Open Source India

The World Foresight Forum: Envisioning a better future

2011-04-23T08:43:00.001-07:00

A few months ago, an invitation from an event titled the World Foresight Forum landed in my inbox and the mail said,

we would like to include your speech in the Convention, in the Seminar "Dealing with global challenges: a leadership crisis?", in particular on the topic "Development of a knowledge-based economy."

The invitation added that,

The project, an initiative of the Hague Centre for Strategic Studies, Granaria Holdings and TNO, aims at turning The Hague into the centre of the international debate on “Security, Peace and Justice for Sustainable Global Growth”, being already the de facto judicial capital of the United Nations, where institutions, such as the International Court of Justice and the International Criminal Court are headquartered.

The theme of “Security, Peace and Justice for Sustainable Global Growth” is something that interests me deeply, so it took about a few milliseconds to say yes. I landed up last week at The Hague without much expectations, knowing only that it sounded very interesting, and interesting it was. A few prime ministers, the Chairman of Goldman Sachs, the CEO of Thomson Reuters, Edward De Bono (the founder of lateral thinking), several futurists, the Mayor of The Hague, academics, entrepreneurs and many others attended this event at The Hague, The Netherlands.

My session was moderated by the very jovial and sharp, Dr. Stephan de Spiegelerie. Stephan, as he insisted we call him, hit the nail on the head when he said that what was interesting about our session titled, "Development of a knowledge-based economy" was that it was all about possibilities, whereas many of the sessions at the WFF were concerned with issues of the past. In another session, earleier that day, Glen Hiemstra, Founder of Futurist.com said that (and I am paraphrasing a bit here and may not be exact) that there are two ways of creating the future. One was extrapolating from the present and the other was looking to the future and letting that create the present. Taking a cue from Stephan and Hiemstra, I painted a blue-sky picture (and most would say, a very idealistic picture) of the opportunities thrown up by the Internet. I started with a story about Emperor Ashoka, who was one of the greatest rulers of India, that I had read in my childhood that had a deep impact on me.

After the brutal battle of Kalinga, the Emperor Ashoka was so overcome with remorse that he renounced bloodshed and embraced Buddhism. As part of his penance, Ashoka went to monasteries across the country. At each monastery, he would leave munificent donations of gold coins. At one monastery, the emperor left behind one solitary gold coin. When his perplexed followers asked him to explain, Ashoka said that the abbot of the monastery was a great man but he did not share his knowledge with others.

I followed that up with another story. As a child growing up in India, one of the first things I learned is a hymn to Saraswati, the Goddess of Knowledge, which says that:

Wonderful is your gift of knowledge

the more we share, the more it grows

the more we hoard it, the more it diminishes

These two stories amply illustrate the fact that there was a moral imperative to sharing knowledge, in Indian traditions. From these stories, I cut to the present where the Internet and the open source model based on collaboration, community and shared ownership of knowledge was leading to tremendous creativity and knowledge sharing, in a manner that Emperor Ashoka might have approved. I cited the example of Linux that has grown from 10,000 lines of code in September 1991 to around 204 million lines of code valued at 10.8 billion dollars and Wikipedia, the open source collaborative encyclopedia, that has grown from a standing start in 2000 to over 13 million entries in 260 languages of the world. Both these examples prove that by through Collaborative Innovation and sharing knowledge, we can grow richer as a society. With the Internet connecting almost 2 billion people, collaborating and sharing is now possible on a scale that no other technology could have enabled.

As the Internet grows and reaches more of humanity, and as it becomes a part of our day to day lives, is it possible that, as a species we will become more of a collaborative species, instead of a competitive one. Like Emperor Ashoka, will we renounce fighting over finite property like land and borders, and learn the value of sharing knowledge? I know that sounds wildly imaginative, but one of the advantages of speaking at an event titled, the World Foresight Forum is that you are not necessarily constrained by the past, and can imagine a future that is discontinuous (and hopefully, much better!) from the past.

To conclude, I quoted four lines from one of my favorite poems, the immortal "Imagine" by John Lennon. The last four lines of Imagine are,

You may say that I'm a dreamer

But I'm not the only one

I hope someday you'll join us

And the world will live as one

As I concluded, Stephan looked me in the eye and asked me if we all could sing along. We all had a hearty laugh at that and moved along to the next presentation. My presentation was followed by another jovial Dutchman, Jaap Roos, VP of Capgemini, Netherlands. Roos spoke about how words that defined our age, words like "Co-value creation, Exponential globalisation, Collaborative innovation, Prosumerism, The long tail etc" did not even exist five years ago. He said that the web creates a 2 billion person, "no-borders amplification effect." Roos concluded with a final slide that said:

* The web is changing all, people remain central

* Our global society and economy will remain very dependent on raw materials, energy, transportation and industry

* The process of Innovation determines success

* Cyber Security and Identity Integrity are the challenges for the web and our knowledge based future

In the afternoon, I was invited to speak to a group alled, TheYoungTheHague, an important Dutch association of young entrepreneurs. These young entrepreneurs were working on “The Hague's Top Ten Improvements” that they would then present to the Prime Minister, Mark Rutte, Government of The Netherlands. The event was held inside a gorgeous church called the Klosterkerk and the lead speaker was drs. Albert van der Touw, the CEO of Siemens Netherlands. van der Touw spoke about how Siemens gets involved in the cities it is involved in, its work in renewable energy, and areas like desaliniating sea water and making it fit for human consumption, in Africa. van der Touw spoke with a lot of passion about these initiatives and I felt happy to see leaders at his level speaking about their social initiatives, with such conviction. I gave a talk similar to the one I gave earlier in the day, but added the point that technology can enable new possibilities, but building a better society is a human endeavour and we can build better societies only if we have compassion in our hearts.

The many discussions at the WFF around concerns like climate change, security, happiness in society etc, made me recall Gandhi's insightful words that, "There is enough on this earth for everyone's needs, but not enough for everyone's greed." Many of the urgent and pressing challenges that we face in areas like climate change can be solved only if we engaged with them in a spirit of collaboration and sharing, and therefore, the need for compassion and a sense collective good was more urgent than ever. The audience consisted of a group of about 100-120 members of TheYoungTheHague, and I hesitated a few minutes before saying something that has been brewing in my heart and mind for a very long time. Having seen many businesses put private profit ahead of the collective good, especially in areas like open standards, an issue that I was closely involved with in India, I said that I was struck by how the world of business is being treated as a "compassion-free" zone, how it seems to operate as if it is above the norms that govern human society. Today, businesses are the dominant economic and social forces in our society and what they do has a profound impact on all of us. It is therefore even more imperative that businesses be guided by strong moral values like compassion and the collective good. It was very encouraging to see some members of the audience nodding their heads and agreeing with these thoughts. Mr. van der Touw later told me that some of the breakout sessions created for suggesting improvements to The Hague referred to my talk. On the last day, we had dinner at the beautiful Peace Palace, which also houses the International Criminal Court.

Among the personal highlights for me at the event were sessions by Edward De Bono, the founder of lateral thinking, the author of "Six thinking Hats" and many other books. De Bono ran us through the principles of the six thinking hats and said that his ideas were being implemented in schools in India and China and showed significant improvements in learning effectiveness. There were many distinguished people in the audience, but that did not faze De Bono, who went about his task like a school master, using a sharp whistle every few minutes to prod people into changing their metaphorical hats. I also met some amazing entrepreneurs from the Kairos Society, a global network of top student and global leaders using entrepreneurship and innovation to solve the world's greatest challenges. It was inspiring to see these young motivated individuals talk about doing good in a way that makes commercial sense.

One tangible example is a company called ThinkLite run by Dinesh Wadhwani that is helping businesses go green without the upfront costs. ThinkLite evaluates a customer's lighting infrastructure and replaces their old, inefficient lighting systems with energy efficient, mercury free lighting at its own cost, and takes a percentage of the savings as its fees. This is the kind of innovative model that can accelerate the adoption of green technologies in the world. I found the Kairos fellows, lead by Ankur Jain to be energetic and enthusiastic and look forward to seeing them bring their work to India.

There were many discussions around cybersecurity and these sessions were very interesting but not very conclusive. On one hand, we had Christopher Painter, coordinator for cyber issues, US Department of State saying that most people paint security and privacy as issues opposed to each other, but that was not necessarily true. After the session, I tried to probe him further on this and his answer was that the surveillance would be around keywords. Unfortunately, I did not get a chance to dig deeper. On the other hand, was Pablos Holman, a futurist, IT security expert, and a notorious hacker with a unique view into both breaking and building new technologies. Holman who was born in the Soviet Union, was very skeptical about the aims of governments around the world to do 24 by 7 surveillance of e-mails and Internet traffic. He spoke with feeling of of how the Soviet culture of surveillance lead to neighbors suspecting each other and ended up creating a very unhappy society. It would take a 100 years to change that culture now, he said. As a hacker, Holman said that he ran a personal server on every continent, so that no government could get his hands on his e-mail. He sportingly admitted that it was an experiment that he ran purely because he could as hacker and a technology expert. Between Painter and Holman, I am still searching for a common ground between security and privacy on the Internet, and I expect this to be a long search.

At the World Foresight Forum, one of the most interesting persons I met was Rabbi Awraham Soetendorp. A very warm and affectionate person, I was delighted to know that the Rabbi spoke about the role of compassion at the WFF. He shared a Jewish story about heaven and hell that I wanted to share with you. There was a man who wanted to know the difference between heaven and hell. God took him to hell and there he saw people sitting around a table laden with tasty food, but the people all had arms so stiff that they couldn't bend their elbows and bring it to their mouths. God then took him to heaven and he saw the same thing, people with stiff hands who could not bring the food to their mouths. The man said, 'What the difference? There is no difference between heaven and hell." God said, 'Wait my son.' The man waited and he saw that the people in heaven were feeding each other." If we are to really seek, “Security, Peace and Justice for Sustainable Global Growth” we need tons and tons of the spirit of sharing that the venerable Rabbi spoke about.

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Moving on from Red Hat to Google

2011-04-03T03:11:00.000-07:00

Last month, I moved from Red Hat to Google. After spending six-and-half years at Red Hat, it was a tough decision to make because I got to work on issues like open standards and open source that have such long-term implications for India. To tell the truth, I had also gotten into a warm comfort zone in my previous job and was wondering what to do next, after we won the open standards fight in India.

In the last year or so, there were several offers, but none of them really excited me because I was looking for a role that has a large social impact. When Google sounded me out, I thought this could be interesting because Internet penetration in India, especially the web in India languages, is one area that can have a large impact. I know that broadband, 3G, 4G etc are on their way, yadda, yadda, yadda, and Internet usage will inevitably grow, but those who have been involved in policy know that there is a great difference between having policies on paper and actually having *political will* behind those policies. For example, every politician and bureaucrat agrees that computing in Indian languages is a good idea, but our so-called software superpower of a country has not made this a reality, even as it relentlessly churns out code for the rest of the world.

Another reason for taking up Google's offer was that I'll be able to continue my involvement in open source and open standards. In some ways, it was also a good time to leave Red Hat because most of the defensive work needed to protect the open source community -- open standards, software patents etc -- have been taken care of. Apart from the FOSS non-profits like FSF and FSMI, the Indian FOSS community now has an layer of non-profits like IT For Change, the Center for Internet and Society, Knowledge Commons and others who look at FOSS from an outside-in perspective and advocate for FOSS as a social good. The setting up of the Software Freedom Law Center's India chapter has also helped give the community some sorely needed legal firepower. I feel that these developments have greatly strengthened the community.

I want to conclude by saying that I see great hope for the future, event though the current policy environment seems so bleak and depressing. is is because, in the last six-and-half years, I have had the privilege of working with many bright, passionate individuals who are working for the larger good. Some of them have left the civil service or the corporate world to work in NGOs, and most of them have the caliber to be successful entrepreneurs or business leaders but have chosen to be involved in the area of public policy. This is an exciting development that will change India's destiny.

ODF, OGG listed as standards approved for e-governance in India

2011-01-03T22:43:00.000-08:00

Here is some good news to kick off the new year. As a follow-up to the Policy on Open Standards for e-Governance, the Department of Information Technology has published the "Interoperability Framework for E-Governance in India (IFEG)."

The draft of the IFEG lists out the standards approved for e-governance in India. The last date for comments on this draft is 27th Jan 2011. The IFEG draft clearly says that ODF and OGG are standards approved for e-governance in India and proprietary document formats and multimedia formats are not mentioned at all. My understanding is that these standards will be included in the future Requests for Proposals (RFP) for e-Governance applications, which means that these standards will be baked-in to all future e-Governance applications.

Indian Open Standards policy finalized--major victory for the FOSS community

2010-11-12T07:54:00.000-08:00

After three years of continuous running battles, India's Department of Information Technology has finalized the National Policy on Open Standards for e-Governance. This incorporates many of the key points submitted by Red Hat. Over the last three years, we worked with our friends in government, academic, civil society and the media to push the Indian government in favor of a policy that mandates a single, royalty-free standard. The final policy and the comments that Red Hat had submitted are attached.

In the previous draft dated 25/11/2009, our major objection was to section 4.1.2 of the policy which said,

"4.1.2 The essential patent claims necessary to implement the Identified Standard should preferably be available on a Royalty-Free (no payment and no restrictions) basis for the life time of the standard. However, if such Standards are not found feasible and in the wider public interest, then RF on Fair, Reasonable and Non Discriminatory terms and conditions (FRAND) or Reasonable and Non Discriminatory terms and conditions (RAND) could be considered."

The comments I submitted on behalf of Red Hat reads:.

While the term “Mandatory Characteristics” indicates that section is binding, the usage of terms like “should preferably” conveys the impression that this is non-binding. Since thousands of government agencies, systems integrators and others connected with e-Governance will look up to this policy for guidance, we request that the mandatory characteristics should be laid out clearly and unambiguously. As with the previous section, we feel that the intent and will of the GoI should be clearly expressed in this section. In any case, Sections 4.3, 4.4 and
5 deal with the exceptions.

The term “essential patent claims,” is not defined in the policy and this could prove to be a huge loophole. This term is also a new introduction and it would have been helpful to know the rationale for its introduction. Ultimately, any patent necessary for the implementation of a standard is an “essential patent claim” because a
standard cannot be implemented partially. In this context, I would like to point out that the Chinese government has issued a notification for the compulsory licensing of patents related to standards used in China. An English translation of this notice is attached with this letter for your reference.

Recommendation: We request that the wording of this section should be changed to "ALL patent claims necessary to implement the Identified Standard should be available on a Royalty-Free (no payment and no restrictions) basis for the life time of the standard.” We also request that the following statement, “However, if such Standards are not found feasible and in the wider public interest, then Fair, Reasonable and Non Discriminatory terms and conditions (FRAND) or Reasonable and Non Discriminatory terms and conditions (RAND) could be considered,” be moved to the sections dealing with exceptions. We feel that this section is the heart of the Draft Policy and placing an exception statement in the very heart of the policy will send out wrong and conflicting signals.

As you can see from the extract below, the points mentioned above have
been incorporated In the recently finalized policy. This section now reads:

4.1.2 The Patent claims necessary to implement the Identified Standard
shall be made available on a Royalty-Free basis for the life time of the
Standard.

Overall, I'd say this is a major victory for the Indian FOSS community
and more than three years of hard work have paid off. Now I need a loooooong break!

The challenges in using proprietary standards

2010-06-09T23:30:00.000-07:00

Flash Co-Creator Jonathan Gay talks of the challenges they faced in using H.264 standard.

The second challenge was selecting a video codec. We wanted to use the cool new H.264 open standard but Macromedia did not feel they could afford the H.264 license fee. I believe that the capped $5M per year H.264 license fee was similar in scale to the annual Flash engineering budget at the time. The H.264 license fee model is very anticompetitive. H.264 licensing is free for very small users, expensive for medium size companies and inexpensive for very large companies. This model puts the midsize companies who could challenge the dominant companies at a significant competitive disadvantage and is the reason that we implemented the proprietary but affordable On2 codec in Flash instead of the open and expensive H.264 codec. The capped license fee also discourages large companies from building a competitor to H.264 because they can simply pay the capped license fee and know they are managing their patent risk and suppressing their smaller competitors. For example, it would have cost Macromedia $5M per year to add H.264 to Flash but it probably cost Adobe much less to add H.264 because they were probably already paying a substantial fee for their video editing products. You can probably thank the success of Flash video for the fact that streaming H.264 video over the Internet is free for another 5 years. Solving this patent license problem is probably why Google purchased On2. However, if they open source the latest On2 codec as people suspect they want to, it’s much easier to launch a patent lawsuit against them because anyone can inspect the source code. Given the large number of patents in the video space, it may not actually be possible to build an open source codec that does not inadvertently infringe on someone’s patent. The MPEG Licensing Authority solves the problem in a Borg-like way by adding any new patent challengers to their patent pool.

Red Hat's comments on Draft Policy on Open Standards for e-Governance Version 1.1 dated May 2010

2010-06-03T06:56:00.000-07:00

These are the comments that I submitted to Department of Information Technology on behalf of Red Hat on the Draft Policy on Open Standards for e-Governance Version 1.1 dated May 2010. Overall, it is a good policy with a few loopholes that need to be plugged. If approved in a slightly improved form, it will be a huge landmark for e-governance in India and for the open source and open standards community.

General Review Comments

Wonderful is your gift of knowledge
the more we share, the more it grows
the more we hoard, the more it diminishes

Hymn to Saraswati, the Goddess of Knowledge

Information Technology, and the Internet in particular, have opened up tremendous avenues for the sharing of knowledge. In the next two years, over two billion people (or one-third of humanity) will be connected to the Internet, making it the largest collaborative network in the history of mankind. Open standards are the most fundamental tool for the sharing of knowledge and we therefore appreciate DIT's leadership in creating the Draft Policy on Open Standards for e-Governance Version 1.1 dated May 2010.

In creating and implementing the Open Standards Policy, we hope that DIT will live up to the best of Indian knowledge traditions that placed tremendous emphasis on the sharing of knowledge. While genuine open standards foster the sharing of knowledge, proprietary standards prevent the free flow of knowledge by treating standards as a priced commodity or as trade secrets, owned and controlled by private entities. We hope that DIT will make a clear distinction between open standards and proprietary standards because this has larger implications beyond e-Governance and impacts the information society as a whole.

We recognize and respect the fact that DIT has a significant challenge on its hands when it comes to genuine open standards because many standards, currently in use, have evolved as de-facto standards that are proprietary in nature. At the same time, we request DIT to recognize the larger historical perspective, which places standards firmly in the commons; and that proprietary digital standards are an aberration of this norm. It is a well established convention of civil society that standards should be treated as a “common wealth” and belong to all, and NOT be controlled by private entities. If standards that we take for granted – like weights and measures – were proprietary standards that required royalties and OEM licenses for usage, the cost and social impact of the same can well be imagined. For example, multimedia standards are some of the most expensive standards in the world. A complete set of playback plug-ins costs around EUR 28 (approximately Rs 1,624). As we deliver e-government services right down to the village panchayats and seek to put computers in every school, the cost of these proprietary playback plug-ins could prove to be a heavy drain on the country's finances, affect IT penetration in India and thereby hinder the spread of knowledge.

On the other hand, open standards can accelerate the sharing of knowledge and the Internet and World Wide Web are the finest examples of this. For example, in 1994, Sir Tim Berners-Lee founded the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) at MIT. It comprised various companies that were willing to create standards and recommendations to improve the quality of the Web. Berners-Lee made his idea available freely, with no patent and no royalties due. The World Wide Web Consortium decided that its standards should be based on royalty-free technology, so that they could easily be adopted by anyone.

It is therefore clear that open standards promote the public good, which is the primary responsibility of any government. The ultimate test of any open standard is – does it give us the freedom to share knowledge without any hindrance, without any terms and conditions? We hope that this is the yardstick that will be used to determine open standards for India.

Comments on Specific Sections

Section 4.1.2 of the policy states, “ The patent claims necessary to implement the Identified Standard shall be available on a Royalty-Free basis for the life time of the Standard. If such Standards are not found feasible then in the wider public interest, Fair, Reasonable and Non Discriminatory terms and conditions (FRAND) or Reasonable and Non Discriminatory terms and conditions (RAND) with no payment could be considered.”

We request that the following statement, “If such Standards are not found feasible then in the wider public interest, Fair, Reasonable and Non Discriminatory terms and conditions (FRAND) or Reasonable and Non Discriminatory terms and conditions (RAND) with no payment could be considered” be moved to the section 4.3 which deals with “Non-availability of Open Standard which meets all Mandatory Characteristics dealing with exceptions.” We strongly feel that this sentence is completely out of place, especially considering that it is currently housed in section 4.1 titled, “Mandatory Characteristics.”

We feel that section 4.1.2 is the heart of the Draft Policy and placing an exception statement in the very heart of the policy will send out wrong and conflicting signals. Also, in terms of sequence, the RAND/FRAND clause pre-empts the selection criteria listed in Section 4.4. It should also be noted that standards that are RAND/FRAND should be termed as “Interim Standards” and should NOT be termed as “Open Standards.”

For example, the H.264-encoded Internet Video format is currently free to end users until at least December 31, 2015. Once this period ends, MPEG LA, the licensing agency for H.264 may start charging royalties. Therefore, H.264 is a partially-royalty free standard, but cannot be considered an open standard because users do not have the freedom to encode and decode data and have to adhere to complex licensing conditions. Under the current wording of Section 4.1.2, H.264 may qualify as a suitable open standard for e-governance but this is clearly unacceptable in the long-term. For example, if Doordarshan uses H.264 to transmit a National Address by the Prime Minister of India over the web on 1st January, 2016, it may attract royalty that “...shall be no more than the economic equivalent of royalties payable during the same time for free television."
Therefore, we suggest, once again, that this sentence be moved to Section 4.4 and be modified to read, "If such Standards are not found feasible then in the wider public interest, Fair, Reasonable and Non Discriminatory terms and conditions (FRAND) or Reasonable and Non Discriminatory terms and conditions (RAND) with no payment, AND NO RESTRICTIONS ON REUSE, could be considered.”

4.3 Non-availability of Open Standard which meets all Mandatory Characteristics

Given the strategic importance of open source and its ability to free India from being technologically dependent on proprietary software vendors, we request that the open source community should have a strong representation in the Designated Body selecting the standards. We request that the process of selecting these Interim Standards should be an open and transparent process that seeks inputs from the public. Citizens should be clearly explained the logic for selecting these standards.

5. Exceptions for Selecting One or More Additional Open Standard in an Area

If multiple standards are selected for a particular area, the government should ensure that data is interchanged without any loss of information. If information is lost in the process of exchanging data, it would defeat the very purpose of having this policy. As with many other policies in India, we are seriously concerned that this exception clause should be used only in the rarest of rare cases and that the exception should not become the norm. Therefore we suggest that this sentence be modified to read as, “Such standard shall be compatible and bi-directionally interoperable, without any loss of data, with the already existing selected Standard.”

Going by past experience, we have seen that proprietary vendors who stand to lose their billion dollar monopolies, are willing to do anything possible to exploit every loophole available to them. Therefore, the constitution of the Designated Body is critically important. DIT must ensure that a transparent process is followed to include multiple stakeholders, including civil society in order to prevent institutional capture of the designated body. The constitution of the LITD 15 committee of the Bureau of Indian Standards is an example worthy of consideration.

Annexure Section m: Maturity -- An standard is considered mature if different implementations, commercial/open, are available, widely adopted and have been stable for some time.

We request that this be reworded to read as, “Maturity -- A standard is considered mature if different implementations in proprietary and open source software, are available, widely adopted and have been stable for some time.” It should be noted that open source software licenses do not differentiate between commercial and non-commercial implementations. The two major development models in the software world are proprietary (where the ownership of the source code is closely held) and open source (where users have the freedom to modify, share and redistribute the source code). Therefore, it would be more accurate to replace the term, “commercial/open” with the term, “proprietary and open source.”

A-I-6 Open Source: The term is most commonly applied to the source code of software that is available to the general public with relaxed or non-existent intellectual property restrictions.

The definition of “open source” is not accurate. There are specific licensing restrictions on Open Source Software. The purpose of these restrictions is to preserve the users' right to share, modify and redistribute the source code. We therefore suggest that the Open Source Definition of the Open Source Initiative be followed. It is the OSI that approves the open source licenses. The Open Source Definition is as under:

Introduction

Open source doesn't just mean access to the source code. The distribution terms of open-source software must comply with the following criteria:

1. Free Redistribution

The license shall not restrict any party from selling or giving away the software as a component of an aggregate software distribution containing programs from several different sources. The license shall not require a royalty or other fee for such sale.

2. Source Code

The program must include source code, and must allow distribution in source code as well as compiled form. Where some form of a product is not distributed with source code, there must be a well-publicized means of obtaining the source code for no more than a reasonable reproduction cost preferably, downloading via the Internet without charge. The source code must be the preferred form in which a programmer would modify the program. Deliberately obfuscated source code is not allowed. Intermediate forms such as the output of a preprocessor or translator are not allowed.

3. Derived Works

The license must allow modifications and derived works, and must allow them to be distributed under the same terms as the license of the original software.

4. Integrity of The Author's Source Code

The license may restrict source-code from being distributed in modified form only if the license allows the distribution of "patch files" with the source code for the purpose of modifying the program at build time. The license must explicitly permit distribution of software built from modified source code. The license may require derived works to carry a different name or version number from the original software.

5. No Discrimination Against Persons or Groups

The license must not discriminate against any person or group of persons.

6. No Discrimination Against Fields of Endeavor

The license must not restrict anyone from making use of the program in a specific field of endeavor. For example, it may not restrict the program from being used in a business, or from being used for genetic research.

7. Distribution of License

The rights attached to the program must apply to all to whom the program is redistributed without the need for execution of an additional license by those parties.

