Kerala’s open source dampener to Microsoft fire

By Sufia Tippu
Sunday, 03 September 2006 20:49

Market

Contrary to reports surfacing in the media that the southern state of Kerala in India is kicking out Microsoft, the real picture is slightly different
The Communist Party of India (Marxists)-led government which is in power now is not banning the software giant.

In a telephone interview with iTWire, Kerala Education Minister M.A.Baby said, “We are not banning Microsoft but we encouraging open source. Unlike in other states where the Microsoft Windows platform has a dominant share, 60% of our schools here aleady are on the free GNU/Linux software for a few years now. We are just pushing the envelope further.”

According to him, with the kind of encouragement now being given to free software, it is but natural that the share of Microsoft would come down.

Interestingly, Kerala known as “God’s own country” because of its picturesque beauty and backwater allure, is the state that Richard Stallman, founder of the free software movement -- the GNU Project and the Free Software Foundation has virtually adopted. For the past five years, he has been regularly visiting this state -- motivating the government as well as developers to migrate to the free software.

“Kerala is the only state apart from another province in Spain that has been aggressively encouraging free software for over five years. So, if you were to say that our Leftist government is against Microsoft and is kicking them out because we are against MNCs it is not correct. Take the case of Coca Cola and Pepsi – when we know that there is a higher level of pesticide content, we feel that we should ban it in our state and discourage people to consume that. This decision is not ideologically provoked,” he pointed out.

Now, nearly 1.5 million students in the 2,500-plus government and government-aided high schools in the state will no longer use the Windows platform for computer education. Instead, those who have not yet moved onto the Linuz platform would be switching over to the free GNU/Linux software.

Despite numerous efforts, Microsoft officials could not be contacted

Meanwhile the Microsoft versus Linux issue had always been in the forefront in this state which is also in the race push up IT software exports. Currently the state’s exports stand at $140 million, way behind Karnataka (Bangalore) figure of $8 billion. The total all-India figure stands at $ 24 billion.

The previous Congress government which was in power had launched several initiatives to propel the state forward in the IT revolution that was steadily sweeping the country. Apart from the incentives for MNCs and Indian software houses like TCS, Infosys and Wipro to set up facilities in that part of the country, there was a much-talked about IT literacy project with the support of Intel and Microsoft that was launched with great fanfare in Kerala few years back.

But even at that time, the Leftist government, which was in the opposition party, had strongly opposed the project saying the agreement between the Kerala government and the Microsoft for training teachers under the IT@School project was fraught with danger.

And it had written to the then Congress chief minister A K Antony saying that Microsoft boss Bill Gates had wanted to push his operating system using the services of software developers who had adopted it and this had been made clear by several experts in the field. “The government should, therefore, be very careful when dealing with Microsoft,” the letter had said.

Now, with Stallman’s most recent visit, it looks like the Leftist government has finally reached its goal of propagating the free software program in the entire state and dispiriting Microsoft’s efforts to spread its Windows fame in Kerala.