developers work on relatively lower costs, use Open Source Software (free software :P, note the "f" ) and make 1 out of 2,00,000 people happy, it will be rather "open" software not bounded to a OS / browser.
Just an opinion! I would love to see more opinions and/or comments on this! I'm waiting for more ideas to pour in ;) -- Roshan Baladhanvi