8. License Must Not Be Specific to a Product

The rights attached to the program must not depend on the program's being part of a particular software distribution. If the program is extracted from that distribution and used or distributed within the terms of the program's license, all parties to whom the program is redistributed should have the same rights as those that are granted in conjunction with the original software distribution.

9. License Must Not Restrict Other Software

The license must not place restrictions on other software that is distributed along with the licensed software. For example, the license must not insist that all other programs distributed on the same medium must be open-source software.

10. License Must Be Technology-Neutral

No provision of the license may be predicated on any individual technology or style of interface.

A-II-6: What is meant by maturity? An Open Standard is considered mature if different implementations, commercial/Open, are available, widely adopted and have been stable for some time.

As with Annexure M, we request that the term, “commercial/open” be replaced with “proprietary and open source.” We would also like to suggest the addition of the following sentence, “The date on which the open standard came into existence will be given priority when it comes to making a choice between two competing open standards.” The reason for this is that an open standard that has been in existence longer is likely to be more mature.

Open Source offers more to CIOs

2010-05-04T05:26:00.000-07:00

An edited version of this article of mine appeared in the April 2010 edition of IT Next magazine in India, in their "Moneywise" column. Please feel free to translate, rewrite and publish it in your local geo to promote the message of open source. If this gets published elsewhere, kindly send me a copy/the link.

Open Source offers more to CIOs

“Quality. Price. Service. Pick any two,” said a very succinct placard in Damodar's tailor shop. Back in the days when clothes were tailored, Damodar was one of the best in the business and he definitely knew what he was talking about.

However, in the software industry, the emergence of open source software (OSS) has turned this dynamic on its head. It is no longer about, “Pick any two,” but “Pick ALL three.”

Take quality for a start. Studies by Coverity, have found that the number of defects per thousand lines of code is lower with OSS than with proprietary software. One of the most famous sayings in the OSS community is that “Many eyes make bugs shallow.” The open, transparent, community driven development model of open source has lead to the creation of some of the most robust software systems ever built. Those who have migrated from proprietary server operating systems to open source systems will happily testify to this fact. Is it any surprise that 446 out of the top 500 supercomputers in the world run on Linux? Or that mission critical applications like telecom billing solutions, stock exchanges and others are increasingly moving to Linux and other OSS systems?

On the price front, the industry has had to deal with the forced upgrade cycles, vendor lock-in and hugely bloated software licenses imposed by proprietary software vendors. While the development model of OSS is community driven, many commercial vendors have built business models around service and support for OSS deployments. Many top-notch system integrators around the world routinely incorporate OSS in the solutions they offer to their clients. Unlike their proprietary competitors, OSS vendors do not have to incur huge development costs and this enables them to offer high quality software implementations at prices lower than proprietary software vendors. The good news for CIOs is that OSS is no longer restricted to infrastructure software categories like operating systems and middleware, but has expanded to encompass application areas like CRM, ERP, Business Intelligence, Enterprise Portals, Content Management Systems and many others.

On the service front, everything boils down to how well the software is implemented and supported. In OSS, commercial vendors usually sell their services in the form of annual subscriptions that have to be renewed. The quality of services rendered to the client determine whether subscriptions are renewed or not. This gives OSS vendors an inherent incentive to offer good quality services. Therefore, CIOs should actively consider OSS while procuring software, especially where the OSS option is mature and meets their functional requirements.

Given the recent downturn in the economy, cost has been one of the reasons for more and more CIOs to turn to OSS. However, to be moneywise, CIOs should focus on all three aspects--quality, price and service. It may be tempting to go with OSS vendors who are the cheapest, but CIOs should evaluate the quality of skills available within the vendor organization before taking a final call. As I sum up, I cannot resist quoting from another placard in Damodar's tailor shop. “I have no quarrel with competitors who charge less. They know the value of their goods and services.”

A quick visit to China

2009-12-12T23:39:00.000-08:00

I made my first China trip last week and spent two days in Beijing. I explored the possibility of working with the Chinese open source community on policy issues of mutual interest like open standards and software patents. India and China (and other emerging economies like Brazil) are already coordinating with each other on policy issues around climate change, therefore my suggestion seemed practical to the people I met. A longer trip to China is planned for April or May and I hope to work out a more concrete action plan during that trip.

Assam government includes FOSS in state IT policy

2009-12-11T02:38:00.000-08:00

Yet another Indian state government made open source an integral part of its state IT policy. The policy is because it mandates open standards and ODF, in particular, which has been advocated open source supporters the open standard for office documents (instead of Microsoft's proprietary .doc, OOXML and other data formats). It also extends beyond software and says that all generic hardware purchased by the government should have support for open source software. The section mandating that source code developed for any State Government body shall be duly archived in a repository, indicates that the policy makers also understand the power of the open source development model. Overall, it is a good policy and worth forwarding to all the government policy makers that we are in touch with.

The full text of Section 3.12 of the Assam Government's state IT Policy says:

(a) The Government would promote use of Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) in all the departments and State agencies, bodies and authorities.

(b) The State Government would promote manpower development and training in use of FOSS, especially in day to day office works.

(c) The State Government would promote imparting training on FOSS in schools and colleges.

(d)Entrepreneurs/ companies using FOSS for application/website development would be given preference over those using third party packaged applications.

(e)All source codes customized/developed for any State Government body shall be duly archived in a repository, and shall be made available freely to other Government departments.

(f) The Government departments and bodies would ensure that Open Document Format (ODF) is adhered to in creating and storing editable documents, data and information and all applications developed by the respective departments adhere to ODF and other Open Standards and are largely independent of Operating Systems (OS) and web browsers.

(g)The Government departments and bodies would ensure that any generic hardware procured has support for multiple Operating Systems(OS) such as Unix, Linux, Opensolaris and other open source platforms.

To download the full text of Assam's IT Policy, click here.

Even slaves were considered property: South African Minister

2009-10-23T13:19:00.000-07:00

I re-read the address given by Geraldine Fraser-Moleketi (video), Former South African Minister for Public Service and Administration, at the third Idlelo Conference. This part, especially, gave me goose pimples.

We cannot be in Dakar without being painfully aware of the tragic history of the slave trade. For three hundred years, the Maison des Esclaves (Slave House) on Gorée Island, was a hub in the system of forceful transportation of Africans as slaves to the plantations of the West Indies and the southern states of America. Over the same period people were being brought as slaves from the Malay Archipelago and elsewhere to South Africa. The institution of slavery played such a fundamental role in the early development of our current global economy, that by the end of the 18th century, the slave trade was a dominant factor in the globalised system of trade of the day.

As we find ourselves today in this new era of the globalised Knowledge Economy there are lessons we can and must draw from that earlier era. That a crime against humanity of such monstrous proportions was justified by the need to uphold the property rights of slave owners and traders should certainly make us more than a little cautious about what should and should not be considered suitable for protection as property.

It is good to remember this at a time when organizations aim to justify the privatization of knowledge and ideas under the guise that this is essential for promoting innovation.

In the area of software patents, this is nothing but a land grab, a conversion of was in the commons into a private enclosure.

FOSSCOMM Meeting this Sunday (11th October, 2009)

2009-10-07T09:45:00.000-07:00

FOSSCOMM (FOSS Community of India) will hold its third meeting in Mumbai at the Homi Bhabha Center for Science Education, Mankhurd (Near BARC/Anushakti Nagar).

The first meeting held in Bangalore started to process of getting the FOSS Community of India working together. After the second meeting held in Delhi in July 09, FOSSCOMM started making interventions in areas like open standards, school education etc. I hope that the Mumbai meeting will lead to the creation of working groups that will provide leadership to FOSSCOMM's efforts to accelerate the growth of Free and Open Source Software movement in India.

Those interested  working with the community are invited to attend the upcoming FOSSCOMM Meeting on 11th October, 2009.

Dilbert on Patent Trolling

2009-09-10T06:36:00.000-07:00

You know that patent trolling has become big business when Dilbert runs a comic strip!

Patent Woes: Speechless about the Word judgment

2009-08-12T03:35:00.000-07:00

This is one of the times when you rub your eyes in disbelief, speechlessly gape at the screen and read the same e-mail over and over again. Pranesh Prakash of the Center for Internet and Society forwarded an article titled, "Judge: Microsoft can't sell Word anymore." The article says,

Judge Leonard Davis, of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Texas, ordered a permanent injunction that "prohibits Microsoft from selling or importing to the United States any Microsoft Word products that have the capability of opening .XML, .DOCX or DOCM files (XML files) containing custom XML," according to an announcement by the plaintiff, Toronto-based i4i Inc.

Judge Davis ordered Microsoft to pay $290 million in damages. The abstract of the i4i patent reads,

A system and method for the separate manipulation of the architecture
and content of a document, particularly for data representation and
transformations. The system, for use by computer software developers,
removes dependency on document encoding technology. A map of metacodes found in the document is produced and provided and stored separately from the document. The map indicates the location and addresses of metacodes in the document. The system allows of multiple views of the same content, the ability to work solely on structure and solely on content, storage efficiency of multiple versions and efficiency of
operation.

While I am not a big fan of Microsoft, even I have to admit that this is crazy. But wait a minute! Didn't Microsoft get a patent last week for "Word-processing document stored in a single XML file that may be manipulated by applications that understand XML."

The abstract of the Microsoft patent reads,

A word processor including a native XML file format is provided. The well formed XML file fully represents the word-processor document, and fully supports 100% of word-processor's rich formatting. There are no feature losses when saving the word-processor documents as XML. A published XSD file defines all the rules behind the word-processor's XML file format. Hints may be provided within the XML associated files providing applications that understand XML a shortcut to understanding some of the features provided by the word-processor. The word-processing document is stored in a single XML file. Additionally, manipulation of word-processing documents may be done on computing devices that do not include the word-processor itself.

So, is someone playing tit-for-tat or an-eye-for-an-eye? Mahatma Gandhi said, "An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind." In the weird, wonderful world of digital technology where greedy corporations can convert standards (that should rightfully belong in the commons) into private property, anything can happen.

The Power of Open Source Development

2009-08-07T04:04:00.000-07:00

This article of mine appeared in the August 2009 edition of Network Computing's India edition. Please feel free to translate, rewrite and publish it in your local geo to promote the message of open source. If this gets published elsewhere, kindly send me a copy/the link so that I get some sense of how useful this is.

The Power of Open Source Development

Using open source development methodologies, John O'Hara, of JPMorgan developed a standards-based alternative to expensive proprietary middle ware

By Venkatesh Hariharan

Most literature around open source focus on using open source software. While the benefits of OSS are gaining increased recognition, some smart organizations are going a step further and applying the Open Source Development Model (OSDM) to solve problems that proved to be otherwise intractable. OSDM is based on collaboration, community and the shared ownership of knowledge and Linux is one of the best examples of how this model works.

In September 1991, Linus Torvalds released 10,000 lines of source code for Linux and licensed it under the liberal General Public License that gave anyone permission to copy, modify and redistribute the code. The only condition was that anyone making improvements to the software and redistributing the changes had to share the improvements with the rest of the community. This liberal license attracted thousand of contributors over the years who contributed their bit to improving the code base of Linux. A Linux Foundation study found that Fedora, a community Linux distribution has now grown to contain almost 204 million lines of code.

There are two reasons why Linux and other open source software have demonstrated such explosive growth. One is the growth of the Internet, which is the largest collaborative platform in the history of mankind, connecting 1.4 billion people across the world. The other is the open, participative, distributed development model of open source where users are actually encourage to contribute to the development of the software. This is in sharp contrast to proprietary software that allows very limited rights to users.

Some of the most savvy technology users are embracing the participative nature of open source software to build technologies that suit their needs. For example, John O'Hara, senior architect and distinguished engineer at JPMorgan launched AMQP (Advanced Message Queuing Protocol) as an open source project after being frustrated with developing front- and back-office processing systems at investment banks. “It seemed to me that we were living in integration Groundhog Day - the same problems of connecting systems together would crop up with depressing regularity. Each time the same discussions about which products to use would happen, and each time the architecture of some system would be curtailed to allow for the fact that the chosen middleware was reassuringly expensive,” says O'Hara.

In 2003, O'Hara embarked on a quest to standardize MOM (message-oriented middleware) technology, to enable mission critical enterprise applications to send messages to each other in a reliable and scalable manner. He decided to break from the past by using OSDM to start the AMQP project and sought Red Hat's expertise in governing open source projects. “Red Hat took the lead in establishing the legal framework for the standard; it, too, understood the issues in managing open intellectual property. The key part of doing this is to ensure that everyone contributing has the authority to do so and that there is a paper trail from every potential owner of IP through to the group effort, and that the intent to share is clear even in draft revisions of specifications. The result was a contract that clearly committed the members of the working group to promote unrestricted open middleware through AMQP.” For developing the software, O'Hara tapped iMatix, a boutique European development house that had clearly demonstrated a commitment to open source.
The AMQP project is a perfect example of what Prof. Eric Von Hippel, Professor of Innovation at MIT's Sloan School of Management calls, “user-driven innovation.” In his book, Democratizing Innovation, Von Hippel says that open source software projects are exciting examples of complete innovation development and consumption communities run by and for users. Today, users like Credit Suisse, Deutsche Börse Systems, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase Bank Inc, the TWIST consortium and others partner with IT leaders like Cisco, Red Hat, Microsoft and others in the AMQP consortium.

Ultimately, the proof of the pudding is in the eating. AMQP today has several implementations in open source and proprietary software. Imatix built an open-source implementation called, OpenAMQP. The beta version went live in 2006 and by the following year it was supporting 2,000 users on five continents and processing 300 million messages per day. Today, there are several open source and proprietary implementations of AMQP, including OpenAMQ, the original open source implementation. In a powerfully interconnected world, the open source development model used to build AMQP demonstrates the the power—and value—of collaborative software development.

Delaying tactics from industry associations?

2009-07-21T04:34:00.000-07:00

Update: Last week, NASSCOM invited me to meet them and I am trying to work out a suitable date.

I am told that industry associations have asked for more time to submit the views of their members and therefore Department of IT has postponed the next meeting of the Apex Committee to review the Draft Open Standards Policy. The meeting was to have happened on 15th July, 2009 but will now probably be held in August 2009.

Now here is the interesting bit. The industry associations asked for more time so that they could go back to their members and ask for their opinions. And here, I am trying to break down the doors of NASSCOM to submit Red Hat's opinion and what do I get? Dead silence. I hear that their deadline was June 7th and then extended to June 15th and I don't know if there is a new cut-off date. But I do know that despite writing to NASSCOM, I haven't heard back from them.

Is this one more ploy to delay a policy that has already been long delayed?

A (non) conversation with NASSCOM

2009-07-16T10:08:00.000-07:00

I wrote to NASSCOM asking for a copy of their submission to DIT on Open Standards. This is their reply and my reply to them. For the record, my reply asking for details was sent yesterday around 4PM. No reply yet on how they submitted an "industry view" without consulting some of us forgotten souls in the industry.

Dear Mr. Hariharan,

Thank you for your email sent to Mr. Som Mittal. NASSCOM has yet to
submit its recommendations to the revised National e-Gov Standards
Policy and we will send them our recommendations once we submit it to
DIT.

Regards,

Dear XYZ,

Thanks for the prompt reply. According to the minutes of the second
meeting of the Apex Committee [1], "Mr. Rajdeep of NASSCOM re-iterated
that government should allow multiple standards at any instance."

The minutes adds that, "Secretary DIT and DG (NIC) suggested that
NASSCOM and MAIT should have an industry consultation on the revised
draft Policy and come out with a collective view ensuring that the
objectives of open standards are fully met and achievable. Both the
members i.e. NASSCOM & MAIT have agreed to do so and suggested to come
back to DIT with the industry view by 7-8th July 09."

Based on the above, I have a couple of questions:

1) Will Red Hat's views be taken into consideration when submitting
inputs to the Apex Committee?

2) What was the process that was followed when Mr. Rajdeep submitted the
NASSCOM's views recorded in the minutes of the second meeting of the
Apex Committee?

As a member, we are seriously interested in the above questions since
open standards is a critical issue for the future of e-Governance and
the IT industry.

We look forward to hearing from you at the earliest.

Prodyut Bora's Blog on Open Standards

2009-07-13T06:25:00.000-07:00

Prodyut Bora, Head of the IT Cell of the Bharatiya Janata Party has put up a blog post titled, When Commercial Considerations and National Interests Collide. Bora was one of the main architects of the BJP's IT Vision that supported open source and open standards. Commenting on NASSCOM's push for the inclusion of multiple standards in the Department of IT's Draft Policy on Open Standards for e-governance, Bora says:

[...] the current demand for multiple standards by Nasscom is misplaced. Multiple standards would introduce duplicacy and reduce perfect interoperability between competing products. Whereas a single open standard would remove entry barriers and encourage innovation by small local firms with limited risk appetite, multiple standards would favour market-dominating multinational Goliaths and the Indian software services majors that make money by servicing such Goliaths. Multiple standards would also result in unnecessarily high costs incurred in writing ‘bridge’ code to connect different products, and things like data migration.

It is because of such short-sightedness in the past that we have landed up with a plethora of identity systems—Election ID Card, PAN Card, Ration Card—before finally the wisdom of a unified ID system dawned.

So far, the Government has very wisely thought in terms of an ‘open’ IT ecosystem. But where commercial considerations and national interests have collided, Nasscom very sadly seems to have favoured the former.

I hope that the folks at DIT listen and finalize the policy soon!

Draft on open source standards splits IT industry: Economic Times Report

2009-07-08T03:37:00.000-07:00

Economic Times carried a news report on the Draft IT Policy. For the last two or more years while the policy has been in the works, not a peep was heard out of NASSCOM or MAIT. Last month, when the policy was close to finalization, they argued for including royalty-based standards and the use of multiple standards for the same domain. According to the Economic Times report:
[] NASSCOM, the apex body for software companies, is vehemently opposed to the idea of a single and royalty-free standard. “Ways can be worked out commercially to make a large e-governance project viable. Making everything patent-free may not be a commercial proposition as there might not be good standards available. On the other hand, adopting a single standard may constrict the country to adopt an old standard, if a new and better standard emerges in future. We support multiple standards which ensure interoperability at zero cost,” says Rajdeep Sehrawat, VP, Nasscom.
If the Automobile Association of India took a cue from NASSCOM's stand on multiple standards and argued that cars sold in India should have right hand or left hand drives (the choice being that of the vendor, of course) the number of accidents would go up exponentially. Now, if users also demanded their, ahem, "rights," and said, "We should have a choice of which side of the road we should drive on," accidents will go up another exponential level. The point is that standards are collective choices that are imposed upon society for the better of all. I have no choice in deciding which side of the road I can drive on, but my life is better off for it. How many standards do you wish to use? Do you want two different standards for web pages and the corresponding mess of pages not displaying properly? There is only one single HTML standard because the vision of the creators of the web was to unify people, not divide them. The best standards, like HTML and Unicode are those that are universally supported.

NASSCOM's Mr. Sehrawat says, "On the other hand, adopting a single standard may constrict the country to adopt an old standard, if a new and better standard emerges in future. We support multiple standards which ensure interoperability at zero cost.”

Is India "constricted" because we have adopted "old standards" like HTML and Unicode? The world migrated from ASCII to Unicode and is migrating from HTML to XML-based web pages even as we speak. The "multiple standards which ensure interoperability at zero cost" is a nice Trojan Horse to sneak in proprietary standards.

Finally, will NASSCOM's suggestions benefit India? No, because the vast majority of standards are controlled by entities that lie outside our borders. If accepted, NASSCOM (and MAIT's) suggestions will mean that the country will pay huge royalties to foreign outfits. Does anyone remember what happened to us when the British East India Company came to us with a similar proposal?

Last minute dramas around around Open Standards

2009-07-03T06:55:00.000-07:00

Now that India's Draft Policy on Open Standards is close to finalization, the usual last-minute dramas are on. In a new twist, I am told that NASSCOM and MAIT have submitted their recommendations, purportedly on behalf of the industry. If this is indeed the case, my organization, Red Hat was not consulted. I also checked with IBM and they too were not consulted. Since Red Hat and IBM have been key players in this area, this is definitely intriguing. I shot off a letter to both MAIT and NASSCOM and a copy of the letter to NASSCOM is reproduced below. It is self explanatory. The letter to MAIT had minor editorial changes but is essentially the same letter.

To,

Mr. Som Mittal,

President,

NASSCOM,

International Youth Centre,
Teen Murti Marg,
Chanakyapuri,
New Delhi 110 021
Phone: 91-11- 2301 0199

Dear Sir,

We have been informed that NASSCOM has submitted its opinion on the Draft Open Standards Policy for e-governance to the Department of Information Technology, Government of India. We have been informed that NASSCOM's submission supports the inclusion of standards under Reasonable and Non Discriminatory (RAND) terms and also the usage of multiple standards in the same domain.

Red Hat has been actively involved in the standards issue and we would like to place on record that we have not been consulted by NASSCOM before this submission was made. We DO NOT support the above recommendations of NASSCOM for the following reasons.

1) Standards should belong to humanity and not be controlled or owned by anyone. In the physical world, we do not pay for using standards like weights and measures. These are norms of civil society that have evolved over centuries and the digital world should be no exception to these norms.

2) In order to protect India's digital sovereignty, we must ensure that national data is stored in formats that are open and free of all encumbrances like royalties, patent claims etc. The Government is the custodian of data that belongs to the citizens of India. It must therefore ensure that this data is not stored in formats that are owned and controlled by anyone.

3) e-Government data like land records etc remain relevant for hundreds of years. If this data is stored in proprietary formats, it will prove expensive for the country in the long-term. It is also seen that proprietary formats are controlled by monopolistic outfits that (a) drive the adoption of a technology (b) file a thicket of patents around that technology and (c) litigate or threaten litigation if royalties are not paid. India must avoid getting into this trap at all costs.

4) For each application area, there must be only a single standard. The use of multiple standards will lead to tremendous complications in the practice of e-governance. Since data is at the heart of e-governance, the confusion created by using multiple e-government standards in the same domain may bring e-governance to a stand still. For example, if different government departments use different standards for document storage, it could greatly slow down or even thwart the process of exchanging files among government departments.

5) Vendors should collaborate on standards and compete on their implementation. The most popular standards like HTML and Unicode are standards that are supported by a vast number of industry players. Multiple standards in the same domain leads to fragmentation. It also helps vendors who can leverage their marketing muscle to drive users towards their own proprietary standards instead of open standards that are created through collaboration and consensus.

6) The Draft Open Standards Policy for e-governance has been in the works for the last two years and several public consultations have been held on this subject. NASSCOM's presence was not visible at any of these consultations and therefore a comment being made at this late stage, when the policy is close to being finalized is surprising. The two recommendations (RAND terms and multiple standards), if accepted, will lead to nullifying the work of the committee that has toiled for the last two years to create this policy because it will land us back to the current status quo dominated by multiple, proprietary standards.

7) We welcome the acknowledgment of open source in the policy. Both open source and open standards are inclusive movements and are therefore closely related to each other. In India, open source is now an integral part of many mission-mode e-government projects and it mention in this policy recognizes its long-term strategic importance in the e-Government sector.

8) We have reviewed version 1.15 of the Draft Policy and would like to place on record our appreciation of the excellent work done by this committee. The Draft Policy does an great job of protecting India's digital sovereignty and avoiding the clutches of proprietary standards. We therefore request NASSCOM's help and support in ensuring that the policy is approved "as is" without any further dilution.

With warm regards,

Venkatesh Hariharan
Corporate Affairs Director
Red Hat

My own little post on Rahul Gandhi

2009-05-31T00:50:00.000-07:00

Last week, the papers were full of Rahul Gandhi, and talked about how India's heir-apparent has infused fresh life into the Congress party. When Red Hat chairman, Matthew Szulik was in India in 2005, we had faxed across a meeting request to Rahul's office. The very next day, we got a call confirming the meeting. Javed Tapia, who then headed Red Hat India, Szulik and myself met with Rahul. As an aside, Szulik is a passionate speaker on open source in education and it was one such speech that made me join Red Hat. Szulik updated Rahul on what is happening with open source around the world and tabled a request that the Indian syllabus should stop mandating proprietary software and endorsing brand names.

We spent around 30 minutes with Rahul. During the meeting he spoke very little but listened intently. He agreed with our point that the syllabus should stop endorsing brand names. While he did not speak much, it was clear that he had oodles of charisma, helped along by that famous dimpled smile. The lasting impression was that of someone who is a very pleasant human being, very understated and with absolutely no desire to show off. For that reason alone, I wish him and the new UPA government great success.

PS: In complete contrast was our effort to secure a meeting with the then IT Minister, Dayanidhi Maran. His secretary said that he would grant a meeting only if we promised to invest crores of rupees to set up a development center in Chennai. I conned the secretary into granting us an appointment but the meeting did not add up to anything.

Another one joins the Hall of Shame

2009-05-28T07:19:00.000-07:00

I tried to pay my insurance premium online at the HDFC Insurance web site but literally drew a blank. This is the e-mail I sent them.

I am using Firefox 3.0.2 on Red Hat Enterprise Linux and am not able to enter data into the "Old Password" text field. Please see the attached screen shot. Can you kindly look into this and have it fixed?

Venky

This is the reply that I got from HDFC Insurance.

Dear Mr. Venkatesh,

Greetings from HDFC Standard Life Insurance Co. Ltd!

With regard to your e-mail, we would like to inform you that our website works on Internet Explorer version 6.0 or higher version. Hence we request you to kindly login to 'My Account' using Internet Explorer version 6.0. It is not compatible on other browsers

We hope to have addressed your query.

Please write to us for any further clarifications you may require.

We assure you the best of our services always.

