Flanked by Richard Stallman, the guru of the free software movement, Yechury said West Bengal should take the lead as some other states like Kerala have already started using free software.
Yechury’s jibe against software majors like Microsoft earning super profits and turning knowledge into a commodity complemented Stallman’s belief that free software is essential for individual freedom.
For Stallman and the movement he created, the term ‘free relates to the user’s freedom to run, copy, modify or distribute the software, rather than to get it free. The first step is access to the source code, something that companies like Microsoft guard jealously.
The state’s information technology minister, Debesh Das, played it safe by declining to name any company. ‘‘On behalf of the state government, we are not against any particular company or individual. We don’t like to oppose any business group,’’ he said.
Das cannot afford to alienate the global companies like IBM or Microsoft, who either have a big presence in the state or have promised future investment.
But Das was also open to Yechury’s proposition. ‘‘The government would consider using open source software as the default exploitation route for the West Bengal government funded software infrastructure in e-governance,’’ he said.
But, as officials pointed out, most of the e-governance activities initiated in the state over the past five years had been done with the help of proprietary software.
Subir Roy, the state informatics officer of the National Informatics Centre, said: ‘‘In the last five years we haven’t had any notable e-governance implementation based on free software or open source. One of the reasons is that most of the development work is vendor driven.”
Stallman said free software is a matter of the users’ freedom to run, copy, distribute, study, change and improve software.
‘‘I expect the state government to come forward and start using free software in areas like school education,” he said.
Quelle/Source: Kolkata Newsline, 16.08.2006
