Information Society Watch

January 10, 2007, Economic Times

In an interview, Lin Lee, Sun's VP for global government strategy discusses how the government can play a key role in the growth of open source software. She notes that a lot of progress has been made in Asian countries, including India, in promoting open source.

November 28, 2007, Times News Network

This interview with Nandu Pradhan, President and Managing Director of Red Hat India, discusses the future of open source software and the company's new strategies for increasing its market share in enterprise servers to 50%. Pradhan envisions an open source future where users can work freely on any platform, and all platforms are interoperable and not locked to any particular file format.

August 31, 2007, V Sasi Kumar

A FOSS enthusiast/practitioner from Kerala, India, blogs about the policy measures initiated by the Kerala state government to promote the use of FOSS in that state. Under the political rule of the Left, Kerala has been at the forefront of promoting FOSS within the bureaucracy, government departments, schools, state government projects and so on. Kerala has led by example and this must be emulated throughout the country.

August 24, 2007, The Economic Times

In a major setback for Microsoft, the Indian government has decided to vote against Microsoft's OOXML standard at the International Standards Organisation (ISO) in Geneva on September 2. This decision of the Indian government came after a high level committee meeting decided that the standard did not make the grade.

September 30, 2006, Rey A L Taganas & Vijay Kumar Kaul, Economic and Political Weekly

This paper explores the supposed innovative behaviour of firms in the Indian IT sector. Although substantial efforts have been made over the past fifty years by the Indian government in implementing various policy measures, building institutions, and putting strong emphasis on higher education, there has been a systemic failure to promote the emergence of networks of innovation. This, in turn, has impeded the innovation performance of the IT industry.

May 12, 2006, Bill Thompson, BBC

This columnist describes his interactions with Indian programmers who are using the freedom of Linux distribution licences to create instrumental technologies themselves. He believes India is beginning a new phase in its use of free and open source software.

October 9, 2006, The Financial Express

The Kerala Government is embarking an a policy directive which makes it mandatory for all state run schools to use open source platform instead of proprietary software. This follows a series of visits by FOSS founder Richard Stallman across the country to promote FOSS as a concept.

May 25, 2006, The Economic Times

This article questions the Indian government’s contradictory practice of advocating the open source ideology in its e-governance projects, while failing to embrace open technology platforms. This article is in favour of open source, specifically because it would reduce cost and provides interoperability.