Warm regards,

Customer Service Officer

This is what I sent to them on getting the above.

As someone involved with the IT industry for 17 years, I would like to point out that using open standards is one of the key principles for good software development. It seems that your web site has been developed using closed standards that work only on one particular browser. That could cause you to lose customers because Firefox, Safari, Opera and other browsers are becoming more popular.

I do not use Internet Explorer nor do I ever intend to use it. I have insurance policies with LIC and Max New York Life and I have never had a problem using their web sites because their sites conform to open standards like W3C (see www.w3c.org). I also use online banking sites like ICICI with my Firefox browser and have had no problems.

To be blunt, using closed standards is sloppy programming practice and it will benefit HDFC Insurance if this is rectified immediately.

Venky

Let us see how they handle this. By the way, what happened to the Linux-Delhi Hall of Shame? I couldn't find it on the Linux-Delhi web site.

Congress government must increase public access to data

2009-05-24T08:55:00.000-07:00

One of the Obama Government's objectives is to increase transparency in government and public access to data. Towards this end, it has set up Data.gov.

The purpose of Data.gov is to increase public access to high value, machine readable datasets generated by the Executive Branch of the Federal Government. Although the initial launch of Data.gov provides a limited portion of the rich variety of Federal datasets presently available, we invite you to actively participate in shaping the future of Data.gov by suggesting additional datasets and site enhancements to provide seamless access and use of your Federal data. Visit today with us, but come back often. With your help, Data.gov will continue to grow and change in the weeks, months, and years ahead.

This is the kind of openness that we need to see more of in India. Once data gets into the steel trap of the government, it can be cussedly difficult to extract it. A good case in point is the Indian Patent Office. Patents are supposed to be a monopoly on an invention granted to an inventor in return for disclosure. This disclosure is supposed to help society to build on existing knowledge and avoid reinventing the wheel. Even USA, which is considered to have the most permissive patenting regime in the world, has a freely accessible database of patents at USPTO.gov. However, extracting patents from the Indian Patent Office is like a root-canal operation. My friends inform me that recently it took them six weeks to obtain copies of patents and required several follow-ups and representation to the higher ups.

This is an intolerable state of affairs. As a citizen, the patent information is yours by right. Yet, you have to pay Rs 4,000 to get a copy of a patent. On top of that, you have to supplicate in front of a officer whose salary is paid out of the money that you pay as a tax payer. At several levels, this is a subversion of the original intent of the patent system, which is to increase access to new inventions and ideas. Also, consider the fact that this travesty is happening within the context of a civilization that believes that knowledge shall set you free! This is just one instance of a system that has been perversely twisted to deny citizens access to data that rightfully belongs to them.

While the BJP did not win the elections, one of the proposals that I really liked within their IT Vision was that of replacing the Right to Information Act with a Duty to Inform Act that puts the onus on the government to share information with its citizens. In the long run, I think this is the way to go and with the technology at our disposal, we no longer have excuses to keep public data out of the reach of Indian citizens.

Business Week names Prof. Phatak among India's 50 most powerful

2009-05-15T07:15:00.000-07:00

Business Week recently named Prof. DB Phatak among India's 50 most powerful people. For those who know him well, this is no surprise. The citation reads:

An open-source evangelist, Phatak, head of Kanwal Rekhi School of Information Technology, IIT Bombay, has inspired and helped an entire generation of youngsters morph into thought leaders. One of the most respected teachers, Phatak is always surrounded by his students and has made computer science a much sought-after stream not just at IIT but at other Indian universities as well. To reach out to a larger student universe including rural India, Phatak started Eklavya, an online distance-learning program for the IITs.

As a journalist working for Prof. Phatak, I used to interact often with him because he is one of those rare people loved by journalists for his ability to come up with quotable quotes for any occasion. Later, I worked with him to put together the ekalavya/Red Hat Scholarships program. Prof. Phatak passionately believes that open source can help India as a country and that it offers great benefits for Indian education in particular. It is therefore apt that IIT Bombay is leading a project that aims at Adoption of Open Source Software in Science and Engineering Education under the National Mission on Education through ICT project of the Ministry for Human Resources Development.

Several generations of India's IT leaders have learnt under the tutelage of Prof. Phatak who is a very popular figure in the IIT Bombay campus. Despite his accomplishments, he retains a child-like curiosity and enthusiasm for new ideas and projects. One of the most entrepreneurial professors in India, he has tremendous stamina for work. He is an inspiring speaker and I once heard him address a group of sales and support staff and he was able to captivate them from the word go and talk to each of these groups in their own language.

Once, while he was addressing the Mumbai GNU/Linux User Group I noticed that his belt had a prominent Playboy logo on it. Imagine that, an IIT Bombay professor wearing a Playboy belt. When I pointed this out to him, he nonchalantly replied that the belt belonged to his son who forgot to pack it while leaving. One of his students told me this gem called "Phatak's leaky stack algorithm" and those who have been part of the professor's round table discussions will vouch for its truth. The algorithm goes thus. The first person to enter Prof. Phatak's room gets a slice of his attention. The next person to enter gets another slice and so on and so forth. Since people are always walking in and out of Prof. Phatak's room, the first person (now firmly at the bottom of the stack) finally gets up and leaves.

At the age of 61, Prof. Phatak retains a mischevious glint in his eye, a quality that he shares with another Prof. Isaac, another IIT professor legendary for his absent-mindedness. If you have got tales of Prof. Isaac or Prof. Phatak to share, please post them in the comments. I'd love to hear them.

Prof. Phatak is also an intensely patriotic person. On his web site he says:

Dr. Phatak's dream is to see a resurgent India catching up with the world using Information Technology as the spring board. He hopes to make IT work for the millions of Indians so as to enable them to lead an honorable, comfortable and peaceful life full of love and harmony.

Those who followed the OOXML saga know how upset he was with Microsoft for the extent to which they stooped in their efforts to get India's No vote on OOXML overturned.

Over the last 18 years in the IT industry, it has been my privilige to meet and work with several wonderful human beings and Prof. Phatak is right there at the top of that list.

FOSS for GOI supported project for Power Sector

2009-05-08T11:51:00.000-07:00

HS Rai has an excellent post titled, "FOSS for GOI supported project for Power Sector" that I liked very much. I commented on his post and have copied it below.

As a tax payer, I am dismayed so see public money being wasted in reinventing the wheel again and again and again. What we need to build are code repositories for common government applications like treasury, municipal management etc and issue diktats that vendors build their services around these code repositories. In the US, hospitals have been (re)using the VistA (Veterans health Information Systems and Technology Architecture) software developed by the US Department of Veterans Affairs. The source code for this software is available at www.sourceforge.net/projects/openvista . The new American CTO, Aneesh Chopra “gets” what open source is all about:

http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-10142626-38.html

The commonwealth of Virginia is undertaking a variety of
initiatives to improve aspects of governance in areas like health care
and education, said Aneesh Chopra, Virginia’s secretary of technology.

On February 23, the commonwealth will debut the Virginia physics
“flexbook,” Chopra said–Web-based instructional materials that cover
areas of physics in which Virginia’s traditional curriculum is lacking.

The commonwealth partnered with the nonprofit CK-12 Foundation to
provide an open-source platform on which new content can be quickly
published. Virginia officials solicited contributions to the text from
around the country. The contributions were subject to a series of
academic reviews.

“Virginia will have its first physics flexbook for teachers to rip,
mix, and burn and to incorporate into their educational coursework,”
Chopra said.

He said the process was faster than the traditional means of
changing coursework, and it was one example of how a robust information
technology infrastructure was helping the government better serve people.

“You can make information more accessible, collaborate more, and
people can do more to hold their elected officials more accountable,”
Chopra said.

Why are we using old, ancient, pathetically fragmented, hideously expensive proprietary software development models when far superior models exist? I agree that it is time to start a serious campaign and get governments to use the open source development model based on Collaborative Innovation and not just use open source software. My article on Collaborative Innovation is at:

www.osindia.blogspot.com/2009/02/collaborative-innovation-video.html

Thanks for this nice post. If the Indian government takes your advice, it will save thousands of crores of rupees!

Andy Grove: Patents Are Like Mortgage Backed Securities

2009-05-05T13:11:00.000-07:00

In one of my previous posts, I had talked about how patents (particularly software patents) are another bubble ready to burst. I also talked about how global patent trolls are now coming to India. Now, Techdirt has an article that quotes Andy Grove, former chairman of Intel and author of the book, Only the paranoid survive, comparing how patents have become like the mortgage-backed securities that caused the current financial meltdown.

The true value of an invention is its usefulness to the public. Patents themselves have become products. They're instruments of investment traded on a separate market, often by speculators motivated by the highest financial return on their investment....

The patent product brings financial derivatives to mind. Derivatives have a complex relationship with an underlying asset. While there's nothing wrong with them in principle, their unfettered use has damaged the financial services industry and possibly the entire economy.

Do these patent instruments put us on a similar road? I fear our patent system increasingly serves those who invest in the patent products... It may be time to use Jefferson's principle as a test and ask if we meet it.

When Andy Grove becomes paranoid about something, you and I better watch out!

Reaping the benefits of open source

2009-04-22T22:58:00.000-07:00

This article written by me appeared in Network Computing's India edition. Please feel free to translate this and get it published in other geographies. There is no need to credit me as the author, but do use this to spread the message of open source and drop me a line of acknowledgment when it is sent to a publication or gets published in print/online. And if you prefer the term "free software" that's also OK with me.

Venky
=====

Reaping the Benefits of Open Source

Open Source Software is moving from the edge of the enterprise into its very heart. CIOs can benefit from this development

Recently, in a Gartner report, 'The State of Open Source 2008', it was mentioned that, "By 2012, more than 90 percent of enterprises will use Open Source in direct or embedded forms." The report goes on to add that, "Open Source is a phenomenon with a broad impact. Chances are, if you do not think you use it, then you use it; and if you think you do use it, then you use lots more of it than you know.”

Why is Open Source becoming so pervasive? The reason is that we are now entering an era of Collaborative Innovation. Open Source Software (OSS) is the leading example of this trend, but the Open Source development model based on collaboration, community and the shared ownership of knowledge is rapidly expanding to other areas like content (Wikipedia), medicine (Open Source Drug Discovery), scientific publishing (Public Library of Science) and other areas of society. With 1.2 billion people on-line, the Internet, which is the largest collaborative platform that mankind has ever seen, has enabled OSS like Linux, Apache, Mozilla Firefox, Open Office and others to flourish. In the next couple of years another 600 million people will join the Internet. Thus the trend towards increasing collaboration is only set to grow and this is reflected in the explosive growth of Open Source projects across the world.

A few years back, OSS could be found on the edge of enterprise, running workloads like mail servers and web servers. However, the growing maturity of the OSS ecosystem means that it is now moving into the very heart of the enterprise, running mission critical servers, desktop computers and even application areas like CRM, ERP, Document Management, collaborative wikis, Content Management Systems and many others.

In these recessionary times, OSS also offers a major advantage in that users can often freely download and try out the software and pay only for value-added services like support. The growing interest in OSS has thrown up a number of software startups that specialize in supporting OSS. For CIOs, this development provides an alternative because the cost of buying support for OSS is usually far less than the cost of purchasing licenses for proprietary software.

For instance, download and check out OpenOffice.org, the full-fledged, Open Source office productivity suite. Many organizations have made OpenOffice.org, the default choice on their desktops and have generated significant cost savings when compared to proprietary office suites. A leading bank, known for its technological savvyness, has almost 70 percent of its staff working on OpenOffice.org. A few years ago, they looked at the increasing cost and hardware requirements of proprietary software and decided to switch to OpenOffice.org. Initially, users had to adjust to the new software, but a four-member helpdesk enabled them quickly become comfortable with OpenOffice.org. The cost of the help desk was far lower than the licensing fees and the increased hardware costs that would have been incurred on proprietary software, which has been restricted to a small group of financial analysts within the company.

Similarly, a study done by IIM Ahmedabad found that the Government of Delhi has saved almost 80 percent by switching to OpenOffice.org. One important reason for switching to OpenOffice.org was its support for the Open Document Format, an open standard for office documents, that ensured that needless upgrades of office suites and its underlying hardware would not be forced upon them. The usage of open standards also helped the Government of Delhi avoid vendor lock-in, which invariably reduces negotiation capabilities of the customer and increases cost.

In many ways, Open Source is becoming the baseline for software development. Within the past couple of years, venture capitalists have started investing several billion dollars in Open Source startups and have reaped handsome returns. The open and inclusive development model; and the freedom to modify the source code and improve the software attracts the best minds from across the world. When compared to the closed development models of proprietary software, which depends on internal skills, the open source model proves to be superior. Eric Raymond, author of the landmark book on OSS, “The Cathedral and the Bazaar” expresses it succinctly by saying that, “Many eyes make bugs shallow.” The reliability, robustness and low number of defects per thousand lines of code in open source software like Linux and Apache bear this aphorism out.

Of course, CIOs of enterprises need enterprise-class support. The growing adoption of Open Source in enterprises like LIC, Axis Bank, Central Bank of India, Bharti (Airtel), mission critical portals like Naukri.com, Yatra.com etc. point to the growing support infrastructure for OSS. As users test and deploy OSS, the demand for support is growing immensely.

Finally, while Open Source is not a panacea for every recessionary ill, in these tough times, it makes sense to evaluate OSS instead of spending precious money on expensive proprietary software. Open Source is a long-term trend that is here to stay and those CIOs who judiciously adopt this new paradigm of software development and deployment will benefit from it.

The "computer programme per se" conundrum

2009-04-22T04:29:00.000-07:00

In a previous blog entry, I had mentioned how the Draft Patent Manual interprets Section 3(k) of the Indian Patent Act in a manner that allows software patents a back-door entry. I had also mentioned in a previous post how the term "per se" in Section 3(k) which says, “A mathematical or business method or a computer programme per se or algorithms are not patentable” leaves a lot of room for mischief. Knowledge Commons has submitted an unambiguous definition for the term "computer programme per se" which would be in tune with the intent of the Indian Parliament, which deleted a proposed amendment to Section 3(k) that said, “a computer programme per se other than its technical application to industry or a combination with hardware; a mathematical method or a business method or algorithms.” Prabir Purkayastha, Chairman of Knowledge Commons lead the creation of this definition. Prabir is one of the few people I know who can climb the rareified heights of strategy and also roll up his sleeves the next moment and work on nuts-and-bolts issues that need to get done. This definition would just not have been possible without him. Richard Fontana of Red Hat, Mishi Chowdhury of Software Freedom Law Center, Tahir Amin and Jaijit Bhattacharya also provided valuable inputs that went into the final submission to the Indian Patent Office that reads:

Computer programme per se in the relevant clause means (a) any computer programme in the abstract, (b) any computer programme expressed in source code form, including source code recorded on an information storage medium, or (c) any computer programme that can be executed or executes on a general purpose computer, including computer programme object code designed for execution on a general purpose computer that is recorded on an information storage medium. An information storage medium means any disc, tape, perforated media or other information storage device, which, if fed into or located in a computer or computer based equipment is capable of reproducing any information, other than an information storage medium that itself represents an inventive contribution to the art. A general-purpose computer here means a device capable of running multiple unrelated programs, often simultaneously for different purposes. It will comprise at least of: (1) one or more central processing units, (2) one or more input devices that are not specific to any one program, (3) memory, (4) one or more non volatile mass storage devices, and (5) one or more output devices. However, a general-purpose computer does not include a device that itself represents an inventive contribution to the art.

Under the foregoing definitions, a claim that merely recites software elements without any reference to hardware is per se unpatentable. If a claim recites both software elements and hardware elements, but the hardware elements amount to nothing more than reference to the components of a general purpose computer on which the software is executed, or an information storage medium in which the software is stored, such that the only possibly inventive aspect of the claim resides in the software elements, then the claim is not patentable. If the software/general purpose computer is combined with other hardware, and the inventive contribution resides primarily in the software or in the software in combination either with components of the general-purpose computer or in an information storage medium, then the claim is not patentable. If the claim recites software elements and hardware elements, and the hardware elements themselves are an inventive contribution to the art, then the claim may be patentable, provided that the claim as a whole is such that the pre-requisites of novelty, non-obviousness and utility are met.

New Obama CTO, Aneesh Chopra, gets open source

2009-04-20T03:38:00.000-07:00

After months of speculation, Obama has finally appointed Aneesh Chopra as Chief Technology Officer for USA. Tim O'Reilly has a ringing endorsement of Chopra. This CNet report indicates that Chopra "gets" what open source is all about.

The commonwealth of Virginia is undertaking a variety of initiatives to improve aspects of governance in areas like health care and education, said Aneesh Chopra, Virginia's secretary of technology.
On February 23, the commonwealth will debut the Virginia physics "flexbook," Chopra said--Web-based instructional materials that cover areas of physics in which Virginia's traditional curriculum is lacking.
The commonwealth partnered with the nonprofit CK-12 Foundation to provide an open-source platform on which new content can be quickly published. Virginia officials solicited contributions to the text from around the country. The contributions were subject to a series of academic reviews.
"Virginia will have its first physics flexbook for teachers to rip, mix, and burn and to incorporate into their educational coursework," Chopra said.
He said the process was faster than the traditional means of changing coursework, and it was one example of how a robust information technology infrastructure was helping the government better serve people.
"You can make information more accessible, collaborate more, and people can do more to hold their elected officials more accountable," Chopra said.

Digital Sovereignty

2009-04-05T02:05:00.000-07:00

In the past, I have mentioned how Digital Sovereignty happens to be the pet theme of my friend, Jaijit Bhattacharya of Sun Microsystems. He has finally written a small op-ed piece on this subject for Business Standard. Jaijit has done a huge amount of research on how standards are being colonized and why India must avoid the trap of standards with IPR issues if we are to preserve our digital sovereignity. He quotes the example of DVD manufacturers in China:

A very good example of the devastating effect of the current IPR regime is the case of the DVD manufacturers in China who have to pay royalty charges on each DVD player manufactured that is to the tune of 33 per cent of the retail price of the DVD player, for a video format standard that is used ($20 royalty on a player of $60). China was helpless in preventing such an unfair cess being put on its domestic industry, demonstrating its lack of digital sovereignty at that point in time.

During the OOXML debate, I had the pleasure of watching Jaijit at work inside the LITD15 committee of the Bureau of Indian Standards, which reviewed and finally voted against OOXML. Despite the massive amount of muscle power that Microsoft had invested to push OOXML down India's throat, Jaijit refused to be overawed. Using his computer science background to great advantage, he was constantly exposing the key flaws in Microsoft's proposed OOXML standard. One memory that lingers from the numerous BIS meetings is that of Jaijit, in full professorial flow, using marker pens and the whiteboard to demolish some of the key arguments in support of OOXML.

If Jaijit was all fire and brimstone, there was one person who was icy cool throughout the 18 long months and endless, argumentative meetings on OOXML. Ashish Gautam of IBM contributed immensely to the discussions with his thorough understanding of the arcane rules of ISO, that most of us were grappling with for the first time in our lives. His ability to stay focused and highlight the right point at the right time went a long way in ensuring that the loopholes in ISO's processes were not exploited by the proponents of OOXML.

Apart from Jaijit and Ashish, there were countless bureaucrats and policy makers who deserve enormous credit for ensuring that Microsoft did not ride roughshod over India's policy making bodies, but that will have to wait for another day when I have the time to write a lengthy post on how the OOXML battle was won. the time being, let me end by agreeing with Jaijit's statement that,

It is imperative for India to ensure that it is a serious player in formulating digital standards in order to ensure security of its IT industry and to maintain its digital sovereignty.

Jai ho!

BJP's IT Vision supports open source and open standards

2009-03-14T02:22:00.000-07:00

The BJP, the largest opposition in India has released an IT Vision document that endorses open source and open standards. Many of the points mentioned in the FOSS Manifesto for India that we put up online last week have been incorporated in this document.

This document was unveiled by none other than Shri. LK Advani, the BJP's candidate for Prime Minister. I did a quick read of the 40 page document and am impressed with how thorough and comprehensive it is. As a long time supporter of free and open source software, I am delighted to see a major Indian political party endorse it. However, I am even more delighted to see that this endorsement is rooted in a comprehensive vision for India's development. A big chunk of the credit for this document should go to Shri. Sudheendra Kulkarni (an alumnus of IIT Bombay) and Shri Prodyut Bora (an alumnus of IIM Ahmedabad). Shri Kulkarni was advisor to Shri Atal Behari Vajpayee when Vajpayee was prime Minister of India and Shri Bora is Head of the IT Cell of the BJP.

I was happy to see that the Digital Colonization theme that my friend, Jaijit Bhattacharya of Sun talks about has been incorporated in this document. Apart from the FOSS Manifesto, some of my key passions on open standards (that we don't pay for standards like weights and measures in the physical world, so why should we pay for standards in the digital world?) have been reflected. Also, as a co-founder of IndLinux.org which we started in 2000 in an attempt to bridge the digital divide, I am happy to see that the BJP has promised to create a National Mission for Indian Language Computing.
The CPI(M), another national party in India has always been a strong supporter of our stand on open source, open standards and our fight against software patents. We are hopeful that other political parties will also take cognizance of the FOSS Manifesto and incorporate the same
into their IT plans for India.

With the country schedule to go to polls next month, we now have a broad consensus emerging around the use of open source and open standards. This is great news for all of us who believe in free and open source software!

Microsoft-Novell, Once Hot and Heavy, Cooling Down

2009-03-13T22:37:00.000-07:00

Channel Web has this article on how the Microsoft-Novell deal is cooling off. Microsoft's multi-million dollar deal to resell Suse Linux subscriptions was like Coke selling Pepsi, an unreal deal between two competitors. When I first read about the deal, my sense was that it would fizzle out in a couple of years. As a journalist, during the dot-com boom, one has been witness to countless dog-and-pony shows but none of these short-term tamashas can substitute for a robust business model.

In some ways, this is a real pity because if any company could have provided some competition to Red Hat in the enterprise Linux space, it was Novell. When Novell purchased Suse, I was asked by a journalist for my opinion. My take was that Novell has established channels and a large support team in India for Novell NetWare and if they successfully transition this team to Suse, Red Hat would have a tough competitor on their hands. That transition never happened. If Novell had succeeded, it would have expanded the overall Linux market and that would have been great for open source.

A year after the deal, I joined Red Hat and one of the first things I came across was our chairman Matthew Szulik's famous quip, "It's a marathon, not a sprint." It seems so easy to set up an enterprise Linux business. Download the source code, build a distribution, hire a bunch of smartly dressed salespeople and voila! you have an enterprise Linux business. But, as even mighty Oracle found out, it ain't that easy.

Building a distro may be the easy part, but the really hard (and unglamorous) part is ensuring that thousands of underlying hardware configurations and thousands of software programs that run on top of the distro are certified and supported. This is truly a marathon and not a sprint. The day somebody is seriously ready for the marathon, Red Hat will have competitors.

A request to sign the FOSS Manifesto

2009-03-09T04:51:00.000-07:00

The FOSS Manifesto (see previous post) has finally been put up as an online petition. It upon political parties to make FOSS usage and promotion a central part of the IT, e-government and education plans in their election manifestos. I request all FOSS supporters to sign the same at the earliest. Thanks to Vinay and IT For Change for hosting this and to Arun of FSF Kerala for egging me to write this and to all those who provided their feedback!

A draft FOSS manifesto for Indian political parties

2009-02-05T05:03:00.000-08:00

With elections approaching in April 2009, it was time to create a draft FOSS manifesto for Indian political parties. This is a first draft and I have written this keeping in mind that most Indian politicians would not be familiar with FOSS. hence, the usage of simple language that anyone can understand. If you feel that any section here needs improvement, please let me know. Comments/suggestions welcome.

A draft FOSS manifesto for Indian political parties

The Free and Open Source Software community in India calls upon political parties to make FOSS usage and promotion a central part of the IT, e-government and education plans in their election manifestos. FOSS is software which is liberally licensed to grant the right of users to study, change, and improve its design through the availability of its source code. The open, inclusive and participatory nature of FOSS is a natural fit for the vibrant traditions of Indian democracy. Since software is the foundation of the knowledge economy, India's IT infrastructure should be built on FOSS and not on closed, proprietary software systems.

We believe that encouragement of FOSS will result in:

Development of the domestic IT industry
Creation of jobs
Encouragement of skills development and upgradation
Enable localization of software to Indian languages
Reduction of India's dependence on monopolistic proprietary software vendors
Encourage the usage of open standards
Bridging the digital divide
Rapid modernization and computerization of India's education system
Technology upgradation of India's Small and Medium Enterprises
Efficient usage of budget outlays for e-government
Faster technology development through Collaborative Innovation

We call upon political parties in India to support the Indian FOSS community by:

Encouraging the use of FOSS in Indian education system. This will inculcate the virtues of collaboration, sharing and participation in children from a very young age and make computerization of schools affordable.
Eliminating proprietary software from the education syllabus and making the syllabus vendor-neutral, thus giving teachers and students the choice of software that suits their budgets and needs.
Using FOSS in e-government to the maximum possible extent and ensuring that government tenders are open and do not favor proprietary software vendors. All software developed with tax-payers money should be released under a FOSS license to encourage collaboration; and the sharing of code and best practices.
Mandating the usage of open standards that are free from royalties and vendor lock-in so that the interaction between the government and citizens happens in a free and open manner befitting a democracy.
Encouraging freely shareable, FOSS based knowledge repositories like Wikipedia in Indian languages.
Encouraging the usage of the collaborative model of FOSS in scientific research. Science thrives on collaboration and the sharing of knowledge. The current trend of privatizing knowledge leads to secrecy in science and reduces collaboration. We must use the FOSS model based on collaboration, community and shared ownership of knowledge to spark a renaissance of knowledge in India.
Eliminating software and business method patents that have lead to huge amounts of litigation in developed countries. Indian traditions have held that knowledge grows by sharing and diminishes when hoarded. Patents on software and business methods grant undue monopolies on ideas and prevent independent invention and the sharing of knowledge.

