You Can’t Hit a Home Run without Building the Ballpark

As long as the automation of basic governmental services in India remains sluggish, open source software is a difficult proposition for many leaders in government to understand. A blind adoption of commercial, off-the-shelf software requires zero investment in local R&D or in the hiring of software design and development skills. By selecting virtually free, if not entirely legally free, proprietary solutions, the program manager can worry about the task at hand, whether office automation, database configuration, or Web deployment, instead of shouldering the presumably more complex and added burden of developing and supporting open source tools to accomplish the job.

Therein lie the horns of a dilemma. As other technology consumers across the globe are discovering, the easy path of optimizing short-term solutions using proprietary, mostly Western, technologies dooms countries like India to a primarily passive role. Jobs created by such projects are typically administration and distribution related. No capacity to innovate or to develop the tools of automation is engendered. No capacity to become an exporter of high-technology services and products is fostered. The right factories are not built. It is a profound irony that while project outsourcing from the West has built a strong software development culture in India, most of this expertise belongs to the owners of the products being produced. It is a further irony that many leaders in India believe that the world’s software has been built by Indian brains whereas the true toll of this glory has been a drain of the talent needed to place India’s own efforts of automation onto first base.

Europe, more advanced and more widely automated than India, is however facing the same problems in trying to improve the capacity and competitiveness of its local software industry and in dampening dependence on its extraordinarily wealthy and powerful foreign suppliers.

The approaches of Germany and the EU offer interesting models for IT policy makers in India. Through a variety of initiatives, the German Interior Minister, Otto Schily, has been trying to foster the growth of local software-based jobs and skills, and to make proprietary vendors more competitive, often forcing them to dramatically lower their prices for products and support. The most visible initiatives include:

• Partnering with industry to provide discounts on hardware pre-installed with Linux to federal, state and local level governments and organizations. This program has already attracted over 500 government agencies. In fact, entire cities have chosen to use the program to migrate to open source including Munich and Schwaebisch Hall.
• Sponsoring a hosting platform and announcement service for open source projects and documentation. This project, called BerliOS, tries to provide the missing link between open source developers and their users, such as companies and government agencies.
• Funding of tools and disseminating information in support of open source software. Examples include DiCoP and Kroupware, both developed or funded by the Federal Office for Information Security (BSI).

The European Union (EU) has also initiated projects to research issues facing open source adoption in Europe:

• Sponsored a UK company, Netproject, to study the feasibility of moving the information systems of several member countries governments to Linux from Microsoft’s Windows OS.
• Funded research on use and benefits of open source software, available as a report called Free/Libre and Open Source Software: Survey and Study.
• Funded an OpenEvidence project to produce open source software technology for “evidence” creation and validation of electronic documents.

These are a visible and provocative recognition that open source software has an important part to play in the automation and functioning of government.

The trick for Indian policy makers is to figure out how to adapt these ideas to an environment, which does not yet support a mature and ubiquitous information-based economy. But to acquire a major league franchise, instead of remaining forever a minor league feeder farm, requires investment in the bats and balls, the uniforms and the ballparks.