Section 12.3. Challenges in Local Adoption of OSS

12.3. Challenges in Local Adoption of OSS

The trend toward OSS adoption faces a number of significant challenges.

12.3.1. Support

The perceived lack of support available for OSS in India is largely due to support services being readily available for legacy platforms. The legacy support industry has been built over many years. However, today there are a growing number of channels of support for OSS. Because of its collaborative nature, a great deal of high-quality yet inexpensive or free help for OSS is provided online. Furthermore, if a user has money, the same level of support is available for OSS as for proprietary solutions, and at the same prices. It should be noted that, while readily available, legacy support is often of poor quality. Furthermore, users or organizations that already have Unix skills find few difficulties in supporting OSS applications or systems. As more students trained in OSS enter the workforce, increasing support services options will emerge. In addition, as more OSS services revenues are derived by the software industry, the OSS services infrastructure will mature, and greater fulfillment of support requirements will be possible.

12.3.2. Piracy

The high seas are unfriendly to both OSS and proprietary products.

According to industry sources, more than 70% of proprietary software is pirated in India. Rampant piracy equalizes the price between "free" software and proprietary software. Since there is little legitimate market value for proprietary desktop packages, there is little financial incentive to develop a local software product market. IT growth is consequently stunted. OSS is seen, by some, as an antidote to these effects because it has the potential to transform the technology consumer of proprietary products into a technology collaborator of open solutions.

India's commitment to maintain compliance with World Trade Organization (WTO) and WIPO standards in the protection of intellectual property will encourage the proliferation of OSS packages. In particular, antipiracy drives and subscription licensing models are already improving the attractiveness of functionally equivalent OSS packages in India.

12.3.3. Localization

Proprietary as well as OSS vendors have committed considerable resources to localizing software in India. Microsoft has pledged millions of dollars to the localization of its proprietary software in Hindi, Marathi, and other major Indian languages. Red Hat has announced a plan to build a U.S.$250 million center to support localization and other software development. IBM has initiated various multimillion-dollar localization projects. Government agencies such as the Center for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC) and the Department of Information Technology (D-IT) also have active programs to develop localization solutions. And OSS community resources have initiated projects to localize various components of the OSS suite. Examples include the Indic-Computing Project, and IndLinux.

Localizing the killer applications of open source, such as OpenOffice.org, the KDE and GNOME suites, and the Mozilla browser and email applications, has increased adoption and usage by the non-English-speaking majority of Indians.

In fact, localization efforts are the main channel by which Indian contributions are being made to OSS projects. Desktop localization projects are the most active collaborative efforts in India. Projects include BharateeyaOO, IndLinux, JanaBhaaratii, and AnkurBangla.

The BharateeyaOO project represents the "Indianization" of OpenOffice.org. It is a cross-platform project for translating a rich office productivity suite into languages appropriate for non-English-speaking Indians. Availability of major computational tools in local languages is already helping to bridge the digital divide and spread computer usage and learning in the rural areas of India.

The IndLinux project has created a Linux distribution that supports major Indian languages, including Hindi, Punjabi, Oriya, Telegu, Bengali, Gujarati, Kannada, Malayalam, and Tamil. Like BharateeyaOO, this project tries to bridge the digital divide by bringing the benefits of computer and information technology to non-English-speaking Indians.

The AnkurBangla project has created a Bangla-language Linux distribution as well as Bangla support for some major applications such as office suites, databases, development tools, and desktop environments like GNOME and KDE. The project's objectives include developing and maintaining open source software targeted toward Bangla-speaking users.

JanaBhaaratii is an Indian government project run by the C-DAC and is funded by the D-IT. This project uses OSS to promote localized computing applications. The project will develop and deploy technology in Indian languages for a broad range of areas such as home use, mass applications, education, rural areas, info-kiosks, cybercafes, and e-governance.

Other projects include localized regional voter registration applications, such as the Voter List project, which uses a bootable CD distribution called GNUBhaaratii that is based on Morphix.

12.3.4. Culture

India's work culture embodies a complex mix of both rigid hierarchy and elastic opportunism.

Opportunism drives the consideration of special favors at all levels of economic activity in India. It is common to hear senior Indian administrators say that there is "no money" to be made in procuring OSS. Today, the Indian form of guanxi in the OSS world is a trickle at best. But some form of guanxi may always be needed to successfully conduct business in India. Guanxi "reciprocity" may ultimately be based on the growing wealth from the IT services economy. However, if some measure of transparency and containment of corruption is to be achieved, cost-effective and pervasive automation is key to reducing discretion in the conduct of government and in the application of governance. It's icing on the cake that automation can be achieved using legitimate, nonpirated OSS tools.

Organizational rigidity is the other face of India's work culture. India's tradition of social hierarchy in the workplace tends to reduce the value of collaboration. While innovation is a strong Indian value, collaboration is not. Traditional Indian business culture is strictly hierarchical. Collaboration with peers is less valued than performing a prescribed duty according to one's place in the organizational structure. This is slowly changing, as more relaxed and flexible Western business practices are adopted. Collaboration inhibitions are reflected in the lack of contributions to collaborative OSS projects.

12.3.5. Software Patents

Intellectual property concerns affect all software, whether proprietary or open source. Globally, the status of software patents is unclear, with a number of initiatives in various stages of contest. Software patents are allowed in both the U.S. and Japan. The European Union is examining its options. In India, unconstrained software patents are not yet allowed. However, recently, the government of India amended the Indian Patents Act to support patenting of embedded software to conform to WTO/WIPO agreements. There is strong pressure from industry bodies such as NASSCOM to extend IPR protection to all forms of software as a way of strengthening the Indian software industry. The counterviewthat patents serve to inhibit innovation in softwareis not widely recognized and, unfortunately, the FOSS community appears to be having minimal influence on keeping software free from patents. The new patent protections for embedded software came into effect January 1, 2005.