India has one of the most youthful populations in the world and it is important that they have access to the tools with which the information society is built. The freedom to modify the source code, the ability to share knowledge and build communities make Free and Open Source Software the best, long-term model for India's development. We therefore urge all political parties to encourage the usage of FOSS for India's development.

Collaborative Innovation Video

2009-02-04T03:01:00.000-08:00

Biztech2 recently uploaded a small five-minute interview of mine around the subject of Collaborative Innovation. Towards the end of the video, I mentioned that one of the biggest impact that open source can have on India is the usage of Wikipedia-like tools for education.

Happily, it looks like the folks in the Ministry of Human Resources Development have understood the value of open source. In the recently launched, National Mission on Education through ICT, they say that, "The peer group assisted content development would utilise the Wikipedia type of collaborative platform under the supervision of a content advisory committee responsible for vetting the content." This is a great day for the Open Access community!

Making the CBSE syllabus vendor-neutral

2009-01-11T21:59:00.000-08:00

My friend, Jaijit and others are working on making the CBSE syllabus vendor-neutral. The CBSE syllabus touches the lives of around 201 million students and the current syllabus mandates specific brand names and is not vendor-neutral. We believe that this benefits monopoly software vendors and leads to a technology dependence that is not healthy for our country in the long run.

All we are asking for is that brand names should not be mandated because:

A) The education system must teach *principles* and not *products.* For example, we should teach "word processing" and not XYZ brand of word processor.

B) This deprives students and teachers of the ability to use products that suit their needs and their budgets.

The CBSE Syllabus can be examined at:

1) Secondary Curriculum 2010,INTRODUCTORY INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY(CODE No. 165)

Unit 2-IT TOOLS mandates Windows GUI basics while Unit-3 mandates MSOffice and its practicals.

RECOMMENDATION: This should be changed to "User Interfaces" and "Office Productivity Applications."

2) Senior School Curriculum 2009,Informatics Practices (Code 065)

Unit -I Computer System And Business Applications:Windows,Unit 2 Introduction to Programming:Visual Basic,UNIT 3 RDBMS:ORACLE XII:Unit 2:Visual Basic,Unit 3 RDBMS:PL/SQL

RECOMMENDATION: This should be changed to "Operating Systems" and the mention of specific brand names in "Introduction to Programming" and "RDBMS" should be dropped.

Shyam, Anivar and others helped put together the Syllabus Review Wiki from where this information was culled. Thanks folks!

If you (or someone you know) can help in making the CBSE syllabus vendor-neutral, please do pitch in and help.

Another bubble ready to burst!

2008-12-22T02:50:00.000-08:00

New York Times has an article on how India avoided the credit crisis. In a companion blog, author, Joe Nocera talks of the reactions he got from the Indians he interviewed.

“We used to think that America was the teacher and we were the students,” one businessman told me over breakfast this morning. “We always thought you knew so much more than us. That notion has been shattered.”

Another bubble ready to burst is this flawed notion called "Intellectual Property." I am not saying that all patents, trademarks etc should be banned but that the notion that intellect can be reduced to property is a false one. As a kid, one of the first things I learn is a hymn to Saraswati, the Goddess of Knowledge, which says that:

Wonderful is your gift of knowledge
the more we share, the more it grows
the more we hoard it, the more it diminishes

The current model of trying to "propertize," "privatize" and "commoditize" knowledge comes from a very mercantile, reductionist model of treating knowledge. That may be OK for other countries, which have "intellectual propertized" their knowledge and hold the balance of power in IP Rights, but not for India which has had a long, rich tradition of free knowledge cultures like yoga, ayurveda, mathematics and many other disciplines.

We have not "propertized" these traditions of knowledge and therefore yoga, ayurveda etc can be freely used by all. When we go to use "their" "intellectual property" (allopathic medicine, software and business method patents etc) we are told, "pay up or else...." talk about an unequal exchange!

The contrast is best illustrated by what happened with Bikram Yoga taught by celebrity yoga teacher, Bikram Chowdhury who makes a fortune teaching yoga to Americans. Bikram copyrighted a series of 26 postures and two breathing exercises practiced in a room heated upto 105 degrees Fahrenheit. Note that Yoga is a body of knowledge which has been free from copyrights, patents and "intellectual property" for more than 2000 years. When asked why, Bikram said that he sought legal protection because "it's the American way."

Each society evolves systems that suit its own needs. Most of India's traditions of knowledge spring forth from a spiritual base whereas America's treatment of knowledge has a mercantile bias. This is not to pass a value judgment on either. The problem arises when, in a globalizing society the two systems clash and are unable to harmonize with each other.

Sadly most of our thinking around legal protection of knowledge has been "derivative" in nature, a shoddy cut and paste job from the "mature IP systems" of the West. However, as the Bilski case shows, even these "mature IP systems" are having second thoughts on how they treat knowledge, or in this specific case, software patents. As I have argued in my previous blog entry, "The Practical Problem with Software Patents," the litigation-ridden path followed by US in granting software and business method patents is something we must avoid at all costs.

I could go on and on, but let me just end with one small piece of evidence. As I mentioned earlier, I have grown up in an Indian tradition that believes that knowledge grows by sharing. Does this wisdom hold true in the Internet era?

In September 2001, Linus Torvalds released 10,000 lines of code for building an operating system, under the General Public License. The GPL license encouraged people to take this 10,000 lines of code, modify it and share the resulting improvements with the rest of the world. A recent study by the Linux Foundation estimated that the code base for the Fedora 9 Linux distribution is now 204 million lines of code!

This is one of the finest examples of Collaborative Innovation that has been made possible by the growth of the Internet. With 1.4 billion people connected to the Internet and another 600 million set to join up in the next two years, the Internet is the greatest collaborative platform in the history of mankind. The attempt to "propertize" knowledge in the Internet era is doomed to fail. Instead, we will see knowledge returning to its rightful place in the commons and the open source principles of collaboration, community and the shared ownership of knowledge being applied to thousands of disciplines. As the commercial distributions of Linux demonstrate, even when knowledge lives in the commons, it is possible to build profitable business models around it.

When we look back on our times, we may find that the term, "Intellectual Property" has taken its place along side another archaic term, "Horseless Carriage." Both were attempts to impose metaphors of the past on the future.

2008-12-22T01:12:00.000-08:00

Make magazine has a great article on open source gift ideas for the season.

There are hundreds of gift guides this holiday season filled with junk you can buy, but a lot of times you actually don't own it, you can't improve upon it, you can't share it or make it better, and you certainly can't post the plans, schematics, and source code either. We want to change that. We've put together our picks of interesting open source hardware projects, open source software, services, and things that have the maker spirit of open source. Some are kits, some are open software projects that you'll need to build hardware for before gifting, and some are just support for the projects/groups that do open source. Included in this guide are things you can get from the MAKE store too (we try and have as many open source goods as possible).

I had heard about the "gift economy" of open source but never realized that we have so many gift ideas! Way to go, open source!

Laziest person in the world award

2008-11-18T02:16:00.001-08:00

I normally don't blog about non-open source stuff but this one takes the cake. This is a mail from a student who reads my blog. Notice the nice attempt at flattery in the first sentence followed by an utterly spineless request. If this is the quality of our students, god help us!

I read your article, its nice and informative about the practical problems of open source. Well, I am new with open source and trying to learn. I have to do a project for my university. Could you please send me any practical code for open source that I can include in my project. I will be very thankful for the help and support.

Proprietary software and "Lipstick on a pig"

2008-11-13T04:33:00.000-08:00

Mark Taylor of Sirius Corporation has written a very interesting article that explains in economic terms why proprietary software is doomed.

Is proprietary software simply a pig skilfully dressed up to make the unwitting think it has intrinsic value?

The answer is 'yes', and here's why.

In any free market, the price of a commodity, over time, falls close to that of its marginal cost of production. A number of things can interfere with this process, the most damaging being the existence of a monopoly, but in the absence of market distortion this rule always holds true.

Global Patent troll comes to India

2008-11-11T21:36:00.000-08:00

One news item that set the alarm bells clanging in my head was the Economic Times report that Intellectual Ventures has signed up an agreement to agreement to buy patents from the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore and plans to tie up with IIT Madras and other such institutes. I don't know the nature of these agreements, but if IISc and others are entering relinquishing significant control over these patents, this would amount to selling off the crown jewels. Neo-colonialism is the first word that comes to my mind after reading this report.

Extracts from the report:

"The company owns over 20,000 patents world-wide related to everything from lasers to computer chips and is now eyeing the 15,000 patents filed every year by various research
institutes in India."

"The fund is controversial in the US as it’s seen as monopolising inventions and using its clout to sign expensive patent-licencing agreements."

We will have to keep a close watch on this company.

The practical problem with software patents

2008-11-09T21:59:00.000-08:00

Note: An edited version of this article recently appeared in Economic Times.

The Bilski case judgment has reversed the trend of granting patents to abstract ideas in the US, and is good for software developers, says Venkatesh Hariharan

In their book, “Patent Failure: How Judges, Bureaucrats, and Lawyers Put Innovators at Risk,” Boston University professors, James Bessen & Michael J. Meurer, show that Murphy's Law (“If anything can go wrong, it will”) has been working overtime in the area of software. The authors dedicate an entire chapter to software and business method patents, which are particularly problematic because they account for almost 38 percent of all patent litigation.

The authors find that in the United States, software patents are twice as likely to be litigated as other patents while business method patents (which act as a proxy for software patents) are seven times as likely to be litigated. The authors say, “Our reading of the case law convinces us that patent law tolerates too many software claims untethered to any real invention or structure; in such a world clear boundaries are unattainable.” The authors point out that patent on abstract ideas are often subject to multiple interpretations and are therefore more ambiguous. An example of this ambiguity is the E-Data patent on "point of sale location." In the IT industry, this term is jargon for the cash register or location where the customer pays the cashier. When the US Federal Circuit interpreted this claim, they decided that it referred to any location where an e-commerce transaction might take place. Thus, a patent filed 17 years ago when e-commerce did not exist, ended up causing several lawsuits.

The lack of clear boundaries in software means that even law-abiding software developers who intend not to violate another's patent have no clear means of avoiding it. The authors point out that there are around 4000 patents on e-commerce and around 11,000 patents on online shopping. Add to this the fact that getting legal opinion on each software patent can cost around USD 5,000 and we have a vexatious, if not impossible, task at hand. For most software developers, doing a patent search in connection with their work is simply not economically feasible. Even leaving aside the cost of a search, the results are seldom conclusive. Thus it really is not possible to eliminate the risk of a patent infringement lawsuit.

It is well known that the U.S. has the most permissive patent system in the world. However, even in the US, there are signs that the pendulum may be swinging the other way. In the recent Bilski case, which dealt with a method of hedging risks in commodities, the US courts ruled that abstract ideas which are not tethered to a device cannot be patented. The decision reversed the 1998 State Street decision that opened the floodgates for software patents.

In the European union, a move to patent, “computer implemented inventions” was thrown out in 2005. In India, section 3(k) of the Indian Patent Act says that, “A mathematical or business method or a computer programme per se or algorithms are not patentable.” In the discussions around India's Draft Patent Manual, the interpretation of the term, “computer programme per se” has been the most contentious one. Given the lessons of history and considering the amount of litigation that software patents have created in the US, India must avoid going down the same path.

A patent is a state-granted monopoly on an invention, in return for disclosure of the idea. The original intent of the patent system was to encourage disclosure by the inventor in exchange for exclusive rights for a limited period of time to the invention. This ensured that inventors did not take their inventions to the grave and that society could build on existing knowledge rather than re-invent the wheel. The regime of software patents began its major expansion in the 1980s in the US. Since then, software developers have been consistently arguing that that software is better protected through copyrights rather than patents.

Under copyright law, if software developers write code that is similar to that of another, they can defend themselves on the grounds of independent invention because copyright protects the expression of an idea. However, the same defense is not possible under a software patent regime because a patent is a monopoly on the idea itself. Thus, even if software developers independently create a program, they may be liable for infringement of one of the more than 200,000 software patents in existence in the U.S. Even end-users who use software for routine, everyday activities may be liable for infringement. For example, McDonalds and 400 other entities were served notices for violating DataCard's patent on “Method for processing debit purchase transactions using a counter-top terminal system.” In another case, a company (ironically) called Beneficial Innovations, sued the New York Times, You Tube and many other media organizations for allegedly violating its patent on “Method and system for playing games on a network.” Therefore the problem of software patents is not one that is confined to the software development industry alone and ends up increasing the cost of software for society as a whole.

The problem is compounded by the fact that litigation is an expensive process. Dan Ravicher of the Public Patent Foundation points out that for a patent holder to send a cease-and-desist letter, all it takes is a post card. However, that inexpensive post card sets off an expensive chain of events for the defendant who will typically pay a lawyer USD 40,000 to get a legal opinion, around USD 2-4 million in attorney’s fees if the case goes to court and many millions more if the defendant loses the case in court and is required to pay damages.

The argument in favor of software patents is that patents promote innovation. The social contract between an inventor and society was that the inventor disclosed details of the invention in return for the patent, and this disclosure would lead to future inventions. However, the history of the software industry shows that innovation flourished long before software patents came into force during the 1980s. Some of the fundamental inventions of the computer age—the Internet, compilers, spreadsheets etc--were created despite the lack of patent protection. It is therefore clear that patent protection is not necessary for innovation in the software industry.

As with any other monopoly, a patent must be treated with great discretion, especially since this particular monopoly is bestowed by the state itself. The act of granting a 20 year exclusive right to profit from an idea to a private entity needs to be weighed against the cost that it imposes on society. Since software and business method patents prevent independent invention, do not function well as a system of property and lead to increased litigation, India must comprehensively reject it.

Update: Micheal Tiemann, president of the Open Source Initiative and my colleague at Red Hat has some generous praise for this article and why Indians should heed its message.

Barack Hussein Obama's secret sauce: Open Source!

2008-11-05T10:05:00.000-08:00

Doc Searls has a great article on how Obama's campaign has effectively used open source and social networking.

"The stack is LAMP: Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP. On the back end we use lots of open source libraries and tool kits. We use YUI, and Ext, which are javascript UI libraries. One of our developers is the creator of the Horde project, which is a big open source PHP framework."

No prizes for guessing what McCain used :-) Now, I am even more of an Obama admirer!

Knowledge Commons welcomes judgment in the Bilski case

2008-10-31T05:38:00.000-07:00

Knowledge Commons welcomes the judgment in the Bilski case. A recent
book by Boston University professors, James Bessen & Michael J. Meurer
titled, "Patent Failure: How Judges, Bureaucrats, and Lawyers Put
Innovators at Risk," has shown that business method patents are seven
times more likely to be litigated as compared to other patents,
because it is difficult to determine the boundaries of abstract
patents categories like business method and software patents.

India has fortunately escaped the litigation riddled path followed by
America. Section 3(k) of The Indian Patent Act says that, "A
mathematical or business method or a computer programme per se or
algorithms are not patentable." This clearly indicates that Indian
lawmakers do not intend abstract ideas to be patentable. However, in
practice, several software and business method patents have been
granted and these will need to be weeded out to prevent future
litigation. Overall this judgment indicates that the pendulum is now
swinging to the other end after the permissive granting of software
patents that followed the State Street ruling in 1998.

Overall this is a good decision for the software industry and
consumers because it will reduce the risk of litigation that hangs
over users and developers of software.

Venkatesh Hariharan
Co-founder
Knowledge Commons

Update: Harsimran Singh of The Economic Times has written a report on the Bilski case. The Mumbai edition of ET has carried the report on Page 5. The report does not seem to be online yet. It quotes Som Mittal, President of NASSCOM as saying that, "The ideas and frameworks for business processes should not be patentable but the content written within those frameworks should be allowed to be copyrighted." This is a welcome statement from NASSCOM because copyright protection allows for independent invention.

In other words, if you write a piece of software and are sued for infringement in a court of law, under copyright law you can claim that you wrote that software independently without copying the other party's code. However, under patent law, "independent invention" cannot be used as a defence. We therefore believe that copyright is sufficient to protect software, whereas software patents will prevent independent invention, increase the risk of litigation and therefore hurt the IT industry.

India's Draft Policy on Open Standards for e-Governance released

2008-09-19T02:59:00.000-07:00

India's Department of IT has released the Draft Policy on Open Standards for e-Governance. For the open source community, this is a significant
step forward because this policy can eliminate the barriers that we have faced due to proprietary standards like .doc, .mpg and others.

Once this policy is finalized, it will become a part of all future Requests for Proposals (RFPs). A committee has been constituted to review standards on the basis of the mandatory charecteristics required by this policy. The committee's report shows that according to this policy, ODF, OGG, W3C standards etc are some of the standards that meet all the mandatory criteria for open standards. OOXML, MPEG etc *do not* meet these mandatory criteria.

The most controversial aspect of this policy was whether multiple standards should be allowed for the same purpose. We have been vocal in arguing vendors should collaborate on standards and compete on their implementation because this is the best outcome for industry and consumers and the Draft Policy has accepted this point.

Patents are not neccessary for innovation

2008-08-13T03:54:00.000-07:00

This article of mine appeared in Financial Express in the Face2Face secion where they carry debates. The rejoinder to my article was titled, "They offer valuable property protection", but like most rhetoric on this subject, the author paints broad brushstrokes while offering very little proof of the link between patents and innovation. Some statements are misleading and I have written a comment at the end of this article.

My article is reproduced in full below.

Patents are not neccessary for innovation

The objective of the patent system is to encourage innovation. Therefore, the question is whether patents are essential to promote innovation in the software industry? The fact is that most of the far-reaching innovations in the software industry happened well before software patents became common. Word processors, spreadsheets, databases, compilers, email, the world wide web, the fundamentals of modern operating systems, the graphical user interface were all developed before software became a patentable commodity in some countries.

Another example of innovation is the Linux operating system, which runs on almost everything, from the Mars Rover, to giant supercomputers to the tiniest embedded computers. This innovation has been powered by the open source model, based on collaboration, community and the shared ownership of knowledge. Thousands of volunteers and private enterprises like Red Hat, IBM and others have contributed source code to Linux under the general public license (GPL) that gives users the freedom to modify the source code and share the resulting improvements with others.

It is estimated that the Linux kernel now has around 10 million lines of source code (the instructions that make a software program work). The commercial value of the source code in an average Linux distribution is estimated at around $8 billion. This represents an enormous wealth of knowledge that is freely available to everyone. The success of open source is clear proof that patents are not necessary for innovation in the software industry and that profit motives are not the only spur for innovation.

Having established that, let us now look at the negative impact of software patents. To do that, we need to take a slight detour into the copyright law. Any person or organisation writing software automatically enjoys protection under the copyright law. If anybody steals source code, they are liable for prosecution under the copyright laws.

However, if anybody wrote source code that ends up being similar to another person's, they can defend themselves by proving that they wrote the code independently. If software patents are allowed, this 'independent invention' argument cannot be used as a legal defense. This is because the first person that obtains the patent then has exclusive rights over the idea. While copyright protects the expression of an idea, a patent is a state granted monopoly on the idea itself. We feel that copyrights are sufficient to protect software, while patents are a treacherous landmine that will increase litigation and hinder innovation in a rapidly growing industry.

It is estimated that around 2,00,000 software patents have been granted in the US and the task of sifting through these patents is so difficult that most companies don't even attempt this task. The language of software patents is so complex that only the most masochistic software developer would spend their time reading patents.

In online shopping alone, there are more than 4,000 patents. This leaves both developers and web portals and any company that implements online shopping liable for infringement. India gave the world the profound concept of zero and the decimal system, which forms the foundation of the digital revolution. Imagine what would have happened to the IT industry if India owned the patents for these ideas! Our knowledge traditions have always held that knowledge grows by sharing and diminishes when it is held secret. Therefore, it is distressing to see our policies being cut and paste from other societies that treat knowledge as something that can be commoditised. If we want a renaissance of the great knowledge traditions of India, we must stop aping the developed economies and their thought processes. Nixing software patents in the bud would be a pretty good start.

*/The writer is corporate affairs director with Red Hat /*

Full text of Section 3(k) relating to software patents

2008-08-06T22:38:00.000-07:00

For those who are too busy/lazy to go through the Draft Patent Manual, here is the full text of 3(k) which falls under Chapter IV titled, "Inventions not Patentable."

3(k) A mathematical or business method or a computer programme per se or
algorithms are not patentable.

4.11.1 A computer implemented invention mean any invention the performance of
which involves the use of computer, computer network or other
programmable apparatus, or an invention one or more features which are
realized wholly or partially by means of a computer programme/ programmes.

4.11.2 Computer programmes are a set of instructions for controlling a sequence of
operations of a data processing system. It closely resembles a mathematical
method. It may be expressed in various forms e.g., a series of verbal
statements, a flowchart, an algorithm, or other coded form and maybe
presented in a form suitable for direct entry into a particular computer, or may
require transcription into a different format (computer language). It may
73 merely be written on paper or recorded on some machine readable medium
such as magnetic tape or disc or optically scanned record, or it maybe
permanently recorded in a control store forming part of a computer.

4.11.3 If the patent application relates only to a machine i.e., hardware based
invention, the best mode of operation may be described along with the
suitable illustrations. However, in the case of a process related inventions ,
the necessary sequence of steps should clearly be described so as to
distinguish the invention from the prior art with the help of the flowcharts.
The source/pseudo/object codes may be incorporated in the description
optionally.

4.11.4 In order to distinguish the invention from the prior art, relevant prior art is
also required to be given in the specification. It is always essential to analyze
the invention in the light of what is described and the prior art, in order
to identify the contribution to the art and hence determine whether this
advancement resides in, or necessarily includes, technological features and
technical application or is solely intellectual in its content. A hardware
implementation performing a novel function is not patentable if that particular
hardware system is known or is obvious irrespective of the function
performed.

4.11.5 Applications related to computer inventions may broadly fall under the
following categories:
(a) Method/process:
(b) Apparatus/system:
(c) Computer program product.
The following aspects should be looked into while dealing with such applications.

4.11.6 The method claim should clearly define the steps involved in carrying out the
invention. It should have a technical character. In other words, it should solve
a technical problem. The claims should incorporate the details regarding the
mode of the implementation of the invention via. hardware or software,
for better clarity. The claim orienting towards a “process/method” should
contain a hardware or machine limitation. Technical applicability of the
software claimed as a process or method claim, is required to be defined in
relation with the particular hardware components. Thus, the “software per se”
is differentiated from the software having its technical application in the
industry. A claim directed to a technical process which process is carried out
under the control of a programme (whether by means of hardware or
software), cannot be regarded as relating to a computer programme as such.
For example, “a method for processing seismic data, comprising the steps of
collecting the time varying seismic detector output signals for a plurality of
seismic sensors placed in a cable.” Here the signals are collected from a
definite recited structure and hence allowable.

4.11.7 The apparatus claim should clearly define the inventive constructional
hardware features. The claim for an apparatus should incorporate a “process
limitation” for an apparatus, where “limitation” means defining the specific
application and not the general application. As a general rule, a novel solution
to a problem relating to the internal operations of a computer, although
comprising a program or subroutine, will necessarily involve technological
features of the computer hardware or the manner in which it operates and
hence may be patentable. For example, in a computer comprising means for
storing signal data and a first resistor for storing data, the clause starting with
“for” describes the function or process carried out by the apparatus, and form
the part of “process limitation” here.

4.11.8 The claims relating to software programme product are nothing but computer
programme per se simply expressed on a computer readable storage medium and
as such are not allowable. For example, if the new feature comprises a set of
instructions (programme) designed to control a known computer to cause it to
perform desired operations, without special adoption or modification of its
hardware or organization, then no matter whether claimed as “a computer
arranged to operate etc” or as “a method of operating a computer”, etc., is not
patentable and hence excluded from patentability. The claim might stipulate that
the instructions were encoded in a particular way on a particular known medium
but this would not affect the issue. e.g., A program to evaluate the value of PI or
to find the square root of a number are held not allowable. An invention
consisting of hardware along with software or computer program in order to
perform the function of the hardware may be considered patentable. e.g.,
embedded systems.

4.11.10 A mathematical method is one which is carried out on numbers and
provides a result in numerical form (the mathematical method or
algorithm therefore being merely an abstract concept prescribing how to
operate on the numbers) and not patentable. However, its application may
well be patentable, for example, in Vicom/Computer-related invention
[1987] 1 OJEPO 14 (T208/84) the invention concerned a
mathematical method for manipulating data representing an image, leading
to an enhanced digital image. Claims to a method of digitally filtering data
performed on a conventional general purpose computer were rejected,
since those claims were held to define an abstract concept not
distinguished from a mathematical method. However, claims to a method of
image processing which used the mathematical method to operate on
numbers representing an image can be allowed. The reasoning was that the
image processing performed was a technical (i.e. non- excluded) process
which related to technical quality of the image and that a claim directed to a
technical process in which the method used does not seek protection for
the mathematical method as such. Therefore the allowable claims as such
went beyond a mathematical method.

4.11.11 The patent application No.558/DELNP/2005 related to method of operating
the credential management processor. This was refused as it was found to be
attracting the provisions of section 3(k) as the alleged method was relating
to ‘receiving ‘, ‘de-referencing’ and ‘storing’ being purely a computer
implemented software application. As well as the enhancement of security
as claimed in method claims was already disclosed in the cited document
and is obvious to a person skilled in the art.

