[glug-t] An article about FOSS in India

http://www.cio.in/govern/viewArticle/ARTICLEID=3139
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United & Open   
Sunil Abraham, director of Mahiti and manager of UNDP's International
Open Source Network, is a staunch advocate of open standards. It is
freely available, maximizes choice, has no royalty implication, and
does not include any predatory practice, he asserts.
                                                                                
                                        
                CIO: How does the International Open Source Network (IOSN) look 
at
e-governance?
Sunil Abraham: After working on FOSS (Free and Open Source Software)
and related issues over the past three years in 42 countries in the
Asia-Pacific region, we have identified core principles for
e-governance from the FOSS perspective.

First, intellectual property created using public funds should be
freely licensed to the public. Whenever the government creates
software, it should be available under a FOSS license. Second, the
public should not be forced to purchase or pirate software to interact
with the State. The government should use truly open standards without
any royalty implications. Open standards drive down the costs of
technology, retard obsolescence, and improve usability and
interoperability.

Third, public digital infrastructure, which directly impacts the
quality of citizenship, should stand public scrutiny. For example, if
the State expects citizens to download and install tax computation
software on their personal computers, then citizens should be allowed
to reverse-engineer this software to make sure that the State is not
spying on them by accessing browser and media player history.

Fourth, even if the state commissions bespoke application on a
proprietary platform, it should be licensed under a FOSS license. Many
people in government confuse FOSS with GNU/Linux or the LAMP (Linux,
Apache, MySQL and PHP) platform. They don't know that they can license
an ASP application built on .NET platform under a FOSS license. By
doing this, they can ensure that different vendors are available to
upgrade or maintain the application. They can also ensure that the
solution can be redeployed in different states and departments without
incurring huge development costs.

Only 15 percent of e-governance projects are successful. What are the
common causes for failure?
Many e-governance projects fail because governments focus on
technology and institutions rather than people. There are two types of
technologies in the world: first, technologies that empower citizens
and build communities and, second, technologies that disempower
citizens and destroy communities. Wikis and blogs fit in the first
group. They have tremendous potential in areas such as the Right to
Information, especially for proactive disclosure. But most
e-governance projects look at citizens only as passive recipients of
information.

That is why computers usually have speakers but no mikes. They have
printers but no scanners. They have monitors but no cameras. Even the
software applications are built completely from a techno-bureaucratic
perspective without considering citizens as co-producers. This has
resulted in the building of many technically sophisticated
applications that don't find any favor with the people. Good
e-governance will recruit citizens as partners in the process of
governance. Many e-governance projects also fail because of poor
usability.

Can you provide examples of successful e-governance projects?
The Smart Card Operating System Standards for Transport Application
(SCOSTA) project is an good example of e-governance. SCOSTA is a
specification that National Informatics Centre (NIC) developed for the
Ministry of Shipping, Road Transport and Highways in response to
requests from different state governments. Different states were
considering various proprietary standards, which meant driving
licenses would no longer be readable and writeable across different
states. SCOSTA, though, is an open standard.

An open standard is a standard that is freely available, maximizes
choice, has no royalty implication, does not discriminate based on
technology platform or business model, allows users to make extensions
or subsets, and does not include any predatory practice. By requiring
compliance with this open standard, the government was able to foster
competition and reduce the price from Rs 300 per card to Rs 30 per
card.

Initially, large corporations that had a monopoly on the card market
launched a state-level disinformation campaign to convince bureaucrats
and politicians that the SCOSTA specification was not technically
feasible. But, with support from IIT Kanpur, the government was able
to create a reference implementation of the operating system and
publicly demonstrate technical feasibility. Within 20 days, the same
companies submitted their modified operating system for compliance
testing by NIC.

This is a wonderful example of how some corporations attempt to gain
monopoly over government digital infrastructure and how intelligent
government policies can help.  SCOSTA's successes in the area of
transport applications have led the Home Ministry to accept the
standard for the pilot of Multi-purpose National Identity Card to be
conducted in 10 states and one union territory. This also illustrates
the ideal role of government in e-governance.
Ideally, government should not be a software developer. It should only
develop and recommend open standards, so that private parties can
develop quality hardware and software at an affordable price.

What role does FOSS play in e-governance initiatives in India? Is it enough?
FOSS is playing an increasingly important role in Indian e-governance.
NIC has built several portals and applications using Plone, a
FOSS-based content management system. CDAC-Chennai has developed BOSS,
a GNU/Linux distribution that is aimed at government departments. Many
states like Kerala, Tamil Nadu, and also Delhi, are migrating to FOSS
in small steps. FOSS is becoming politically mainstreamed. The
Communist Party of India (Marxist) has asked the Centre to use FOSS in
all its e-governance initiatives. The draft IT policy of the
government of Kerala recommends the use of FOSS in e-governance.


Balaji Narasimhan

-- 
Aditya
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