A moving tale

Sam Varghese
Monday, 18 September 2006 19:35

Opinion and Analysis

• Announcements

At this stage, the ruckus would often die down somewhat. Some commentators, the more sober ones, were prone to voice a sense of deja vu at this stage though those in the FOSS universe continued to dream. Generally little would be heard from the government in question for the next six months or a year.

The next stage in most of these tales has often been the one when it turned out that the project, which was so ambitiously announced, had run into difficulties. There would be talk of a limited study to assess the feasibility of the original grandiose plan. And at this stage, the cynics, among whom I count myself, would know what was happening behind the scenes - the announcement had had its intended impact and any proprietary software companies which were holding out had come over to the government's side.

Hence, when a move of this nature is announced by the public sector, one has to take it with a pinch (or probably a kilo) of salt. The fact is, no government department would really like to do something which saves money - this would only lead to a lessening of its budget the next year. Less money means demands from those who dole out the funds - surely a reduction one year means that such reductions are possible the next time too? This, in turn, means less staff and no head of any department would want that - the common wisdom is that the man who sits in charge of 20 is more important (and hence deserving of a bigger pay packet) than the one who is in charge of 10.

When it comes to a business, such decisions generally go through if they are made at the top. It is unlikely that they would succeed if they were made by those at a lower level. The same logic as in the previous paragraph applies.

There are cases aplenty when there has been a lot of smoke and then no fire, both in the public and private sector. In Australia, one large public sector company used the threat of a large-scale move to Sun's Java Desktop System (why they called a Linux distribution that is anybody's guess) to extort low prices from a rival vendor. And there are quite few private companies which have done the same, both for servers and desktop units.

As with everything else in life, one has to wait and see. China has already made strides with Linux - it has its own distribution called Red Flag Linux - but there is one advantage (if it can be called as such) in its approach: what the government says, goes. The opposite is true with India - one could not imagine a more chaotic country where things surprisingly work pretty well.

Given that the grand-dad of the whole FOSS world, Richard M. Stallman, has had a hand in the Kerala decision, an occasional trip by the great man to what is described as God's own country would probably push things along a bit - and lessen the chances of even a minor volte face.