Why software patents are harmful

2008-08-03T22:33:00.000-07:00

When we were battling the Patent Amendment Act 2005, I had requested Lawrence Liang of the Alternative Law Forum to put together a note on why software patents are harmful. Virtually overnight, Liang and his team at Alternative Law Forum put together a position paper on software patents and their impact on the Indian industry. This is a highly recommended read for those interested in this issue.

We had forwarded this note to policy makers across the spectrum and were successful in keeping software patents off this amendment. However, the draft patent manual seeks to bring in software patents through the backdoor and we are working on ensuring this does not happen. Will keep you posted.

Patent Office Meeting in Mumbai on 7th August: Please attend if you can

2008-07-27T22:15:00.000-07:00

This is a call for FOSS developers in Mumbai who are interested in the software patents issue. The Patent office has called for a stakeholders meeting on the Draft Patent Manual.

On behalf of Red Hat, I have submitted our comments on the manual.

In 2005, I was involved in the Patent Amendment Act 2005 and on behalf of Red Hat, we had made representations to policy makers on why software patents are bad for the Indian software industry. At that time, Lawrence Liang and Prashanth Iyengar of the Alternative Law Forum had done a fantastic job of putting together a position paper on this issue virtually overnight. Happily, our lobbying was successful and software was kept out of the Amendment. What makes me hopping mad is that the Draft Manual seeks to bring in through the backdoor, something that was explicitly rejected by the Indian parliament. To say the very least, this is a very dubious practice.

Interestingly, Infosys and TCS are in favor of software patents. Those who followed the OOXML fight on this blog would know that both these organizations had voted in favor of Microsoft's OOXML proposal. If there are articulate FOSS developers in the Mumbai LUG, I would request them to be present at the 7th August 2008 meeting and explain to the group why software patents are against the interest of the developer community.

Infy, TCS lock horns with Red Hat over IT Patent

2008-07-25T04:54:00.000-07:00

Interesting news item in The Financial Express about the recent stakeholder meeting on the Draft Patent Manual. Some selected extracts:

IT majors like Infosys Technologies Ltd and Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) are opposing the open-source community's demand that the government drop a clause in the draft patent examination manual as it gives scope for software patenting under the Indian Patent Act of 2003.

The IT majors made their opposition clear at a meeting in Delhi, called by the government's department of industrial policy & promotion on Thursday. The dispute has been sparked by the draft manual that will guide patent examiners in their interpretation of the Indian Patent (Amendment) Act for software. Section 3(K) of the Act clearly says: "A mathematical or business method or a computer programme per se or algorithms are not patentable."

...

Pinaki Ghosh, the intellectual property head of Infosys, said, "We are of the opinion that software systems as well methods should be patented." Companies like Infosys want software patents along the entire software value chain from source code to software embedded in hardware. However, patenting of software is being opposed strongly by Red Hat India, the Linux based open source software company, along with science forums like the All India Peoples Science Network.

Venkatesh Hariharan, who heads Red Hat India's open source affairs, said the draft patent manual that seeks to introduce patents is not in consonance with the current legal situation. Hariharan pointed out that Section 3(K) of the Patent Act clearly says that a mathematical or business method or computer programmes per se, or algorithms, are not patentable.

He said the Patent Amendment Act 2005 had sought to introduce software patents but this was rejected by Parliament in the final version, and Section 3(k) was retained in its original shape.

"On reviewing the draft patent manual, we find that it seeks to make technical applications of software patentable. This approach was explicitly rejected by the Indian Parliament," Hariharan said. FICCI official said there has been some underlying ambiguity regarding the patenting of software with technical effect. The draft manual says that the software will be patented only if it goes into a new hardware. This FICCI is opposing this condition.

Stakeholders Meeting on the Draft Patent Manual

2008-07-25T02:38:00.000-07:00

Yesterday, the Ministry of Commerce and Industry hosted a "Stakeholders Meeting on the Draft Patent Manual." Around 70 people attended this meeting. The audience was a mix of lawyers, industry associations like CII, FICCI etc, civil society organizations and industry.

The pro-software patent lobby was pretty aggressive about their point of view. The body language made it apparent that they had come prepared for a fight. The main points of the pro-patents lobby (loosely paraphrased, since the discussion was happening so fast) were:

1) Patents will help Indian companies compete with the biggies globally
2) Indian companies are filing for patents abroad anyway, therefore we should have patents in India too.
3) Software patents are pro-innovation and should therefore be encouraged.

Prabir Purkayastha from the Knowledge Commons and myself represented the open source community. Prabir made the point that software is a form of mathematics and that merely applying it in a specific domain like image processing should not make it patentable. He also added that such patenting would be an incorrect interpretation of Section 3(K) which says that "a mathematical or a business method or a computer program per se or algorithms are not patentable."

At this point, the discussion became pretty heated and the chair of the meeting decided to call for a separate meeting on software patents. I'll keep you updated. Meanwhile, if there are open source supporters who are who can help us with the software patents issue, please let me know. If you happen to be based in New Delhi, that's even better! We need all the help we can get.

ISO/IEC and OOXML: The judge, the jury and the hangman

2008-07-18T05:52:00.000-07:00

Those who have been following the OOXML issue would have noted that India was among the four countries that had appealed against the ISO/IEC approval of OOXML. The next step in this drama (charade?) is that the heads of ISO and IEC have replied to the four countries. The replies
essentially dismiss the claims made by the four countries with studied nonchalance. I am not surprised. After all, if I was asked to pass judgment on my own goofups, I am not likely to hang myself. Enough has been said on how Microsoft has compromised ISO on this blog and others and I will not add to this.

The ISO Secretary General, Mr Alan Bryden was in India in December 2007 and I had asked him what he thought of the controversy surrounding the OOXML process. His answer was that ISO is a democratic organization and it will emerge stronger from this controversy. Very glib answer but an absolute and shameful lie. Just two months after Mr. Bryden's false statement ISO held a Ballot Resoution Meeting held under such apalling circumstances that we (the LITD15 committee of Bureau of Indian Standards) were forced to send a set of suggestions to ISO on how the BRM should be conducted. As we Indians are wont to do, the letter was exceedingly polite, but in retrospect, this politeness is wasted on the mafia that runs ISO.

The larger question for for policy makers in emerging markets is : Who exactly is ISO/IEC answerable to? If they interpret the rules and game the system to accommodate a big, powerful corporate interest, then maybe it is time that emerging economies created a standards body of their own with transparent governance structures and a firm commitment to royalty-free open standards. The only way that emerging countries can protect themselves against naked greed and avarice of a corporate entity in quest of super-profits and the institutions they have captured is to collaborate with each other to ensure justice. We must also send out a strong message to these greedy corporations that we have zero tolerance for such attempts at digital colonization.

We Indians have had enough of the East India Companies looting our country, and leaving a trail of bloodshed, poverty and famine behind. We have had enough of India being a soft state. If these companies want to sell in India, they better follow Indian rules and obey Indian laws and stop acting against the interests of the people of India. If you think those are harsh words, I'd recommend reading Prof.DB Phatak's blog and his detailed commentary on Microsoft's activities around OOXML. As they say, there is no smoke without fire and if a respected professor like Prof.Phatak is so furious, imagine what caused it.

Creating an alternate standards organization will be an exceedingly tough task, but standards are not an area where compromises can be tolerated. Standards govern our lives in a million different ways and the common man and woman deserve to have their standards created in an open, transparent manner that benefits everyone.

Let me know what you think of the idea of creating an open standards organization for the benefit of the emerging economies.

CC book lasts for four week on NYTimes Bestseller List

2008-06-13T15:18:00.000-07:00

This is interesting. Cory Doctorow's book, Little Brother has been on the bestseller list of the New York Times for four weeks in a row. The book is released under a Creative Commons license, which means that you can download and read it for free. If is is available for free, why would people buy it in the bookstores and send it to the NYTimes bestseller list?

Cory is a great guy and a wonderful speaker on the subject of Creative Commons and open content. I heard him speak at the first Red Hat Summit in Nashville in 2006. At the Summit, he explained that, as an author, his biggest problem was obscurity and that releasing his books under a Creative Commons license helped him overcome that.

At that time, I thought that was an interesting explanation, but this is excellent proof of what he said two years ago! I'd encourage you to listen to his 2006 talk at the Red Hat Summit and recommend that you download it in the OGG format, which is an open format.

The ghost of software patents is back!

2008-05-08T23:30:00.000-07:00

Life is never easy for an open source evangelist. The OOXML drama came to a close on 2nd April 2008 and we were on to our next issue -- software patents. The Draft Patent Manual might end up bringing software patents through the back door. this would be surprising because the Indian parliament explicitly rejected software patents in the Patent Amendment Act 2005. In this blog, I am including extracts from a letter that I sent to the Patent Office on 11th April 2008. The deadline for comments was 15th April 2008.

Software patents in India as per Clause 3(k) of the Indian Patent Act

We find that the Draft Patent Manual seeks to introduce software patents and we believe that this is not in consonance with the current legal situation India where Clause 3(k) of the Indian Patent Act clearly says,

“A mathematical or business method or a computer programme per se or algorithms are not patentable”.

You may recall that the Patent Amendment Act 2005 sought to introduce software patents. The amendment proposed in the Patent Amendment Act 2005 for Clause 3(k) was,

“a computer programme per se other than its technical application to industry or a combination with hardware; a mathematical method or a business method or algorithms.”

However, this amendment was rejected by the Indian Parliament, which chose to retain Clause 3(k) as it is. On reviewing the Draft Patent Manual, we find that it seeks to make technical applications of software patentable. As you can see from the above, this approach was explicitly rejected by the Indian Parliament. The relevant section of the Draft says:

Draft Manual 4.11.7
4.A mathematical method is one which is carried out on numbers and provides a result in numerical form (the mathematical method or algorithm therefore being merely an
abstract concept prescribing how to operate on the numbers) and not patentable. However, its application may well be patentable, for example, in Vicom/Computer-related invention [1987] 1 OJEPO 14 (T208/84) the invention concerned a mathematical method for manipulating data representing an image, leading to an enhanced digital image. Claims to a method of digitally filtering data performed on a conventional general purpose computer were rejected, since those claims were held to define an abstract concept not distinguished from a mathematical method. However, claims to a method of image processing which used the mathematical method to operate on numbers representing an image can be allowed. The reasoning was that the image processing performed was a technical (i.e. non- excluded) process which related to technical quality of the image and that a claim directed to a technical process in which the method used does not seek protection for the mathematical method as such. Therefore the allowable claims as such went beyond a mathematical method.

Open Source Software and software patents from a national perspective

We would also like to add that the Government of India has identified open source software as a strategic tool for e-governance and for bridging the digital divide in India. The Department of IT's 11th Five Year Plan (2007-2012) says,

“If computer adoption has to reach from current 1% of population to say 5% in next five years, we have to seriously pursue some other route, viz., that of Free/Open Source Software (FOSS).”

The National Knowledge Commission, in a report submitted to the Prime Minister of India, says,

“Because of the enormous size and scope of the E-governance effort in India and because of the availability of globally recognized software talent of Indians, we must actively encourage open source software implementations and open standards wherever possible.”

Open Source Software is built in a collaborative manner by developers spread across the world who share source code and build upon each other's works. In his book, “The Success of Open Source,” the noted political scientist, Prof. Steven Weber, Director of the Institute of International Studies, University of California, Berkeley, says,

“The conventional notion of property is the right to exclude. Property in open source is configured fundamentally around the right to distribute, not to exclude.”

The GNU General Public License, which is used by almost 60 percent of open source software explicitly states that if you modify and redistribute source code licensed under the GPL, you have to share the resultant changes with others. This legal framework has lead to enormous innovation and technology collaboration on a scale that's never been witnessed before. For example, the Linux operating system, which began life in September 1991 has now grown into more than 100 million lines of code.

The freedom to modify the source code and share the changes has benefited India immensely. Many linguistic groups have localized the Graphical User Interface of Linux into more than 11 Indian languages so that non-English speakers can also benefit from the power of digital technology. Open Source Software like Orca help the visually handicapped use computers with ease and skill. Many national mission-mode projects in e-governance make extensive use of open source software. In almost all fields of IT, open source software has emerged as a powerful alternative to expensive, proprietary software, which have restrictive licensing schemes. Developing countries, across the world have therefore embraced open source software with open arms in light of its strategic long-term benefits.

It is for these reasons that the respected technologist and past president of India, Dr. APJ Abdul Kalam, said,

“In India, open source code software will have to come and stay in a big way for the benefit of our billion people."

Open source software is one of the most dynamic, innovative sectors of the global economy, but the patent system is a costly hindrance to open source innovation. We believe that although the patent system was created to foster innovation, it’s simply not an engine for innovation for open source. Software patents were barely recognized when open source began, and so the hope of obtaining a patent did not motivate the first developers. Those pioneers were generally opposed to software patents. The open, collaborative activity at the heart of open source is at odds with the patent system, which excludes the public from making, using or selling a patented invention. Open source developers seek to contribute code to the community – not to exclude others from using the code.

Today the patent system is, if anything, a hindrance to open source. Developers face the risk that the original code they have written in good faith could be deemed to infringe an existing software patent. Software patents are difficult to interpret, even for experts in computer science and software engineering. Experts often disagree as to whether a particular patent claim covers a particular program. Thus, a risk of litigation exist for every open source project, and the potential cost of patent litigation can be ruinous, especially for startup companies.

Given the litigation risk, some open source companies, including Red Hat, acquire patents for the sole purpose of asserting them defensively in the event they are faced with a future lawsuit. Despite the hindrances of the global patent system, open source continues to expand at an exponential rate. One can only imagine how that expansion would accelerate if the braking effect of the patent system were lifted.

Given the fact that (a) that Indian legislators have clearly chosen to exclude software from the list of patentable inventions (b) that open source software is important to India's long-term strategic interests, and (c) there is a growing global outcry against software patents, we hereby request you to ensure that the Draft Patent Manual reflects the will and intent of the Indian Parliament.

LETTER ENDS

We will keep track of the developments around the Draft Patent Manual. This might prove to be a challenging task because I hear that there is a powerful pro software patents lobby at work. Keep watching this blog.

Call for volunteers: Syllabus change drive

2008-05-07T04:52:00.000-07:00

The more I talk to my friends in industry and the free and open source
software communities, the more I am convinced that one of the most
important things we can do is to get open source software a part of the
syllabus.

One of the first things we need to make this happen is to rid the
syllabus of its proprietary bias. If you or your friends come across
examples where the syllabus mandates proprietary software, please report
it at the Syllabus Change page (thanks to Anivar for setting this up):

http://fci.wikia.com/wiki/Syllabus_Review

Wherever possible, add links to the syllabus and descriptions of the
proprietary bias in the syllabus. We will take this issue up with the
education ministry and all the major political parties in India.

Let us ensure that the next generation of Indian students grow up as an
open source generation!

The Microsoft-Yahoo deal

2008-05-02T01:37:00.000-07:00

I saw a news iterm in the papers that Microsoft may raise its bid for Yahoo. Let's face it folks, both these guys need each other. Microsoft has tried its hand in the online game through MSN, acquiring Hotmail, Slate etc and these efforts haven't added up to much. The Yahoo bid is probably its last chance (since Google is not for sale or is too expensive) to establish a significant online presence. The alternative is to go on another spending spree and revamp MSN and other online properties.

For Yahoo, there are not too many potential acquisition candidates and time is running out. At one point in time, Yahoo was *the* first Internet destination for most people, Google now holds this prime spot. Unless Yahoo comes up with some killer app that increases its market capitalization, it could see a decline in value. And value on the Internet can sometimes decline dramatically. Remember Pointcast, which was valued in billions at one point in time and was eventually sold to news Corp for a mere $7 million?

There will be a bit of haggling, Microsoft will up its price for Yahoo and both these chaps will fall into each others arms and issue feel-good press releases.

An Open Letter to LITD15 committee of BIS

2008-04-29T12:19:00.000-07:00

On 20th March 2008, the LITD15 committee of the Bureau of Indian Standards voted against Microsoft's proposed OOXML standard. 29th March 2008 was the last date for participating countries to vote on OOXML. In the interval between these two dates, Microsoft went to the Prime Minister of India and alleged that this committee acted against the national interest. Fortunately, the Indian bureaucrats who met the PM did a good job of defending the committee's vote against OOXML.

Prof. DB Phatak of IIT Bombay recently wrote a mail to the LITD15 committee saying that, "In my opinion, these actions go well beyond the behavioral boundaries for a commercial entity, some of these amounting to interfering with the governance process of a sovereign country." IIT Bombay was a member of the LITD15 committee and Prof. Phatak was part of a four-member team at IIT Bombay that did a very intense review of OOXML before the institute voted against OOXML. While Prof. Phatak is a great supporter of open source, he also has a great reputation for being fair and balanced.

An e-mail I sent in response to the mail from Prof. Phatak to the LITD15 committee is given below.

Venky

Dear Prof. Phatak and my fellow committee members in LITD15,

It is a sad day for all of us when standards are created not on technical merits but through political bulldozing. In this hour of darkness, we look up to a respected teacher like you to show us the way out.

Open Standards are the foundation upon which we can build a just and inclusive information society and therefore these issues are critical for India's digital future. Today, thanks to the growth of the open source movement, users in developing countries like India have the choice of software programs that they can freely modify and deploy. This can go a long way in bridging the digital divide in India. However, proprietary standards end up nullifying these advantages.

For example, I can download and implement a Linux desktop on my PC, but to legally acquire the rights to use proprietary multimedia codecs, I will have to pay a royalty of 28 Euros (Rs 1,680) [1]. This payment adds no value to the local economy, increases costs for the end users and widens the digital divide, especially in developing countries like India. Such proprietary standards also violate the principle that standards should belong to all of humanity and should not be the monopoly of an individual or a corporation or a group of organizations acting in concert.

What I have observed is that clever organizations are trapping people into using their proprietary standards by:

1) Driving global adoption of *their* "standards"
2) Filing a thicket of patents around these "standards"
3) Collecting royalties for usage of these "standards" or threatening lawsuits against those who do not comply

How this scenario plays out in real life can be seen from the Joint Photographic Experts Group (JPEG) patent case. JPEG, as most users of digital photographs know, is a popular format for photographic images that has been widely adopted by makers of digital cameras, camcorders, PDA, cellphones and other devices. In 2002, Forgent, a company that owned Patent No. 4,698,672 in the US, ambushed the industry by suing 31 major hardware and software vendors, including Dell and Apple Computers. The company alleged that these companies infringed on its claim to an algorithm used in the popular JPEG picture file format. It is reported that Forgent's legal assault earned it $150 million. Forgent was finally brought to its heels by the Public Patent Foundation that challenged and overturned Forgent's claims on the basis of prior-art.

Dan Ravicher of the Public Patent Foundation who fought the JPEG patent case points out that, in the US, where most of these battles are fought, it costs only 39 cents to send a postcard with a cease and desist notice to an alleged patent infringer, the defendant would have to spend $40,000 to get a lawyer's opinion and anywhere from $2-4 million to defend a case. I do not have comparative numbers for India, but I am sure that no one on this committee relishes seeing the insides of a courtroom.

Therefore, I hope my fellow committee members will agree with me that our first responsibility as professionals who represent India at ISO is to ensure that we do not support such proprietary standards. At this point, it is also important to point out that all ISO standards are not necessarily open standards that empower users with the freedom to encode and decode their data. India has one vote at ISO but it is an important vote and we must exercise it to ensure the creation of genuine open standards at this global forum.

I therefore propose to my fellow committee members that the first bar that any standard must pass before it gets India's approval is that standards should be completely free of any IPR issues, royalties, patent encumberances, trade secrets etc. The proposed standard should give unfettered freedom to users to encode and decode their data in that format. If, and only if, it clears this bar should it be allowed to reach the next stage where it is evaluated on technical merits.

On the OOXML Issue
==================

I am given to understand that on 27th March 2008, the honorable Prime Minister of India held a review of this committee's "Disapprove" vote on OOXML. I am given to understand that Microsoft's submission to the Prime Minister's Office was that the committee's vote is against the national interest.

As someone who has worked over the last ten years to localize Linux to Indian languages and take IT to the 95 percent of Indians who do not speak English, I find such a comment deeply disappointing. Due to my involvement in Indian language computing, I was introduced to the transformative power of open source software and open standards like HTML. To me, the vision of building an inclusive information society is paramount and open standards are the foundation of this dream.

As a committee member, I would like to place on record my deep disappointment at the fact that Microsoft chose to question the decision of this committee at the highest office of our country. For over a year, we have reviewed the proposed standard with a fine tooth comb. Every opportunity was given to Microsoft to put their points across. At every meeting they brought a disproportionate number of participants along; some of these participants were not even Indian nationals. I think the committee as a whole was very courteous in accommodating all this but drew the line when this began to detract from the functioning of the committee. The only words that came to my mind when I heard that Microsoft's complaint had prompted the Prime Minister of my country to review this committee's decision was "stabbed-in-the-back." This was a great disservice to this committee and the country and I hope this never happens again.

It is to the credit of our policy makers, the Department of IT, the Ministry of Consumer Affairs and the Bureau of Indian Standards that the sanctity of this committee's decision was upheld. Therefore, I wish to second Point # 3 made by Prof. Phatak and would like to place on record Red Hat's appreciation for the exemplary transparency with which the proceedings of the committee were conducted. This is in sharp contrast to other countries where the decisions of the technical committees were overruled due to political considerations. In the context of what has happened globally, the conduct of Indian policy makers is all the more admirable and has done our country proud. We would therefore like to than our oft-criticized policy makers from the bottom of our hearts.

Standards cannot (and should not) be created in a technical vaccum. Without a moral and ethical framework, we cannot create standards that benefit humanity. Mahatma Gandhi summed it up best when he said that, “Real swaraj will come not by the acquisition of authority by a few but by the acquisition of capacity by all.” I believe that this committee should be focused solely on the user's swaraj (freedom) to encode and decode their data.

At times like these we look up to our teachers to provide us with a strong ethical and moral framework and be a guiding light. I therefore look forward to your mail and to your constructive suggestions on the way forward.

Regards,

Venky

PS: I have expressed some deeply held personal beliefs in this e-mail and it is entirely possible that I may be wrong in many places. However, I hope that we can start a dialogue around creating genuine open standards and India's role in creating standards that benefit the world.

[1] See http://tinyurl.com/2n4aox and https://shop.fluendo.com/

Red Hat CEO on the "economics of abundance"

2008-04-23T22:39:00.000-07:00

Red Hat's CEO, Jim Whitehurst was interviewed by Bangkok Post recently. I liked his comments on the "the economics of abundance" versus the old notion of "intellectual property."

Red Hat's CEO spoke of "the economics of abundance" that applied to software, and how, in the digital age, when intellectual property could be copied for free the question was "How do you build economics around that?" And he noted how the use of "old-world concepts" such as "it's mine and it's property," by calling it "intellectual property," built on an old-world sense that it had value and cost a lot to duplicate.

Emphasising that Red Hat was a very strong believer in intellectual property rights, he said that in the old-world, with physical things, you couldn't give away a product for free to try out, "but if you think about the economics of abundance, where bits can be copied for free, why shouldn't that be a business model?

"It's kind of flipping business models on their ear," he said. "Rather than apply old-world physical products' commercial principles, let's start from scratch and say 'is there a whole new way to create value?' And that's what we think we're doing and that's pretty extraordinary too. We still have a long way to go. And I don't think that we're fully there in understanding yet. All
content, music ... how do musicians make money? Should it be using DRM, or is there another way to do it?

A sad day for open standards

2008-04-02T06:13:00.000-07:00

Let me admit it--I am saddened to see that OOXML now has the ISO stamp. The open source and free software communities are motivated by the dream of building an inclusive information society. Open standards--which can be freely implemented by anyone on a royalty-free basis and are created through consensus--are the foundation of this dream.

Therefore the Open Source Foundation of India feels that OOXML is an April Fool's Day joke played on the whole world and is a very sad outcome for open standards. The manner in which Microsoft has pushed OOXML through the ISO has breached all norms of standards creation. The voting results show that emerging economies like China, India, South Africa have voted against OOXML. Due to the manner in which one organization has hijacked the standards institution, we need to ask ourselves, "Can we trust these organizations with the critical standards that India depends upon?"

China's reaction has been to create standards of its own and it is reported that they have plans of creating 10,000 of their own standards. To protect our country's interests, we will have to ask organizations like ISO to follow transparent and ethical standards creation processes. Alternately, emerging economies will have to come together to create standards institutions that cannot be hijacked by monopolistic organizations.

Those who want to know the value of open standards just have to look at the amount of innovation that has happened on the Internet and compare it to the desktop world where competition has been systematically killed off to protect monopolies. Vendor driven standards like OOXML are not open standards and the Software Freedom Law Center has cautioned open source and free software developers from implementing OOXML due to legal risks. Since open source is the most viable alternative to expensive proprietary software, the global open source community is extremely unhappy with this development.

Bill Gates is new Secretary-General of ISO

2008-04-01T11:28:00.001-07:00

Phew, just managed to file it before 12AM!

Bill Gates is new Secretary-General of ISO

In a dramatic development, Bill Gates of Microsoft has taken over as the new Secretary-General of ISO. The outgoing Secretary-General, Illbeser Vile said that since most of the ISO members now belong to Microsoft, this is the most appropriate course of action.

Announcing his ascendancy at a press conference, Bill Gates justified the takeover of ISO. "Just as George Bush invaded Iraq due to WMD (Weapons of Mass Destruction), we have invaded ISO for approving a WMD (Weapon of Monopoly Destruction) called ODF (Open Document Format).

"For 26 years, we have been one step ahead of the world, constantly changing the file formats to suit our whims and fancies. Then one day we woke up to find that governments are embracing ODF. This had to be stopped."

Flicking the dandruff off his suit, Gates said that he has been itching for action ever since he stepped down as CEO of Microsoft. "I built two great monopolies in Windows and Office but it got kinda boring. I went off on a retreat, called all the M$ top-shots to the table and asked, "What's the next great monopoly that we can build?"

