H!

On 10/8/07, Kumar Appaiah <> wrote:

Dear Linuxers,

We know Dr. Kalam was a FOSS advocate, and as soon as he was told that his own (President's) web site was powered by non-free technologies, he had it switched to a FOSS based server. But I think the de-Kalamization (read de-FOSSization) has started with his exit:

http://uptime.netcraft.com/up/graph?site=www.presidentofindia.nic.in

http://www.presidentofindia.nic.in/sp280907_hindi.html

Look at that...! They have Hindi version as an image. Must be pretty dumb guys up there. :)

Comments/Observations?

Kumar

With regards,

On Mon, Oct 08, 2007 at 02:31:50PM +0530, Dinesh Shah wrote:

http://www.presidentofindia.nic.in/sp280907_hindi.html

Look at that...! They have Hindi version as an image. Must be pretty dumb guys up there. :)

It's either that, or proprietary IE only fonts on most Indian government websites.

About the guys up there: I believe they must be Bill Gates wannabes who've never dared to pop in Live CDs, lest it deleted their C-drives.

Kumar

On Mon, Oct 08, 2007 at 03:27:01PM +0530, Kamaleshwar Morjal [???????? ??????] wrote:

That's a semi-Hindi bitmap [blunder!]. That's not even completely in Hindi. All the links are still in English. All the GOI or State Gov websites exhibit similar 'qualities' :( Anything we can do about it? Anybody there who can educate the 'guys up there' about OSS and Unicode? :)

Slightly off this topic, but related: I've started to "resurrect" the Linux Delhi Hall of Shame:

http://wiki.linux-delhi.org/cgi-bin/twiki/view/Main/HallOfShame

That also covers a lot of people in need of education.

Kumar

On Monday 08 Oct 2007 20:51:04 Rony wrote:

G Karunakar wrote:

...

when Dr Kalam was there there was his team which managed the site, after he moved out, he migrated it to www.abdulkalam.com along with all his speeches during his tenure, but later leaving few presidential addreses, most are now missing (must be that RB or GOI decided that all his speeches as president may not be outside in public domain!).. meanwhile management of the website has fallen back upon NIC, which is using its old setup (of Windows/IIS) .. much of the site being similar to what it was before Dr Kalam got it changed, with just little cosmetic changes! After new president was sworn in, the site was down for couple of weeks, with throwing up 404's or no content.

With due respect, he should have made the NIC guys switch to FOSS instead of getting it done by his team. This is what clients can fear about foss. After the foss guy is gone, who will maintain his systems? 'Teach a man how to fish.....'

Eh. Typical! I'm beginning to think that this whole FOSS thingie is becoming as bullish as Microsoft or <insert your most hated proprietary software vendor here>.

Dr. Kalam did what was in his power. Forcing NIC to change to FOSS would be abusing the power, because you see, the NIC people might not agree with his point of view that FOSS is better. Or maybe, they just don't have the man-power or the expertise to run the damn things on FOSS. You know, get out of the damn shell for once.

On 08-Oct-07, at 8:51 PM, Rony wrote:

...

similar to what it was before Dr Kalam got it changed, with just little cosmetic changes! After new president was sworn in, the site was down for couple of weeks, with throwing up 404's or no content.

With due respect, he should have made the NIC guys switch to FOSS instead of getting it done by his team. This is what clients can fear about foss. After the foss guy is gone, who will maintain his systems? 'Teach a man how to fish.....'

NIC guys are quite capable of doing it in FOSS if asked to

Mrugesh Karnik wrote:

On Monday 08 Oct 2007 20:51:04 Rony wrote:

...

With due respect, he should have made the NIC guys switch to FOSS instead of getting it done by his team. This is what clients can fear about foss. After the foss guy is gone, who will maintain his systems? 'Teach a man how to fish.....'

Eh. Typical! I'm beginning to think that this whole FOSS thingie is becoming as bullish as Microsoft or <insert your most hated proprietary software vendor here>.

Dr. Kalam did what was in his power. Forcing NIC to change to FOSS would be abusing the power, because you see, the NIC people might not agree with his point of view that FOSS is better. Or maybe, they just don't have the man-power or the expertise to run the damn things on FOSS. You know, get out of the damn shell for once.

You got my statement wrong. The President leads the Nation. NIC http://home.nic.in/ is a Govt. organization and for a Democracy like India, FOSS is the way to go. The sheer cost saving in OS licenses will be enormous, considering the total number of systems used by every government department all over India. Over and above that, system security from viruses and spyware will be an added by-product. To make the FOSS platform popular, experts will have to spread their knowledge to the newbies, otherwise it is still some high tech stuff, out of reach of the normal people.

Another factor most important is that by letting foreign closed software giants work closely on Govt. systems, we are putting ourself at a risk of exposing ourselves to them and we will be at their mercy to take corrective action at their asking price.

What we individually feel about FOSS is fine but in the larger interests of the Nation, FOSS _is_ the way to go for India. Individuals may find it difficult to adapt themselves to FOSS, but it is not very difficult for Governments and large organizations plush with resources.