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posted by on Tuesday April 07 2015, @07:31AM   Printer-friendly
from the GNU-it-to-me-baby dept.

Simon Sharwood over at El Reg reports on policy guidelines from the Indian government's technology department:

India's Department of Electronics and Information Technology (DEITY)--has laid out a new policy (PDF) commanding the nation's government to use only open source software.

The policy statement is rather blunt:

Government of India shall endeavour to adopt Open Source Software in all e-Governance systems implemented by various Government organizations, as a preferred option in comparison to Closed Source Software (CSS). The Open Source Software shall have the following characteristics:

  • The source code shall be available for the community/adopter/end-user to study and modify the software and to redistribute copies of either the original or modified software.
  • Source code shall be free from any royalty.

Compliance with the policy is "mandatory" and applies to all central government agencies for state agencies when they replace or upgrade "e-governance" software. There's an out if an agency needs software that isn't readily available as open source, but the policy insists on calling for only open source products in all future RFPs.

[...]There's also lots of wriggle room in the definition of "e-governance", which DEITY says is "A procedural approach in which the Government and the citizens, businesses, and other stakeholders are able to transact all or part of activities using Information and Communication Technology tools."

Between that loose definition and the get-out clause for apps that aren't easily found as FOSS, it looks like India's not blocking proprietary software entirely, but is making it plain it prefers open source whenever possible.

It's worth noting that the state of Tamil Nadu and the state of Kerala have been leaders in the move to Free and Open Source Software in India, pursuing that path for many years in government, especially in education.

 
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  • (Score: 2) by DeathMonkey on Tuesday April 07 2015, @06:45PM

    by DeathMonkey (1380) on Tuesday April 07 2015, @06:45PM (#167536) Journal

    How does one have a *mandatory* *preference*?
     
    Easy, just call up the Purchasing department and ask them.

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