After three days of intense discussion, the M$ guys finally said, "Why even care to build products, when we can monopolize standards itself?"

Speaking to the press, Microsoft's VP for Interoperability, Wescroo U said, "Now we are back to where we belong - bang in the center of the universe! There was a time when the desktop world used to revolve around Microsoft. Then these pesky Internet startups like Yahoo, Google and Facebook turned up, making us looks like fuddy-duddies. Once we control the standards, we'll see what happens to the sky-high stock valuation of some of these companies."

Speaking to investors, Gates said that controlling ISO was the ultimate business model. "Now we don't even need to build products ("we were not very good at that anyway, just look at Vista!") Our new strategy is:

1) Drive adoption of our standards
2) File a thicket of patents around it
3) Sit back and collect royalties or sue the buggers who don't pay up.

If the software business was a 80 percent margin business, this is a pure-cash play," Gates told salivating Wall-Street types. "Then why have so many employees?" asked a shiny, bald-headed guy in a pin-stripe suit. Promptly, 40,000 out of 50,000 Microsoft employees were fired, sending Microsoft stock into the stratosphere, where it finally overtook Google. The remaining 10,000 employees were reassigned to frantically create "standards" or file patents around them.

One Microsoft minion patented the English language. Everytime, the press asked a question in English, Microsoft was a few dollars richer. The Queen was reportedly furious about it but there she could do little about it since England is now the 51st state in the United States of America. Another Microsoft factotum patented the right-hand drive as well as the left-hand drive. Microsoft lawyers promptly scurried around halting traffic on the streets and collecting royalties from bewildered commuters, ably assisted by the traffic police, especially in the banana republics around the world. The only exceptions were the rebel outposts of China and India, which refused to toe the Microsoft line. To neutralise these pesky, non-Microsoft compliant countries, Gates and co, told investors that they will foment a war between the neighboring countries. "That will teach them how to comply," sniggered the man whose net worth was now half the GDP of the world.

"Is there no limit to your greed?" asked a reporter asked a journalist in an awed whisper. "No. Our aim is TOTAL WORLD DOMINATION(TM)," said Gates.

Watching this on his TV in the Oval Office, George Bush turned pale. Promptly, Secretary of State, Condoleeza Rice, whispered into the President's ears, "Don't worry sir. If nothing else stops them, we can try nuclear deterrence."

NOTE: The sequel to this is coming soon to a multiplex near you. Tickets will cost double since the movies will be encoded in Microsoft's proprietary WMA format.

ADDENDUM: Gates said that he is also going to unveil an April Fools Day joke on the world called called OOXML. However, since there are some well known date problems with the OOXML format, it will be unveiled only on April 2nd, 2008. Get ready for the Microsoft Tax!

A quote from Swami Vivekananda

2008-03-30T22:11:00.000-07:00

I came across this great quote from Swami Vivekananda:

No great work can be achieved by humbug. It is through love, a passion for truth and tremendous energy that all undertakings are accomplished."

After a full year of reviewing a half-baked, 6,000 page proposal called OOXML, I cannot agree more :-)

Microsoft files complaint on OOXML vote to apex office and Ministry of Consumer Affairs

2008-03-26T00:39:00.000-07:00

I love Microsoft for their sheer willingness to piss off every human being on this planet in their quest for approval of OOXML. 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. I do not have a copy of their complaint but am assuming that their complaint is that the committee is packed with supporters of ODF.

Mrs. Verma was persuaded to stay back only after all the other members requested her to stay. After that, Dr. Arora of CSI displayed great statesmanship by asking the Microsoft representative if Microsoft would like to withdraw its complaint. Sadly, the Microsoft representative said that it cannot be withdrawn because it was sent by his senior or some similar reason. The Wipro representative then chimed in and tried to stall the vote by saying that he did not believe that the committee has not been able to apply its mind to the subject and should therefore abstain from voting on this issue! For those of us who have been engaged in this issue from the very beginning (as compared to the software exporters who put in cameo, guest appearances and contributed very little to discussing technical issues) this was obviously not acceptable.

I am just amazed and shocked by the depths to which Microsoft is willing to descend. I have had the privilege of representing Red Hat and the Indian open source community on the LITD 15 committee and have attended almost all the meetings convened on OOXML over the last one year. I would therefore like to place on record my appreciation for the Bureau of Indian Standards and Mrs. Neeta Verma for the transparency and openness with which they conducted an exceptionally difficult task. The manner in which they conducted the proceedings has done India proud and is in stark contrast to the controversies surrounding committees reviewing OOXML in other countries.

Some of the most respected academic institutions (IIT Bombay, IIT Delhi, IISc, ISI Kolkatta and IIM Ahmedabad) besides several government organizations were part of this committee and I have no doubt that they will wholeheartedly agree with my opinion. I would also like to point out that the academia and government bodies have comprehensively voted against OOXML after spending more than a year reviewing it. Doubters who are still not satisfied can verify the transparency of these meetings by requesting recordings of the meetings from the Bureau of Indian Standards and anyone under the Right to Information Act.

To cite just one example, a four-member committee at IIT Bombay spent countless hours reviewing OOXML before voting against the proposal due to its technical flaws. The only group to vote in favor of OOXML was the software exports group and that too on the basis of “support for multiple standards,” an argument which had no relevance because the committee was asked to review OOXML on technical merits and national interest.

Considering the fact that some of the finest technical minds in the country have spent more than a year reviewing OOXML before India finally voted No, I feel that Microsoft's complaint is a great disservice to the committee, its chairperson and the Bureau of Indian Standards. For those who are interested, this is how the committee voted on the question, "Should India change its NO vote on OOXML?"

1. National Informatics Center - NO
2. Center for Development of Advanced Computing - NO
3. Computer Society of India - NO
4. Department of IT - NO
5. IBM - NO
6. Institute for Electronic Governance - Absent
7. Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad - NO
8. Indian Institute of Science - NO
9. Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi - NO
10. Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay - NO
11. Infosys - YES
12. Indian Statistical Institute, Kolkatta - NO
13. Manufacturers Association of IT - Abstain
14. Microsoft - YES
15. National Association of Software and Services Companies - YES
16. National Institute of Smart Governance - Absent
17. Reserve Bank of India - Absent
18. Red Hat - No
19. Standardization Testing and Quality Certification Directorate - NO
20. Sun - NO
21. Tata Computer Services - YES
22. Wipro - YES (for changing India's vote from NO to Abstain)

India's comments on BRM to ISO

2008-03-25T02:07:00.000-07:00

There were widespread reports of irregularities in the BRM held in Geneva. At the meeting held on 13th March 2008, the Indian delegation to the BRM gave a debriefing to members of LITD15, which is reviewing OOXML. The very diplomatic Deputy Director General of BIS said that he had not attended such a meeting in 28 years of his career. Based on the debriefing, the LITD15 committee sent a message to ISO with India's suggestions (we are too polite to call it a protest!) on how the BRM should be conducted. Before sending off these comments, everyone was asked if they have any objections and since no one (including Microsoft) had any objections, these comments were unanimously approved.

LITD15's comments to ISO are given below along with my comments.

1. All technical issues raised by different member bodies should be discussed adequately during BRM. If balloting on technical issues is envisaged, it should not be done during BRM. Balloting may be done after discussion within corresponding mirror committees of the national bodies providing sufficient time for discussions. In other words, duration of BRM should be in consonance with the requirement of time to sufficiently discuss all technical issues raised.

MY COMMENT: The biggest complaint about the BRM was that five days is too little time to review the changes. The five day BRM was sufficient only to discuss 54 issues and the rest of the issues were decided over a paper ballot. The Indian delegation pointed out that if a paper ballot is to be done, why should countries go to the expense of sending four people to Geneva for five days? It would be much simpler to do a ballot from the home country after discussion with committee members.

2. If the basic structure of the submitted document is proposed to be changed during BRM, provision for circulation of restructured integrated document for consideration of member bodies should be incorporated in the Fast Track Process as well. Enough time should be given to member bodies to examine/carry out the impact assessment of the modifications proposed.

MY COMMENT: The scope of the document has changed. The document is being split into five parts. If the scope and nature of the document changes substantially (as it has in this case) then adequate time needs to be given to review the changed proposal. As one of the esteemed academic members of LITD15 says, "What document is there for us to vote upon?"

3. Definitions of newly introduced terminologies should be clearly articulated before discussions are initiated on the related issues.

MY COMMENTS: The fact that we have to make such an elementary request highlights the hollowness of the "Fast-track" process and the BRM.

4. Voting process especially in terms of considering simple majority/two-third majority and counting of P member/O Member votes at BRM should strictly be adhered to as defined in JTC 1 Directives.

MY COMMENTS: This is a serious ethical and governance issue. If O member votes are not counted (as per JTC 1 directives) then the Microsoft claim of getting "more than 98 percent of the comments were accepted" falls flat. The voting was forced upon the BRM after overruling the objections of several countries, including India. The vote was to be decided by a simple majority by paper ballot for 847 issues which could not be discussed. Four P members (Czech Republic, Finland, Norway and Poland) voted for approving the 847 issues, Four P members (including India, Malaysia, South Africa and the US) voted against these issues. The votes of two O members (Chile and Ivory Coast) was improperly counted in contravention of JTC1 rules. The head of the Chile delegation landed in Geneva on the last day, just to vote Yes. The head of the Ivory Coast delegation is Wemba Opota, a Senegalese citizen, who is responsible for Microsoft West Africa!

Even by the "simple majority" rule imposed by the ISO conveners on the BRM, the result is a TIE and not a majority, as claimed by Microsoft.

5. It is suggested that the resolution to the issues raised during the process of development of standard shall be provided before the publication of the standard and shall be included in the published standard and shall not be deferred to the maintenance phase.

MY COMMENTS: As the delegation said, maintenance is for issues that are identified *after* the standard has been frozen. Known issues cannot be swept under the carpet under the guise of "maintenance."

OSFI comment on India's No vote on OOXML

2008-03-24T02:49:00.000-07:00

The open source and free software communities are motivated by the
desire to build an inclusive information society. Open standards are
the foundation of this vision. With respect to Microsoft's OOXML
proposal submitted to International Organization for Standards (ISO)
through ECMA, the open source community has consistently pointed out
that ISO's "fast-track" processes were never meant for a complex,
6,000 page proposal like OOXML. Several serious ethical and governance
issues were also pointed out with respect to the Ballot Resolution
Meeting (BRM) on OOXML that was held in Geneva in February 2008 and
the European Union has initiated an investigation into OOXML. The
Indian committee consisting of government, academia, industry and
software exporters voted overwhelmingly against approving OOXML as an
industry standard with 13 votes against and only five votes in favor.
It is worth noting that the academia consisting of the most respected
Indian institutes; and the government voted against OOXML.

The Open Source Foundation of India believes that all stakeholders
should collaborate on the creation of standards and should compete on
creating the best implementation of these standards. As we have seen
in countless standards battles (VHS versus Betamax, Blu-Ray versus
HD-DVD, Microsoft's proprietary extensions to HTML versus Netscape's
proprietary extensions) battles over standards end up hurting
consumers and the industry. On the other hand, unified standards like
the HTML standard that governs the Internet, ends up benefiting
everyone. Standardization around HTML has converted the Internet into
a global platform that is now used by 1.2 billion users. The amount of
innovation we have seen in terms of social networking, search engines,
Web 2.0 etc would not have been possible if the Internet was a
fragmented platform. We therefore believe that vendors should stop
pushing their own standards, which leads to wasteful competition.
Instead, they should collaborate with all stakeholders to create
unified and open, royalty free standards as this delivers the best
outcome for all stakeholders.

India votes NO for OOXML

2008-03-20T04:39:00.000-07:00

After a colossal amount of debate and discussion over the last one year, India has finally voted NO for OOXML. Today the committee was asked "Should India change its September 2007 No vote into Yes?"

13 members voted No
5 members (including Microsoft, of course) voted Yes.
1 member abstained
3 did not attend

The government bodies, academic institutions and industry voted against OOXML. The only people who voted for OOXML were the software exporters--TCS, Infosys, Wipro and NASSCOM (National Association of Software Services Companies).

Steve Ballmer was in India?

2008-03-18T01:40:00.000-07:00

One of my friends informed me that he saw Steve Ballmer and Microsoft India Chairman, Ravi Venkatesan on the Jet Airways, 9W811 flight from Delhi to Bangalore on 13th March 2008. My friend was on the same flight which was scheduled to leave at 5.50PM but finally took off at 6.10PM. Apparently, he was the last person to get into the flight and the first to deplane. Interestingly, that was the day when BIS met to discuss OOXML. For those who have been following this issue, India's final vote on the subject will be on 20th May 2008. Talk about timing!

It was difficult to believe this at first because Ballmer is known to travel by private Jet. However, our sources at Jet Airways confirmed that it was Ballmer! Strange indeed. If you happen to know anything that confirms or invalidates this, let me know. If he was indeed in India, we would love to know who he met. Mail me or leave a comment on my blog.

US Navy to focus only on open systems

2008-03-14T08:24:00.000-07:00

The US Navy is one among a growing list of organizations that are making open technology solutions mandatory. An article in Federal Computer Week quotes Vice Adm. Mark Edwards, deputy chief of naval operations for communications, as saying,

“The days of proprietary technology must come to an end,” he said. “We will no longer accept systems that couple hardware, software and data.”

For customers, there is no alternative to open standards and open technology platforms, unless they are comfortable with (a) being captive to their vendors (b) paying what their vendors dictate and (c) putting up with inferior technology solutions.

What happens when Murphy's Law goes overboard and a customer has to suffer a, b and c together? Red this article, "Software glitches leave Navy Smart Ship dead in the water."

Such a long journey (OOXML, pronounced O O Hex ML)

2008-03-11T06:17:00.000-07:00

The Bureau of Indian Standards committee on OOXML will be meeting up on 13th March 2008 to get a debriefing on the Geneva BRM. The BRM attracted a fair share of criticism from participants for the manner in which it was conducted. Malaysia issued a press release expressing their dissatisfaction with the BRM. The press release quoted Puan Fadilah Baharin, Director General of STANDARDS MALAYSIA as saying:

"Malaysia had submitted 23 comments and more than 70% of them were not addressed satisfactorily by Ecma's proposed dispositions. We intended to resolve these technical issues at the BRM, but we could only raise 2 concerns due to the time constraints imposed."

Microsoft's Brian Jones meanwhile announced on his blog that 98% of Ecma responses have been approved and I hear that Microsoft has shot off letters to Indian policy makers spreading this misinformation. I don't know what reality distortion field Microsofties are living in but it looks like they dragged ISO into the morass they live in. Let us go back to the Malaysian press release:

Last year, many countries raised concerns against the appropriateness of the voluminous OOXML draft standard submitted by the Ecma International to ISO for a Fast Track process. To date, our observation to these concerns have yet to be addressed better after the BRM. Malaysia's concern is currently being shared greatly by many other National Bodies from Asia including India, China and Korea; as well as from the US and Canada.

Andy Updegrove has some of the sanest comments on the OOXML BRM. Whatever Microsoft may claim, the fact is that emerging economies like Brazil, China, India, South Africa, Malaysia and others have voted against OOXML. Even the US, which had voted "Approve with Comments" in September 2007 voted "No" at the BRM.

What I predict is that Microsoft will apply heavy pressure on countries like Cyprus, Ecuador, Jamaica, Lebanon, Pakistan, Trinidad and Tobago, Turkey , Uruguay, Venezuela, which joined the JTC1 ISO committee reviewing OOXML just before the previous vote in September 2007 to make sure that they vote "Yes." I am sure that Indian policy makers are also under heavy pressure but many of them are smart enough to know a fraudulent standard when they see one. In the rest of the countries, Microsoft may have burnt another bridge and left themselves more isolated among policy makers.

Here is what others said about the BRM.

U.S. National Body Head Frank Farance

"Eighty percent of the changes were not discussed . . .It's a big problem .
. I've never seen anything like this, and I've been doing this for 25
years."

Canadian National Body Delegate Tim Bray

"The process was complete, utter, unadulterated bullshit. I'm not an ISO
expert, but whatever their 'Fast Track' process was designed for, it sure
wasn't this. You just can't revise six thousand pages of deeply complex
specification-ware in the time that was provided for the process."

Brazil National Body Delegate Jomar Silva

"Here are the facts: 1) If [Microsoft] finds that the process functioned,
is because [they] really did not see the process! 2) Anyone who says that
we made rigorous revisions, his nose will grow 10 cm, and anyone that says
the countries had resolved only some important points, his nose will only
grow half as much (chalk it up to a wood shortage). I am even more
irritated when I see that people who had not been there, had not
participated at all, saying whatever they want."

Greek National Body Delegate Antonis Christofides

". . . the BRM was essentially confined to making changes that only
scratched the surface of the problems. . . I and my reviewers found 13
additional errors in the original specification. However, national bodies
were not allowed to submit new comments . . . Therefore, there was no way
to submit and correct them. . . the Ecma responses make the text slightly
better, but though slightly better it is still abysmal . . we did not have
the time to study one thousand responses . . . In fact, even the 80
responses that Greece studied, we did not study at the level of scrutiny
that is required when you inspect a standard. There was no time for that.
What we did was glance through, and make fast decisions based on what seems
right at a quick glance."

The last one year has been such a huge learning experience for me in how standards are created and how some are hijacked!

Microsoft "persuades" NGOs to support OOXML

2008-02-28T08:14:00.001-08:00

Our friends at Linux Delhi have put up a copy of the form letters that Microsoft has been sending NGOs on the OOXML issue. Apparently, these NGOs have been sending copies of these letters to the Ministry of IT and Bureau of Indian standards.

Raj Mathur of Linux Delhi asks makes some pertinent points which are quoted below:

There is a possibility that some, if not all of these NGOs are beneficiaries of cash inputs from their (MS') Corporate Social Railroading ^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H Responsibility arm. I'd really be interested in answers to these questions, anyone up to asking them?

* How many letters supporting OOXML has the Government of India received from NGOs in the recent past?
* How many of these NGOs have received cash inputs (directly or indirectly) from MS?
* How many of these NGOs can sit across a table and discuss OOXML?
* How many of these NGOs can enumerate the benefits of OOXML over, say, ODF for their own organisations?

The NGOs supporting OOXML are probably as clueless as ASSOCHAM (Associated Chamber of Manufacturing) which told a journalist from the Economic Times that they supported OOXML because "Microsoft is a member." If that's the case, ASSOCHAM should have been honest about the fact that they are supporting a member and not palmed it off "in the national interest."

I feel sorry for these NGOs who probably depend on Microsoft's donations. Do you know of any NGO that has received similar letters? Please bring this to my attention and I will give them a call to find out how much they know about OOXML and ODF :-) Meanwhile, everyone, give a big hand to Microsoft for redefining Corporate Social Responsibility. If their tribe increases, doomsday is not far away!

"Talk is cheap; flouting the rules is expensive"

2008-02-28T04:24:00.000-08:00

Microsoft's interoperability announcement has been met with skepticism by the European union, which levied a record $1.3 billion fine on Microsoft. This comes on top of an earlier penalty of $1.17 billion.

Marketwatch reports that:

The European Commission in 2004 found that Microsoft was using its dominant position in operating system software to prevent new competition, and ordered the company to grant rivals access to its technology "protocols" at a reasonable price so they could develop compatible products.

When billion dollar fines do not deter Microsoft, what else will? This is a classic example of the worst excesses of capitalism where companies become so powerful that they are not answerable to any soverign country. The systematic subversion of ISO's processes to "fast-track" a massive 6,000 page "standard" with huge gaping flaws, gaming the ISO system by fixing the ballot in countries like Pakistan and Sweden, getting a whole bunch of countries to join ISO at the last minute to rig the system so that OOXML gets two-thirds majority required to become an ISO standard.... how long will this abuse continue? And how long can India remain a mute bystander to such blatantly unethical practices? We are a soft state and we often pay the price for it.

This is where I admire the European Union for having the guts to investigate the anti-competitive practices of Microsoft. I doubt if any Indian policy maker will ever make the kind of statement that Neelie Kroes, European commissioner for competition policy made. "Talk is cheap; flouting the rules is expensive. Microsoft continued to abuse its powerful market position after the Commission's March 2004 decision requiring it to change its practices."

The EU is also investigating Microsoft's anti-competitive practices around OOXML and I thank god that at least one government has the sense to do something more than stand by and watch like a dumb pole. I hope that one day, Indian policy makers will display the kind of spine that Neelie Kroes and others at EU have shown in taking on Microsoft.

Meanwhile, the eerie radio silence from the OOXML BRM at Geneva is unnerving. More than 120 people discussing such a critical issue and not a peep out of the blogosphere! Such a secretive way of creating globally important standards is a practice that stinks to high heavens!

OOXML BRM in Geneva

2008-02-25T11:29:00.000-08:00

By now, day 1 of the OOXML BRM in Geneva must have ended. The outcome is still not known, but whatever the outcome, ISO is going to be in for a lot of questions. How does a shoddy, half digested 6000 page long document (I am being *very* polite in my description) be eligible for a fast track review process. Does anyone believe that a complex standard like OOXML can be reviewed in six months? If that is the objective then why even review it in the first place? ISO's credibility has been permanently dented and, as my friends in the FSF points out, we need to make it clear that ISO standards are not open standards.

I have also been talking to a group of young technologists who are alarmed by what is happening in the standards world. We believe that it is time India took a more active (if not activist role) in creating international standards. This realization is spreading to neighboring countries also because policy makers I spoke to in Sri Lanka, Pakistan and other countries are also alarmed at the blatant manner in which OOXML is being pushed through. It may be time for emerging economies to come together and tame the beast of proprietary standards.

OSFI raises objections to ASSCOHAM's stance on OOXML

2008-02-09T01:16:00.000-08:00

The Open Source Foundation of India would like to place on record its objections to ASSCOHAM's stance on OOXML. Neither us nor the Open Document Format Alliance (www.odfalliance.in) nor the Free Software Foundation (www.fsf.org.in), which have been leading the fight for open standards were consulted before ASSOCHAM issued its press release. An industry body is expected to listen to all sides of a debate before arriving at a conclusion and we are disappointed that a respected body like ASSOCHAM, which has temendous credibility among policy makers has not followed this process.

We would like to ask ASSOCHAM if it:

A) Has a clear definition of an "open standard" and if it has evaluated OOXML to see if it passed the test. For the record, OOXML has been submitted a few months ago to ISO, so it is not even an international standard nor does it meet the criteria for an open standard. See www.odfalliance.in for more information.

B) Is ASSOCHAM aware that the European Union is examining whether Microsoft Corp. violated antitrust laws during a struggle last year to ratify its Office software file format as an international standard.

C) Is ASSOCHAM aware of the serious allegations of abuse of the ISO processes by the proponents of OOXML. For example, in Pakistan, the 12 member committee reviewing OOXML was stacked with four Microsoft Gold Partners and even the IT Ministry and Pakistan's IT leaders were not aware of the committee's participation at ISO?

It is clear that only a single interested party's opinion is being reflected through this press release. We would like to point out that ASSOCHAM's credibility as an industry organization will be seriously affected if it does not give due consideration to alternate points of view.

Venkatesh Hariharan
Co-Founder,
Open Source Foundation of India
www.osindia.blogspot.com

CNBC Panel Discussion on Open Source, Free & Proprietary Software

2008-02-01T23:21:00.000-08:00

Last week, Jon "maddog" Hall, Executive Director of Linux International; Atul Chitnis, Senior Vice President at Geodesic Information Systems and I were on a CNBC panel discussion on "Open Source, Free & Proprietary Softwares" at IIT Bombay's Techfest. I am used to 30-45 minute talks on open source where I happily ramble on with my pet theories on why open source is changing the world. I have also been on panel discussions where the panelists normally gets to make an opening statement before the moderators and the audience start shooting questions. However, TV is very, very different as I discovered last week.

To start with, the CNBC panel was shot in three segments of seven minutes each (a 30 minute show has around 9 minutes of ads telecast during breaks in the show) which meant that all three panelists could speak about 3-4 sentences in each of the seven minute segments. Oh well, hopefully, it will do some good to the world of open source. The audience seemed to be mostly teenagers, which I think is a good thing. If teenagers think something is sexy, it probably is :-)

I was trying to figure out what time the panel will be on TV and the politest thing I can say is that the CNBC TV Schedules suck. Later, I got to catch up with Jon Hall and treat him to coffee at the IIT restaurant. Despite the ferocious nickname, he is a gentle giant of a man and I felt honored to be on the same panel as Jon.

I am still clueless as to when the program will be telecast. If anybody knows, drop me a line :-)

WEF opens with a call for "collaborative innovation."

2008-01-27T00:26:00.000-08:00

I am reading Wikinomics so it was no surprise when I came across an online article that spoke about the World Economic Forum's call for "collaborative innovation."

One of the blurbs in the book is by Klaus Scwab, founder and executive chairman of the World Economic Forum, who says, "A deeply profound and hopeful book, Wikinomics provides compelling evidence that the emerging "Creative Commons" can be a boon, not a threat to business. Every CEO should read this book and heed its wise counsel if they want to succeed in an emerging global economy."

We live in exciting times. If we take my previous post on the Science Commons, and this post, we get the clear sense that policy makers at the highest levels are taking note of the phenomenon called free and open source software. Open standards, open source and open access are what make "collaborative innovation" possible and it is nice to see policy makers take a note of this.

