Tux Watch

Part- 4. India Plays “IT” Big

Further adding to local FOSS Ecosystem development initiatives in India, the Indian state of Tamil Nadu has been making headlines [here ] the world over as the state goes for FOSS due to concerns over security and the high costs that Microsoft offers for Windows. The Indian state is not new to FOSS as the local government been running Red Hat Linux on various backend servers coupled with JBoss application server and PostgreSQL databases.

Mr. C.Umashankar the Managing Director, Electronics Corporation of Tamil Nadu (Elcot is a state-owned IT supplier) has clearly announced that

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Part- 3. India Plays “IT” Open

India has been very prominent on the FOSS world news bulletins due to the fact that with one of the largest populations in the world, the country has been on preference list for Information Technology and Software Business Process Outsourcing for the western or developed world. Adding to this, almost every major FOSS development corporation has either Research and Development center in India as well as country operations including giant brand names like Red Hat, Novell, IBM etc. In India, the Center for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC) [here ] has been leading FOSS initiatives in the country.

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Part- 2. Pakistan Brings Nation Closer To Realization

To take FOSS efforts to the next level in Pakistan, the Government initiated a project worth Rs29 million titled “Open Source Resource Center” (OSRC) [here] was established at the through the Ministry of IT’s [here] implementation arm the Pakistan Software Export Board (PSEB) [here] in January 2004 in Islamabad to facilitates stake holders and investors in the software industry, should they decide to shift their businesses from vendor-dependent proprietary software to open source software technology. It aims to create a culture of open source software use in Pakistan through media awareness and training workshops, and act as a virtual community for experts in this field.

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Part- I. Realizing True Potential

Readers on this side of the world may not be aware of some very interesting ICT and FOSS developments taking place in the various regions of Asia. First of all, there are many FOSS initiatives that are very active within the overall region adding value to the global FOSS movement. These regional or country level initiatives include organizations and groups like:

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Is Community Linux a possible solution to fighting Software Piracy in the developing world? Get a load of this article titled “China, Russia Worst Pirates of U.S. Goods — Lawmakers” here. What you see here is a typical problem of over expectations. You expect every person in the other side of the world to be born from their mother’s womb an expert on IPR or simply copyrights.

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Yup, thats what Heather Meeker says at Linux Insider in her opinion article titled “Copyright Law Key to Global Free Software Model” here. She says Linux is the killer application of the  FOSS movement and various companies are opening shop in Asia but without internationalized licensing, they aren’t going to do great in the market lacking IPR enforcements.

This article is way out of (more…)