On Fri, 3 Jan 2003, Nikhil Karkera wrote:
Are there any statistics over how much money drains out of India on proprietary s/w every year?
Here are is some interesting stat :
No. of PCs/Nodes in Public Sector Banks in India --> 95,090
pls refer http://www.banknetindia.com/banking/bitpresentlevel.htm
Here is interesting fact about type of software used in banks:
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The Software Packages for Banking Applications in India had their beginnings in the middle of 80s, when the Banks. spurred on by RBI and the Rangarajan Committee Report, started computerising the branches in a limited manner. The approach was to empanel a few hardware vendors who will also develop the software as per Bank's specifications and also help to install at the branches. This was a multi-vendor approach to foster competition and to assess the relative vendor capabilities. These packages were written usually in fox-pro or C and were dos-based - and rarely ^^^^^^^^^ Unix-based.
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Even today when I visit some nationalised banks I observe that most of the terminals have DOS
Further ...
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The early 90s saw the plummeting hardware prices and advent of cheap and inexpensive but high-powered PCs and servers and Banks went in for what was called Total Branch Automation (TBA) Packages. Architecturally, some were centralised solutions with a powerful central server maintaining the database, with multiple terminals; others went in for distributed processing with multiple PCs as nodes linked on a LAN. The Platforms used ranged from simple UNIX-C to powerful RDBMS like Oracle etc.
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Now what would be easier... porting the apps from DOS to Linux or continue with DOS/Windows ?
Also it is a misconception that money *drains* out of India The software providers are Indian Cos.
Recently I read a comment by Bill Gates:
The Windows OS is essentially free as when u buy it you can use it as long as you want
There is truth in this statement I guess as if a profit-making organization buys Windows and uses it for 10-15 yrs it has more than recovered the cost.
Also free-funda can be implemented under Windows too. I mean there are many open-source/free tools for Windows (Open Office for e.g.) too
Also using Linux does not mean that all the application s/w will be free. The tailormade s/w made by companies like Infosys will cost money obviously.
At the end of the day we have to think of massive overhaul of the entire system if we want to port the apps to Linux
Is it practical ?
regards Nikhil