Science Commons, Open Source Drug Discovery etc

2008-01-21T22:12:00.000-08:00

Last Friday, January 18th, 2008, we (Knowledge Commons, Delhi Science Forum, IIT Delhi, Red Hat and Sun) organized a workshop on science policy for a very select group of 20 policy makers. Participants included members of the Planning Commission, which drafts India's Five Year Plans; the National Knowledge Commission, a high-level advisory body that reports to the Prime Minister of India, the Chairman of the Board of Governors of IIT Delhi and some of the most respected scientists in the country. The objective was to look at the Free and Open Source model of knowledge creation and examine the impact it can have on India. The highlight of the event was the session on Open Source Drug Discovery, a $34 million program to fight diseases that are prevalent in India.

Prabir Purkayastha of the Delhi Science Forum and the brains behind the event, set the ball rolling by giving a brief overview of how the patent system evolved as a trade-off between the inventor and society, with society granting a temporary monopoly to the inventor in return for disclosure of the invention, which ensured that inventors did not take their creations to the grave. He pointed out that the era of the individual inventor is over and most innovations are now done by corporations.

Prabir also pointed out that the myth about patents leading to innovations was not always true and cited the example of James Watt's patent over the steam engine which lead to 30 years of stagnation. It was only after Watt's death that the efficiency of the steam engine improved. Even during this era, collective innovation flourished as can be seen from the invention of the blast furnace and the improvements in the steam engine within the Cornish mines.

He added that science is not purely for profit and the current scenario where patents are seen as a metric of innovation could lead to a situation where sharing is hindered. This could be dangerous in areas like medicine and agriculture. In this context, the Free and Open Source model had emerged as an important paradigm that generated advances that are outside the proprietary domain. Therefore, the question in front of the group was – Can we look at alternate ways of doing research and can these be harnessed for the public good?

Prof. VS Ramamurthy, Chairman of the Board of Governors, Indian institute of Technology, Delhi and one of the veterans of the Indian scientific establishment said that knowledge is important for socio-economic development and today, knowledge has become multi-disciplinary. When multi-disciplinary groups are involved, secrecy will only increase the cost of doing research.

In science, failures are as important as successes but the patenting system encouraged only the recognition of success and not the process by which a particular result was arrived at. He said that we need to look at knowledge management in totality and examine whether answers we have been given in the past are relevant anymore. He concluded by saying that the open source model has enormous relevance for countries like India which have limited resources but unlimited human resources.

Prof. Abhijit Sen, member of the Planning Commission and one of India's leading economists asked a succinct question, “Do patents deliver?”

Prof. Sen pointed out that patents create private property through exclusion, increase the cost of communication and therefore escalate the cost of the production process in science. In areas like climate change, which involved a whole range of technologies, the free flow of knowledge was extremely important.

“Property rights are not an unalloyed virtue if the externalities are very large. If patents do incentivize, do they do so in the right manner?” he asked. Prof. Sen pointed out that two of the world's poorest countries, India and China, are now becoming more important globally and for those managing money, it becomes important to invest in these countries. Therefore, these countries should reexamine patents in light of the new realities of the commons and growing economic clout.

Dr. Samir Bramhachari, Director-General of the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR), unveiled a $34 million plan for Open Source Drug Discovery. CSIR is one of the world’s largest publicly funded R&D organisations 38 laboratories working on a range of subjects from molecular biology to road research to Himalayan bio-resources. The Council has more than 4,000 scientists working for it at these 38 labs.

Dr. Bramhachari noted that there was very little R&D money being spent by MNCs on the typical diseases that afflict Indians because of the relatively low purchasing power in our country. At the same time, MNCs are aggressively scanning Indian academia for research being done by Indian students and adding this knowledge to their database. He also pointed out that collaborative R&D networks like Innocentive had a lot of Indians contributing to it. Therefore, he had proposed to the Indian government the creation of an Open Source Drug Discovery framework which will harness the collective minds of Indian scientists. The OSDD project will kick off by focussing initially on the Tuberculosis bacilli and the web site will be launched once CSIR finalizes the legalities of a “Pharma GPL” share-and-share-alike license.

This workshop demonstrated that there is remarkable understanding of the potential of open source within the highest echelons of the Indian policy making elite. Prof. Ramamurthy summed it up best when he said that in the government system, change is always a very slow process. However, open source is inevitable and will be the norm 10 years from now. What we can do best is to accelerate the change in favor of open source.

Videos and transcripts of this event will be uploaded soon. Thanks to Red Hat India supporting the event and covering the cost of the videos.

Photos of OLPC deployment in Khairat, India

2008-01-02T07:39:00.000-08:00

As 2007 was drawing to a close, I got a chance to visit the OLPC deployment in Khairat, India. This deployment is supported by Reliance, one of the largest industrial groups in India. I have uploaded photos from the visit and added a small description to each photo. These are at:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/venky7/sets/72157603606772250/

It was wonderful to see the enthusiasm with which the teacher, students and parents had embraced this project. Definitely one of the more fun things that I did in 2007 and something that I look forward to in 2008. Do visit the Flickr page and add your comments, feedback, brickbats etc...

Today's Economic Times poll on Free Software (Please Vote)

2007-12-18T00:23:00.000-08:00

Today's Economic Times has an online poll that asks, "Should India support free software to take PC penetration to the next level?"

Please login to www.economictimes.com and scroll down to the voting section on the right hand side of the web page and vote "Yes."

This vote will be on only today, so please vote at the earliest.

Open Source is Democratizing Knowledge

2007-12-17T02:45:00.000-08:00

In September 1991, when Linux Torvalds, a student at the University of Helsinki in Finland, released 10,000 lines of code on the Internet, nobody could have believed that it would spark off a revolution. In the fifteen years since then, Linux has grown into an enormously capable operating system that contains more than 100 million lines of code that runs on tiny embedded computers to supercomputers and everything in-between. This has been made possible through the contribution of thousands of volunteers across the world working together over the Internet, in what is perhaps the largest collaborative projects in the history of mankind.

Linux is the leading example of the open source movement that is democratizing knowledge and the tools with which we access knowledge. The open source principles of community, collaboration and the shared ownership of knowledge have lead to a transformation in the way knowledge is created and distributed. This has profound implications for India and other developing countries.

Linux was released under the General Public License created by the Free Software Foundation which gives users four freedoms: The freedom to run the program, for any purpose; the freedom to study how the program works, and adapt it to your needs, the freedom to redistribute copies and share it with others and the freedom to improve the program, and release your improvements to the public, so that the whole community benefits. A precondition to these four freedoms is that the source code for the software is freely available.

For millions of software developers across the world, this access to source code and the ability to improve it to meet their needs has been enormously empowering. In the area of supercomputing, scientists have coupled together commodity hardware and open source software to build complex systems that have drastically reduced the cost per teraflop for supercomputers. For millions of users across the world, the ability to freely copy the operating system has meant that they can try it out on their computers for free and pay for value added services like support, customization and training, as and when they are ready. Across the world, governments like China, Brazil, Venezuela and others have been embracing open source because it reduces their dependence on monopolistic vendors and their monopoly pricing structures and restrictive licensing practices. In India, Kerala, West Bengal and Tamil Nadu have declared their intention to use open source software to make IT more widely accessible to their citizens.

Enterprises across India have also been quick to realise the benefits of open source despite the enourmous amounts of FUD (fear, uncertainity and doubt) that proprietary vendors have sought to create. Today, enterprises like LIC, IDBI, IRCTC, IndiaBulls, UTI Bank, Canara Bank, CESC and others use Red Hat Enterprise Linux and other open source software to run their mission critical applications. The SMS voting backbone for highly popular TV shows like Kaun Banega Crorepati and Indian Idol also run on Red Hat Enteprise Linux.

Linux is now well established as a reliable, stable and secure operating system on servers. According to IDC, Linux server sales grew from 4.3 billion in 2004 to 5.3 billion in 2005 as customers deployed it in a wider range of technical and commercial workloads. Over the last few years, Linux has also emerged as a capable desktop operating system with slick desktop user interfaces and an excellent, free office productivity suite in Open Office. Those who have used the Linux desktop have been pleasantly surprised by its capabilities. The Kerala government has decided to move around 12,500 schools to Linux after finding proprietary software to be unaffordable.

It is no surprise that Linux and open source software have caught on rapidly in India. Our traditions of knowledge like yoga and ayurveda have always been free and open to all. We have successfuly built commercial models on top of free knowledge as can be seen from the proliferation of Ayurvedic spas and the fact that yoga is a $30 billion industry in the US. Open source proves that the age old adage that we all grow richer by sharing knowledge still holds true in the Internet era. For decision makers who are implementing IT, it is time to take a long hard look at the long term benefits of open source and evaluate the value it provides on servers and desktops.

Tata supercomputer ranks fourth, runs Linux

2007-11-28T23:19:00.000-08:00

I came back from a nice long (and completely unplugged) break trekking around North East India (shameless plug: Check out my photos at http://www.flickr.com/photos/venky7/). Among the many e-mails that were accumulated in my inbox, the one that made me happiest was the news that India has finally broken into the TOP500 Supercomputer List. The icing on the cake is that it runs Linux!

This feat was achieved by the Pune-based Computational Research Laboratories, incorporated as a fully-owned subsidiary of Tata Sons with a mandate to achieve global leadership in the area of high-performance computing systems.

This is wonderful news for the open source community and the Indian IT fraternity!

Suggestions for the National Policy on ICT in Education

2007-10-25T06:41:00.000-07:00

My friends at Digital Learning magazine are coordinating inputs for the "National Policy on ICT in Education" to be sent to the Indian Ministry of Human resources Development (MHRD). Today was their deadline and here is what I have sent them.

Suggested Policy Objectives for the "National Policy on ICT in Education."

ComputeRs have emerged as the Fourth R of education, after Reading, wRiting and aRithmetic. If our future generations have to be a part of the global mainstream society, and build upon India's great success in IT and IT enabled services, we have to equip them to be IT literate. Since IT is becoming an all-pervasive aspect of our lives—from booking train tickets to receiving exam results to managing retail cash counters, IT education will help our students become a member of the global information society. This will also help the country by helping us consolidate our leadership position within the global IT and ITES industry and maintain our lead over competing economies.

We therefore suggest that ICT should be considered an integral part of the educational system and that the government must invest in making all students who are a part of the Indian education system IT literate.

Suggested Guidelines for the "National Policy on ICT in Education."

The challenges in ensuring that all Indian are IT literate are formidable. According to the Ministry of Human Resources Development website, India has 888,000 educational institutions, 179 million students and more than 2.9 million teachers. In many villages and cities across India, millions of children have no access to basic educational facilities. And even as the Indian school system grapples with basic challenges such as the lack of elementary facilities like blackboards, along comes yet another challenge—How do we ensure that the next generation are not just literate but also digitally literate? Open Content and Open Source Software can be freely modified, improved upon and redistributed without paying any royalties or license fees to anyone. A venerable academic institution like MIT is using the open source Creative Commons license to share its knowledge with others at its Open Course Ware (www.ocw.mit.edu) site. MIT's web site says:

“MIT is committed to advancing education and discovery through knowledge open to everyone. OCW shares free lecture notes, exams, and other resources from more than 1700 courses spanning MIT's entire curriculum.”

The Indian state of Kerala has adopted open source software to make its students IT literate for the freedom it provides in terms of modifying the source code and making improvements and its cost effectiveness. Governments across the world are now using open source software to modernize their education systems. In India, it has been found that the education system indirectly discourages open source software because the syllabus sometimes mandates the use of proprietary software. In light of the benefits of open source software, we recommend the following guidelines:

1.The syllabus/curriculum should emphasize principles and not products. In other words, it should teach wordprocessing, spreadsheets etc and not a specific brand of software. Endorsing a specific brand is illegal under the Monopolies and Restrictive Trade Practices Act. Also, products may get outdated while principles are eternal. It is therefore in the interests of teachers, students and the education system to rectify this issue at the earliest.
2.Wherever possible, the education system must use open source software. If proprietary software has to be purchased, there has to be adequate justification for such usage of tax payer's money. A wealth of educational software is available freely from web sites like Eduforge (www.eduforge.org) SchoolForge (www.schoolforge.net) and Gcompris (www.gcompris.net) which offer Open Source educational software in for courseware management, school administration and for teaching children in disciplines like mathematics, music, astronomy, languages etc that can be freely downloaded and used by educators. Since the source code is available for modification, educators can customize these software programs to Indian conditions, localize it to Indian languages and make it more appropriate for their students. Open Office (www.openoffice.org) offers students and teachers a high quality office productivity suite which has rapidly become the second most popular office suite.
3.Software developed with taxpayers money should be placed under a suitable open source license. This will allow the larger education community to build on top of existing software rather than reinvent the wheel every time.
4.Content developed by the government using taxpayers money should be placed under a suitable open source license. Licenses like the Creative Commons licenses (www.creativecommons.org) offer alternatives to the restrictive “All Rights Reserved” copyright licenses by offering flexible licensing schemes for authors of content.

These guidelines, if implemented strictly, can save the Indian education system thousands of crores of rupees over the next decade.

Suggested Practices for the "National Policy on ICT in Education."

The Open Source philosophy is catching on in the world of content. For example, Wikipedia (www.wikipedia.org) has rapidly emerged as one of the largest online dictionaries in the world. In a short span of five years, Wikipedia has attracted five million entries from across the world in several languages and is a fantastic educational resource that we should localize to Indian languages. Because it is released under the open source, “Creative Commons” copyright, Indian educators have the freedom to translate Wikipedia into Indian languages and share it with their students.

The Open Source philosophy has proved to be so popular that other disciplines are embracing the tenets of community, collaboration and shared ownership of intellectual resources with powerful results.

Other web sites like Planet Math (www.planetmath.org)aim at creating communities of educators focused on a specific domain to make knowledge more accessible.

Many educational institutions themselves are now coming together to leverage the economic benefits of participating in Open Source development. For instance, leading universities like the University of Michigan, Indiana University, MIT and Stanford are investing up to $1 million in staff time to develop producing open source Collaboration and Learning Environment (CLE) software. Even universities that are not members of the Sakai Project can download the software and interest in the Sakai Educational Partner Program (SEPP) is growing at the rate of 1-2 universities per week.

Thus it is clear that whether it is for creating educational content, managing coursework and learning, teaching a specific discipline or administration of an educational institution, the open source model offers tremendous benefits as a model for the creation and dissemination of knowledge. In a country where 888,000 educational institutions need to be modernized and more than 179 million students educated, the community ownership model of open source can help the country save billions of dollars that would be spent on proprietary operating systems, software and content. Since anything developed under an open source model can be shared freely, it can help in the rapid dissemination of educational materials to India's vast population of students.

From a long-term perspective, it is important that the creation and dissemination of knowledge should be a collaborative, community driven process rather than one that is monopolized by a few individuals or companies. In the Indian, intellectual tradition, knowledge has always been considered as a common good treated as a community resource rather than private property that can be monopolized and enjoyed by a few. The need of the hour is therefore a close collaboration between educationists and technologists. The open source model provides a framework that can lead to an open source renaissance for Indian education.

We therefore recommend that India should adopt the best practices of the open source community for creating educational content and software. We further recommend that a working committee consisting of eminent academics, industry and the open source community be formed to guide this process.

Suggested knowledge tools for the "National Policy on ICT in Education."

The Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) philosophy and its accompanying licenses can be powerful tools in the dissemination of knowledge.

For more on Open Source licenses, see www.opensource.org

For more on the Free Software philosophy, see www.fsf.org

A FOSS Foundation for India

2007-10-20T06:18:00.000-07:00

Over the last few years, most of us in the community have often discussed setting up a foundation for Free and Open Source Software in India to work on policy, advocacy, promotion and development of FOSS and open standards. I think the time is now ripe to bring industry, government, academia, and the community to gether to create a FOSS consortium. Some initial thoughts on the charter of the foundation and organization structure are given below. I'd love to hear from the community what they think of this.

Charter of the FOSS Foundation

1)Formulate strategies on how India can benefit from deploying FOSS and
implement/monitor implementation of the same.
2)Monitor latest developments in FOSS technologies and ensure global
leadership in key strategic areas like supercomputing, security,
localization, affordable computing, GIS, embedded computing etc.
3)Research and quantify the benefits of using FOSS for India.
4)Work with government, industry, academia and the open source/free
software community to popularize FOSS in India.
5)Leverage FOSS to bridge the digital divide in India through affordable
computing and localization to all the major Indian languages.
6)Encourage research and analysis of FOSS in India through academic
research, market research, white papers, case studies etc.
7)Study the legal implications of free and open source licenses in the context of global patenting and copyright laws and recommending strategies beneficial to India.

Organization Structure

The Org Structure flows from the charter and therefore, dear blog readers, your comments on the above are of paramount importance. There are several org structures that we can consider:

1) W3C, which is one of the widest industry consortia with over 400 members. It also has an inclusive process which allows the public to participate in its debates and discussions.

2) The Linux Foundation

In brief, LF's structure is that each Platinum member can elect a director, subject to an upper limit of ten, Gold members can elect three directors from amongst themselves and Silver members can elect one director. From their web site, I could not figure out what mechanism they have for community participation.

3) NASSCOM

NASSCOM is the most successful industry organization in India. As its web site says, "In 1988, NASSCOM had 38 members, who together contributed close to 65 percent of the revenue of the software industry. Since then, membership of NASSCOM has grown multifold to reach over 1100 members."

We look forward to your inputs on how to create an open, participatory organization that keeps growing along with the FOSS community. Do send me your comments by the end of next week (26th October 2007).

Media replies on the OOXML issue

2007-10-17T22:53:00.000-07:00

These are some questions that a media person sent me on the OOXML issue.

Venky
=====

> Q1. Do you look at this development as a decisive turn of events against
> Microsoft in the fight between the open source and proprietary software
> camps?

The fact that OOXML was defeated in India indicates that Indian policymakers are well aware of the importance of open standards and one must give them due credit for this. The open source and free software communities believe that public data should be in public formats. The government is the custodian of citizens data and has an obligation to ensure that this data is not tied to one particular application. Take the case of land records, which need to be preserved for 400 years or more. If land records are stored in a proprietary format, there is no guarantee that it can be retrieved a few hundred years later because the only one who can unlock the file is the organization that created the format.

The only way to assure that data can be stored and retrieved freely is to use published standards that have been built through collaboration and consensus and have multiple third party implementations. The Internet is one of the finest examples of true open standards because anybody can create web browsers and e-mail clients by following the standards published by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).

Open standards are important to humanity because it enables us to share knowledge freely. Both, open source and open standards are inclusive movements and therefore the rejection of OOXML is a great victory for those who campaign for the users freedom to encode and decode their data.

>
> Q2. How important would be the outcome of the final judgement on
> government spending on business software?

Open standards are not just important, they are fundamental to efficient e-governance. Using proprietary standards is akin to handing the keys to the treasury to a third party and is a very unwise step when it comes to citizens data.

> Q3 What are the loose ends Microsoft will have to fix in order to win the
> trust of voting members?

The Bureau of Indian Standards has submitted a list of issues with OOXML that has been submitted to ISO.

>
> Q4 Can you share on some of the concerns raised by the voting members
> regarding OOXML? How relevant are these according to you?

1) Taking the legacy Office file format and XMLising it does not make it an open standard. Third parties should be able to freely implement an open standard without recourse to the author of the document. At 6000 pages OOXML is too long and too opaque to be implemented by third parties. Most of those who claim to have implemented OOXML are parties which have private treaties with Microsoft.

2) There is an existing open standard for documents called Open Document Format (ODF). Creating multiple standards for the same purpose only leads to confusion. For example, in 1995, both Netscape and Microsoft came up with their own extensions to HTML. This lead to a profusion of websites proclaiming "Optimised for Netscape" or "Optimised for Internet Explorer."

The purpose of standards is to unify and not to divide and the best standards like ASCII, Unicode, HTML etc are ones that are created through consensus and collaboration. We have all gained enormously from unified standards for data exchange and the web. Let us ask the industry to collaborate and come up with a consensus unified standard for document exchange. Vendors should collaborate on standards and compete on their implementation. This is the best outcome for industry and consumers.

3) After more than 26 years of pushing proprietary formats, Microsoft is now arguing that it is OK to have multiple standards. Multiple standards for the same task lead to increasing the cost of compliance, testing and implementation for everyone. For developers, it increases the time taken to release an application, which drives up cost. For users it increases the possibility of errors and miscommunication.

For example, the recent delay in the launch of the Airbus A 380 (which will cost the organization €2 billion, or $2.5 billion over four years) has been attributed to the fact that the Airbus fuselage sent from Hamburg, Germany was received at Toulose, France, the workers found that the 300+ kms of wiring could not be connected properly. (See http://www.iht.com/articles/2006/06/26/business/airbus.php). Boeing itself has attributed it to "incompatibilities in the development of the concurrent engineering tools to be used for the design of the electrical harnesses installation." Anecdotal evidence indicates that both these organizations were using different measurement systems derived from the country of their origin. In a globalizing world having common standards helps everyone. International travelers who carry multiple power adapters for their notebooks know this logic well.

In e-governance, let us take a simple case. The revenue department uses data from the land records data base. Unfortunately, this is in a different format and therefore the the revenue department has problem decoding land records data. In such a case, who is responsible for the correct decoding of the land records? As mentioned earlier, the purpose of standards is to eliminate such friction and therefore, BIS should recommend that vendors should work together on unified standards.

The two attached docs will give more info on the subject. My blog at www.osindia.blogspot.com also has ore info. Specially these articles:

http://osindia.blogspot.com/2007/08/policy-challenges-for-open-standards.html
http://osindia.blogspot.com/2007/01/importance-of-open-standards.html

4) There are also serious objections to Microsoft's efforts at "Ballot Box Engineering" which are documented at my blog on www.osindia.blogspot.com

Venkatesh Hariharan
Co-founder
Open Source Foundation of India

FOSS.in makes the right call

2007-10-10T09:50:00.000-07:00

Those of you who follow FOSS.in would have noticed that this year, the conference has done a reboot on its call for papers. The web page now says,

This note is going to catch many people by surprise:

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.

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.

A couple of years ago, when I saw in Sri Lanka, Sanjiva Weerawarna told me that the island nation has 25 committers to Apache! If Sri Lanka can contribute so much to open source, so can we. Kudos to Atul Chitnis and the FOSS.in team for taking a bold call. I like it because it reminds me so much of one of my favorite sayings, "Hands that help are holier than lips that pray."

While we are on FOSS.in, as a former journalist, I also admire the well written content on the FOSS.in web site.

Policy recommendations on Open Source for India

2007-10-01T06:55:00.000-07:00

These are some policy recommendations on Open Source for India. I look forward to your comments on these recommendations. This will be ciculated to e-government policy makers next week.

===============================================================================================

We, the members of the open source software (OSS) community in India, recommend that the Government of India should promote OSS in order to encourage competition and choice, make IT more affordable and bring the benefits of IT to the people of India.

We recommend that the Department of IT, Government of India adopt the following steps which will go a long way in promoting OSS in India.

1)Applications developed by the Government of India should be cross platform and not be locked in to a specific platform. Building cross-platform applications encourages choice and provides implementing agencies the freedom to select the platforms that suit them the best. Since applications have a long shelf-life, building cross-platform applications isolates the application from technological changes in the underlying platform.

2)Mandate that all documents and data created by government organizations follow open standards that are free from royalties, patents and other encumbrances.

3)Encourage the development and usage of Linux and open source desktop productivity applications in government. This move can reduce dependence on expensive proprietary software, encourage choice, promote healthy competition and save the country enormous amounts of foreign exchange. In areas like office productivity applications etc where open source tools match the functionality of proprietary software products, adequate justification must be provided for purchasing proprietary software.

4)Mandate that, by default, software development funded by the government should be available to the public under an open source license. This ensures that the code is available to government agencies for improvements and further enhancements. Since the code is available freely, this also provides an avenue for inputs and feedback from concerned citizens.

5)Create a central repository of open source e-government applications. This move can save India thousands of crores of rupees by facilitating reuse of applications, sharing of best practices, slashing implementation time and reducing risks of project failure. This can be on the lines of the Government Open Code Collaborative Repository (www.gocc.gov) established in the US as a, “collaboration between public sector entities and non-profit academic institutions created for the purpose of encouraging the sharing, at no cost, of computer code developed for and by government entities where the redistribution of this code is allowed.”

6) Create a collaborative community for open source in education. Enormous resources are needed for modernizing and IT-enabling the education system. An open source program for education can create a nationwide community of educators for creating software and content that can be freely shared across the system. This will help rapidly disseminate the latest educational pedagogy, software tools, content and best practices within the system. This can be organized around disciplines like mathematics, physics, chemistry etc. and involve the Indian academic community and software developers.

7) Encourage the use of the open source model which is based on collaboration, community and shared ownership of intellectual resources in scientific disciplines like agriculture, biotechnology, health care research, etc. so that the benefits of such research can reach the public faster.

8) Set up a high-powered think tank consisting of top-notch policy makers, academics and politicians under the auspices of a powerful policy making institution to provide leadership and direction on open source on a continuous basis.

The agenda for such an organization would be:

A)Identify and quantify the political, cultural and economic benefits for India as a result of open source. This would not just be restricted to software but also to issues like IP, content, scientific publishing etc. In other words, the focus of this body would be on how India can take full-advantage of the open source movement to benefit Indian society.1

B)Develop an action plan aimed at making India a global leader in the open source community. For example, India could take the lead in developing and customizing open source applications for developing countries or identify areas where it can make visible contributions to the global open source community. For example, Sri Lanka has made significant contributions to the Apache web server through the Lanka Software Foundation.

C)Leverage the open source development model based on community, collaboration and shared ownership of intellectual resources to bridge the digital divide. This forms part of point A, but is a large enough area to deserve special attention. For example, Indian language software development and localization of open source tools can be identified as a priority sector for funding. This will take IT beyond the five percent of India that speaks English and provide cost-effective software solutions to Indian users, thus bridging the digital divide. another area could be the development of applications and content that meets India's unique needs.

