Kerala has a population of around 28 million so we are not talking small numbers here; the natives of the state are generally educated and left-leaning. And the people are highly politically aware - there is a famous saying about Keralites that they will not mind bumming their morning cuppa but will always buy their own newspaper.
But the question is - will it actually go through? Or will the administration make some compromises down the road?
If one has doubts, it's because the announcement appears to have more to do with politics than anything else - not that this is surprising. Kerala has two coalitions - the United Democratic Front (led by the Congress party) and the Left Democratic Front (led by the Communist Party of India - Marxist). While the former was in power, a deal had been cut with Intel and Microsoft to advance the Wintel platform in schools. The Left front won the 2006 elections - polls are held every five years - and the state has now shifted focus to Linux.
There have been times in the past when it looked like free or open source software (FOSS) was about to make giant strides in this country or that; some government made a pronouncement, the media got all excited (and usually ended up misquoting the person who made the announcement) and people from various parts of the FOSS sector started bleating about world domination.
Generally, a few days later, reality would return. By then the pronouncement would have been endlessly clarified by the spin doctors who surround every government official and what would have emerged was that the government in question actually said it would be creating a "level playing field" (a physical impossibility - ask anybody who's played a game at Melbourne's Colonial Stadium) for all kinds of software.