D)Create a road-map for open source software development for India's software export industry. In the long-term, software will be sold as a service. Open Source Software is accelerating this trend which plays to the advantage of India's vibrant software services industry.

Prof. Ashok Jhunjhunwala on OOXML

2007-09-15T00:53:00.001-07:00

Yesterday, there was an interview of Prof. Ashok Jhunjhunwala in the Times of India where he supported OOXML. He also repeated Microsoft's statement that users want a choice of multiple formats. Prof. Jhunjhunwala is a very respected academician and prima-facie, the Microsoft line seems to make eminent sense. After all, who can argue about choice? (BTW, since when has Microsoft been about choice?) Let's scratch a little deeper by asking a few questions about choice:

1) When you wake up in the morning and choose which side of the road you drive on? I certainly don't?

2) Did you like the choice of Microsoft's HTML versus Netscape's HTML? Both companies created their own proprietary extensions to HTML that threatened to fragment the Internet. Even today, there are web sites that say "optimized to XYZ browser" and to me that is a sign of bad software design. Ironically, the Bureau of Indian Standards web site says, "Best viewed in MSIE 4.0 and above browsers." If you are developing or redesigning a web site, it would be much better to make your web site compliant to the World Wide Web (W3C) standards (called recommendations in W3C parlance). I am much happier having one single, unified web standard because it makes my life easier.

I therefore urge academics, policy makers and others to push for common, unified document standards, not a multiplicity of standards. The industry and vendors should collaborate on standards and compete on their implementation.

PS: There was one important question that the Times of India journalist missed asking Microsoft. I would have loved to know what the venerable professor thinks of Microsoft's attempts at Ballot Box Engineering on the OOXML issue.

Software Freedom Day

2007-09-15T00:51:00.000-07:00

Today is Software Freedom Day. According to Wikipedia:

"Software Freedom Day (SFD) is an annual worldwide celebration of the free/open-source software. SFD is a public education effort, not only to celebrate the virtues of free and open source software, but also to encourage its use, to the benefit of the public."

We don't usually link the two words "Software" and "freedom" together. After all, what does the high tech world of software have to do with freedom? However, freedom is basic to any human activity and software is no exception.

For example, the open standards movement is about your freedom to encode (create) and decode (retrieve) your own data. If you store data in proprietary formats, only the maker of that format knows how to unlock that data and you are now dependent on that vendor. This is like buying house but the keys to the house still remain with the builder. Why take the risk? Actively use open formats like ODF and OGG and avoid using proprietary formats like .doc and .mpeg which are proprietary formats.

The open source and free software movement is about your freedom to modify code and share it with others. It is for this reason that Linux can scale from tiny embedded systems to mighty supercomputers. Wikipedia is about your freedom to share knowledge and information with each other.

Over the next few years this movement will go from strength to strength because the open source and free software communities have shown that we can grow richer by sharing!

Microsoft Certified Ballot Box Engineering in Pakistan?

2007-09-13T22:43:00.000-07:00

After some digging around, I found out that there was indeed a committee that met and voted yes for OOXML in Pakistan. It looks like the committee met just once. There was a presentation on OOXML by a Microsoft person to the committee members. From what I hear, no views from the opponents of OOXML were presented. I had e-mailed the directors of Pakistan Standards and Quality Control Authority (PSQCA) and to the Pakistani Minister of Science and Technology, Ch. Nouraiz Shakoor Khan saying that we would like the open source community's views to be presented before a final vote was taken but received no replies. After listening to the Microsoft person, the committee voted in favor of OOXML. Now here is the interesting bit: Out of the 12 committee members, four are Microsoft Gold Partners, one was a Microsoft representative and the rest were academics. After the invalidated vote in Sweden, I am not surprised that so many Microsoft Gold Partners were on this committee. I tried to check whether the open source community's views were taken into consideration before the voting but currently I do not have information on this.

PS: I hear that Microsoft is planning to now offer MCBBE (Microsoft Certified Ballot Box Engineer) course along with its other course. I hear that several Indian political worthies who have specialized in booth capturing are lining up to take this course and upgrade their professional skills!

BusinessWorld on ODF versus OOXML

2007-09-07T04:57:00.000-07:00

BusinessWorld magazine has an article on the recent standards battle at the Bureau of Indian Standards over Microsoft OOXML proposal. As you know, the OOXML proposal was rejected unanimously by the LITD15 committee formed by BIS to review OOXML. The ODF Alliance which includes FSF, Red Hat, IBM and Sun worked hard to ensure that OOXML was not approved. The reasons for this can be read at www.noooxml.org

BusinessWorld is now running a vote on its web site asking readers:

"Which documentation standard do you want to vote for?" The link for this article and the vote (see right hand top corner of the page) is:

http://www.businessworld.in/content/view/2458/2536

I request all FOSS supporters to vote for ODF. Next Monday's issue of BW also has an article on this subject and I am looking forward to it.

Now, M$, please stop smoking it!

2007-09-05T07:46:00.000-07:00

Despite all the ballot box stuffing, Microsoft's OOXML proposal was defeated at ISO. What does the company that calls darkness as light have to say? It has the arrogance to release a press release titled, "Strong Global Support for Open XML as it Enters Final Phase of ISO Standards Process." The press release quotes Robertson, general manager for Interoperability and Standards at Microsoft Corp as saying:

"Technical experts around the world have provided invaluable feedback and technical recommendations for evolving the format," Robertson said. "The high quality of the Open XML format will be improved as a result of this process, and we take seriously our role in working within the Ecma technical committee to address the comments received.

Excuse me Tom, but India voted unanimously against OOXML. In case that did not register, let me repeat: India voted unanimously against OOXML. Despite all the explanations given by Microsoft, the Bureau of Indian Standards committee formed to examine OOXML marked each of the 200 issues as unresolved. Now, do you still use the words high-quality and OOXML in the same breath?

What this company deperately needs is a moral compass!

Memo to Microsoft: Stop wasting our time!

2007-08-30T10:13:00.000-07:00

Finally word is out and the Bureau of Indian Standards has confirmed that it will be submitting a "No with comments" vote to International Standards Organization on Microsoft's OOXML proposal. This brings to a temporary close five to six months of hectic legwork to prevent a sub-standard proposal from getting the coveted tag of an ISO standard.

I doubt if Microsoft realises it, but its actions are only making it the Union Carbide of the global IT industry. Microsoft is the world's largest software company but if you flip through their 6000+ pages of OOXML documentation, you'll be justified in wondering how they grew so big if the rest of their work is as shoddy as OOXML. The extremely flawed proposal certainly does not befit its stature in the IT industry. But, does Microsoft learn from all the feedback given to it or does it learn anything from it. No. Humility and Microsoft are like oil and water--never shall they mix. According to reports coming in from countries that are involved in the ISO vote on OOXML, Microsoft is busy stuffing the ballot boxes. Read Andy Updegrove's blog post The OOXML Vote: How Bad Can it Get? (Keep Counting). Originally, only 30 ISO members were supposed to vote on OOXML. However, as the September 2nd date for the final voting comes close, another ten more countries have joined the committee. Updegrove says:

As someone who has spent a great part of my life working to support open standards over the past 20 years, I have to say that this is the most egregious, and far-reaching, example of playing the system to the advantage of a single company that I have ever seen. Breathtaking, in fact. That's assuming, of course, that I am right in supposing that all of these newbie countries vote "yes."

I guess we'll just have to wait and see a few more days to learn whether that assumption is true. Want to place your bets?

Sitting here in India, it is difficult to influence countries like Malta, Cyprus, Ecuador, Jamaica, Lebanon, Pakistan, Trinidad and Tobago, Turkey, Uruguay and Venezuela in the two days left before the final votes are submitted, but we shall try. I checked with the IT ministry in Pakistan and brought to their attention that Pakistan is now a "P" member of ISO which entitles it to vote on OOXML. This was news to them as they were not consulted on the OOXML issue. I hope that Pakistan's vote will be cast only after thoroughly reviewing the arguements for and against OOXML.

Coming back to India, I am extremely proud of the fact that my country has voted against this proposal. To accept such a poor document would have been to denigrate the very meaning of "standards." The academia, the government bodies, industry organizations and non-profits like the Free Software Foundation spent countless hours debating and discussing this issue. Some of the best brains in India burnt the midnight oli to review this 6000 page proposal and the final consensus was that none of Microsoft's answers to the 201 technical issues raised was found satisfactory. I hope the Microsoft bosses in Redmond take note of this and make a genuine attempt to rectify the issues instead of trying to stuff the ballot boxes.

For wasting the collective intellect of India's best IT brains, Microsoft and ECMA must be blacklisted. Just as a person with a bad credit history has to redeem himself or herself before applying for subsequent credit, any standards proposal submitted by these two organizations should be thoughly vetted before it is even accepted for review or voting in India. India has more pressing problems to tackle than OOXML. Therefore, Microsoft, please do us a big favor and stop wasting our time. Next time, do your homework before you submit something to India.

PS: This is an old joke in the IT industry and shows how little Microsoft has changed in decades.

Q. How many Microsoft engineers does it take to change a light bulb?

A. None. Microsoft declares Darkness(TM) an industry standard.

Policy challenges for “Open Standards”

2007-08-26T04:35:00.001-07:00

India's Department of Information Technology has taken a great first step by mandating open standards. Now it must take the next step and come up with a clear definition of open standards to protect national data

During India's independence movement, Mahatma Gandhi said, “Real swaraj will come not by the acquisition of authority by a few but by the acquisition of capacity by all.” Several decades later, Gandhiji's statement rings true in the context of the Open Standards movement which seeks to protect users' freedom to access their data.

One of the unintended consequences of the digital revolution is that users have often found their data locked up in proprietary file formats. As a result, users own the data they have created, but have no control over the format in which they are created. This is akin to a situation where a builder transfers the ownership of the house but retains control over the keys to the house. Software vendors have often exploited this situation by changing file formats from one version to another and thus forcing users to keep upgrading their software. Clearly this is an untenable situation and this is why India's Department of IT (DIT) has wisely chosen to mandate the use of open standards for data storage.

DIT's move needs to be applauded because it addresses serious political and economic issues that concern India's long-term security in the world of IT. The Government is the custodian of the citizens data and it therefore has the responsibility of ensuring that this data is accessible for centuries and is not locked down in proprietary file formats that are known only to the creator of the software. As a sovereign country, we cannot allow data that belongs to the people of India to be controlled by individuals or corporations.

It is a fact that the life of the data is often much longer than the life of the software which creates it. Twenty years ago Unix ruled, today it is Windows, tomorrow it may be Linux and day after it may be a software that has not even been imagined today. If data is tied to software platforms, we will need to recreate the data every time the software changes. This is neither practical nor desirable. For example, land records last for over four hundred years. If we take the average lifespan of a software platform as twenty years, this means that the data locked in proprietary file formats will have to be ported or recreated twenty times for it to be available to future users. The only practical solution therefore is to clinically separate the data from the software that created it. This what the open standards movement seek to achieve by giving users the freedom to encode and decode their own data.

Unfortunately, DIT's mandate has also resulted in several spurious proposals that claim to be “open standards.” Just as we need to be vigilant against adulterated medicines, we need to be vigilant against proprietary standards masquerading as “open standards.” The increasing move to open standards in India and abroad has forced some of the most adamant companies to now seek the coveted status of “open standards.” For example, the maker of a popular word processor that has supported only closed formats since 1983 is now demonstrating indecent haste by seeking to “fast-track” their proposal through international standards bodies. They are seeking to undermine the very sanctity of the term “open standards” by seeking to rush through craftily worded standards and hastily drafted proposal through standards bodies. E-government institutions across the country, and DIT in particular, must avoid being deceived by such wolves in sheep's clothing.

To avoid such situations, the Open Source Initiative has published the Open Standards Requirement (OSR). By implementing standards that follow the OSR, organizations can ensure that they retain full control over their data and avoid paying extortionate royalties and license fees for accessing their own data. The Open Standards Requirements are:

1.No Intentional Secrets: The standard MUST NOT withhold any detail necessary for interoperable implementation. As flaws are inevitable, the standard MUST define a process for fixing flaws identified during implementation and interoperability testing and to incorporate said changes into a revised version or superseding version of the standard to be released under terms that do not violate the OSR.

2.Availability: The standard MUST be freely and publicly available (e.g., from a stable web site) under royalty-free terms at reasonable and non-discriminatory cost.

3.Patents: All patents essential to implementation of the standard MUST be licensed under royalty-free terms for unrestricted use, or be covered by a promise of non-assertion when practiced by open source software

4.No Agreements: There MUST NOT be any requirement for execution of a license agreement, NDA, grant, click-through, or any other form of paperwork to deploy conforming implementations of the standard.

5.No OSR-Incompatible Dependencies: Implementation of the standard MUST NOT require any other technology that fails to meet the criteria of this Requirement.

The purpose of Open Standards is to include and not exclude. As we have seen from the growth of the Internet, open standards bring tremendous benefits with them. Today the Internet has more than a billion people who use it as a platform to socialize, communicate and transact. The common, unified standards like HTML has enabled the Internet to grow rapidly. Since the specifications for HTML are freely available, anyone can create tools that create (encode) HTML and tools that read (decode) HTML. Software developers, web site designers, Internet portals, social networking sites, bloggers, photo sharing sites and many others use HTML as a global means of reaching out to others. This would have not been possible with proprietary standards because that would mean that the data is accessible only through a specific software to the exclusion of other software.

For example, in 1995, both Netscape and Microsoft came up with their own extensions to HTML. This lead to a profusion of websites proclaiming "Optimised for Netscape" or "Optimised for Internet Explorer." Both these companies came up with proprietary extensions to HTML which could be viewed only with their own browsers and this development threatened to fragment the Internet. Fortunately, pressure from the World Wide Web Consortium and users forced both companies to back down and adhere to common standards. Unfortunately, bad habits die hard and we still see organizations optimizing their systems for one particular browser instead of following open standards that can be accessible through any browser.

We have all gained enormously from unified standards for data exchange and the Internet. The best standards like ASCII, Unicode, HTML etc are ones that are created through consensus and collaboration. This promotes choice, encourages competition and brings down cost for end users as companies come up with the best implementation of the standard.

As custodian of citizens' data, the Indian Government must come up with a clear definition of open standards that protects Indian citizens and enshrines their right to encode and decode data. The Open Source Initiative's Open Standards Requirement (OSR) is a good first step for arriving at such a definition. Such a definition will ensure real swaraj by ensuring “the acquisition of capacity by all” and not the “acquisition of authority by a few.”

Venkatesh Hariharan is a member of the Open Source Foundation of India. He can be reached at venkyh [at] gmail dot com.
This work is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution License and freedom is granted to reproduce this article provided this notice is retained intact.

Media coverage of OOXML issue

2007-08-25T05:13:00.000-07:00

The media seems to have taken great interest in the OOXML issue. The Economic Times, which is the world's second largest financial newspaper had an article titled, India throws MS open format out of the window. The article said:

NEW DELHI: India on Thursday gave Microsoft a thumbs-down in the war of standards for office documents.

In a tense meeting at Delhi’s Manak Bhawan, the 21-member technical committee decided that India will vote a ‘no’ against Microsoft’s Open Office Extensible Mark Up Language (OOXML) standard at the International Standards Organisation (ISO) in Geneva on September 2.

“We unanimously agree on the disapproval of OOXML with comments. The same will be submitted to ISO,” National Informatics Centre head and BIS technical committee chairperson Nita Verma said after a marathon meeting that lasted over six hours. There was no need for a voting as only Infosys Technologies and CSI supported Microsoft.

The Open Document Format (ODF) alliance, enjoying widespread support from academia and corporates like Oracle, IBM, Red Hat, Sun Microsystems, Google, were in a jubilant mood having succeeded in stalling OOXML from being accepted as a standard in India.

Business Standard, had an article titled, "BIS stumps Microsoft for new language"

Leslie D'Monte / Mumbai August 24, 2007

Microsoft today suffered an initial setback when the Bureau of Indian Standards (BIS)-appointed technical committee did not approve of its Open Office eXtensible Mark-up Language (OOXML) as an alternative standard for electronic office documents to the International Organisation for Standardisation (ISO).

It qualified its disapproval with comments. The BIS can review the decision till September 2, when the same has to be submitted to the ISO along with 123 other country-specific standards bodies.

This article quotes a Microsoft spokesperson saying, "We respect the decision taken by the Bureau of Indian Standards (BIS)-appointed committee. At the same time, it is important to note that all the BIS members unanimously support the need for multiple standards. Going forward, we will work with the BIS and the committee members on the comments noted during the ballot resolution process.”

Well, I attended almost all the meetings of BIS and certainly do not agree with this viewpoint. My submission to BIS is that vendors should collaborate on standards and compete on their implementations. Who in the world wants two different HTML standards? I certainly don't.

Hindustan Times had an article titled, A New Duel.

Friday August 17, 12:54 AM

The biggest IT giants are at war. A war so huge that its magnitude spans almost the entire planet. The bone of contention is who will control your office documents - to be precise, the underlying document formats that run on your computers. It is a bit like what language a national anthem will be written in. It involves pride, sentiments and high stakes.

The rivals in this high pitched battle are Microsoft on the one hand and an influential axis of IBM and Sun Microsystems on the other. The IBM-Sun axis is backing the Open Document Format (ODF) alliance. A veritable who's who of the industry is lined up, taking sides.

India votes no against OOXML

2007-08-23T11:54:00.000-07:00

Just returned from delhi where I attended the Bureau of Indian Standards meeting on OOXML. Red Hat is a voting member of this committee and I had the privilege to represent the company on this committee. The committee has voted an unanimous "No with comments" on OOXML. I will wait for an official mail from BIS before saying anything more but thought that I should share the good news with my friends in the FOSS and open standards community.

TCS joins the open source community

2007-08-19T21:59:00.000-07:00

This is good news. India's largest software company, TCS, has released its Wide Area Network Emulation product called WANem in open source. The project is hosted on http://wanem.sourceforge.net/

Hopefully, this symbolises a small but significant cultural shift among Indian software exports companies. Traditionally, they have not encouraged contribution to open source projects because their primary focus is outsourced software development.

The Big Bazaar and Open Source

2007-07-20T03:48:00.000-07:00

These days, I feel that i cannot pick up a book without stumbling on some mention of open source. I was reading Kishore Biyani's (Pantaloons, Big Bazaar, Future Group fame) autobiography, "It happened in India." Throughout the book, the theme is that of collaboration and partnerships. What was interesting to me was that, in the second last page of the book, Biyani talks of open source.

"In the Creative Economy, innovation will also necessarily come through collaboration. And that is evident from some of the most successful innovations that we have seen in recent years --from the Toyota Production System to the way Linux, or more recently, Wikipedia, has developed,"says Biyani in the book.

It is an interesting book and I would recommend it to anyone interested in the changing business scenarios in India. I wonder if Biyani has read Eric Raymond's, "The Cathedral and the Bazaar?" I am glad to see that more and more industry leaders are talking about open source.

Bill Gates and open standards

2007-07-08T07:17:00.000-07:00

In 1997, in my previous avatar as a journalist, I had interviewed Bill Gates. What a different world that was!

That was his first visit to India and the fanfare would have made you believe that this was a head of state visit. Microsoft had just crushed Netscape in the great internet wars and seemed completely indomitable. I was extremely keen to meet the man who sat at the very center of the desktop universe to understand what his next move would be.

One of the biggest changes from 1997 to 2007 is that the desktop rapidly diminished into being a subset of the Internet universe. The focus of users shifted from being limited to their desktops to collaboration and communication via the Net. I remember that my first PC was bought in 1994 and I soon got bored of it until my 1200 baud modem was purchased in 1995. It was as if a whole new universe was now available to me through my rasping, screeching modem. Of couse, none of us, including Bill Gates, expected this universe to expand so rapidly.

One of the factors (and consequences) of the growth of the Internet was that open standards became more popular. The Internet itself would not have existed without open standards. One consequence that I could notice around 1997-2003 was that new file formats for audio and video and other forms of data emeerged that were no longer tightly tied down to the desktop. My term for it, at that time, was Platform Independent File Formats (PIFF). Looking back, the PIFF observation was a good one as far as trends go. However, having file formats that are independent of the underlying platform is not good enough and this is where open standards come back into the picture. If I create a document, the document belongs to me. However, if I made the mistake of creating it in a proprietary file format, the only way I can decode it faithfully is by using that proprietary vendor's application or try my best to reverse engineer that file format. That is like buying a house but while I own the house, the builder owns the keys to *my* house. Not a good idea right?

I have blogged about this in my article "The importance of Open Standards." In a world of truly open standards, monopoly pricing cannot be guaranteed. And that world is not far away because users clearly understand the alue of open standards and the impact it can have on their lives.

Six Questions on MS OOXML

2007-06-26T03:08:00.000-07:00

Georg Greve of Free Software Foundation, Europe has come up with a simple set of six questions that policy makers must ask before approving OOXML which has been proposed as a standard.

This is recommended reading for those interested in open standards.

Eben, Kerala and other issues

2007-06-11T22:27:00.000-07:00

I had a very long chat with Eben Moglen last week and had gone down to Delhi in this heat wave to meet with him. On Saturday morning, when the temperature was 45 degrees centigrade, around 50 people turned up to hear him talk about the issue of software patents and Microsoft's claims that Linux violates its patents. Eben is a combative force-of-nature and I am glad he is on our side!

We spoke about a number of things that will become common knowledge once the Software Freedom Law Center unveils its plans for India. Before, coming to Delhi, Eben had spent three days in Kerala. We agreed that it was important that Kerala succeeded with Free and Open Source Software because it is one place where there is both, political will as well as grassroots support for FOSS. The plans to set up an academic center of excellence for FOSS in Kerala was another thing that we spoke about. This academy is a wonderful idea and I would love to teach there. Incidentally, I will now be speaking on open source at the IIT Bombay's course on ICT for Development.

The Success of Open Source

2007-05-26T03:13:00.000-07:00

I finally managed to read the first chapter of Steven Weber's book, "The Success of Open Source." My first reaction on reading it was, "Wow! Somebody really gets it and can also explain it to others in a lucid way." The first chapter is available online and I encourage you to download it and read it without delay.

"The conventional notion of property is the right to exclude. Property in open source is configured fundamentally around the right to distribute, not the right to exclude."

One reason why open source appealed to me from the very beginning was because of the notion that we could grow richer by sharing. When we began localization of Linux to Hindi with IndLinux.org in 1999, it was exciting to know that our effort would one day reach millions and millions of people could freely contribute and share this work. And mind you, I knew very little about Free Software or Open Source in 1999.

Call it an epiphany or whatever you will but it just felt so right and so good. Starting IndLinux.org was probably one of the best decisions in my life.

In the industrial era, people grew richer by creating private property that excluded others. In the knowledge era, the open source model proves that we can all grow richer by sharing. So, why should we build the foundations of our country on the exclusionary notions of the industrial era?

When we started IndLinux.org, there was never any doubt that we should use the GPL license because our intention was that those who spoke Hindi and other Indian languages should be able to use a computer with the same comfort that English language users enjoyed. We did not want our work to be captured by private interests and converted into a monopoly and the GPL with its "share-and-share-alike" model was the perfect vehicle for a developing country like India.

Our vision was the schools and colleges and villages and the poorest of the poor should be able to use computers in their own language. Our concern was that if such a fundamental tool as the computer was denied to our people, it would only accelerate the digital divide. That was not something that our conscience was comfortable with. Our hope was that more and more people would join us, help us with the translations, improve upon the software and share it freely so that the digital divide could be bridged rapidly. Looking back, our biggest self criticism is that we were not more ambitious and more courageous in our goals. The last eight years has only strenthened our convictions that open source is the path ahead for India.

There is still along way to go before we bridge the digital divide but we can We can look back with some satisfaction and see that the movement has grown quite a bit. I am reminded of the lovely lines of the Urdu poet, Majrooh Sultanpuri:

Main akela hi chala tha jaanib-e-manzil magar,
Log saath aate gaye aur kaaravaan bantaa gayaa.

This loosely translates as:

We set out alone towards our goal,
but others kept joining us
and our caravan kept growing

And since I am on poetry, let me close with the last four lines from John Lennon's immortal Imagine:

You may say that I'm a dreamer
But I'm not the only one
I hope someday you'll join us
And the world will live as one.

Colonizing Yoga

2007-05-19T00:53:00.000-07:00

CNN-IBN reports that "According to the US Patent Office, 150 yoga-related copyrights, 134 patents on yoga accessories and 2315 yoga trademarks have been granted." I remeber reading that the US Patent Office is supposed to train the Indian Patent Office on how to grant patents. Makes me feel like someone awaiting a consignment of toxic waste.

Focus on the positive agenda

2007-05-17T02:10:00.000-07:00

I have been talking to several of my friends within the Free and Open Source community on the issues around open standards etc. So far, we have been reactive rather than proactive. However, the Open Source community has a positive agenda of democratizing technology and deploying it to improve the lives of people. The access to source code and the freedom to modify it are extremely relevant to developing countries like India.

India has everything to gain by using open source and open standards. Policy makers from the National Knowledge Commission to the advisors to the Kerala Government and many others are realizing that open source is the fastest and most effective way of bringing the benefits of IT to the people of India. We will do everything we can to accelerate this change. In the next one year, the Free and Open Source Software community will be more proactive in bringing the benefits of open source to the people of our country.

The Kerala Government's decision to migrate 12,500 schools to open source is one such example. There are projects like Vigyaan CD (www.vigyaancd.org) that aim to empower engineering students with a wealth of open source software. There are people within the FSF who are doing some brilliant work on user interfaces for the blind. Instead of being reactive and defensive, we will work on scaling up such initiatives that improve the lives of people. Through open source we can create a just and equitable information society.