A recent report on the international Open Source Software (OSS) scenario, mapping its development and implementation across the world, notes that in the “developing” world, India, China and Brazil show the best record of OSS adoption and development. This, it notes, is “much higher than expected” considering their position in the ‘Information Society' scale, an index the report uses to measure the development of what it terms as Information Societies (IS).
The 150-page report, published by the National Open Source Software Observatory of the CENATIC Foundation, charts globally the popularity and deployment of OSS. Primarily aimed at – by its own admission – boosting competitiveness of the Spanish business sector by identifying international projects that can be relevant to Spain, the report analyses, rather comprehensively, trends in both public and private sector adoption of OSS, and the role and participation of technology communities in many advanced IS.
Globally, the U.S., Australia and the Western European countries — all economically developed — lead OSS development and adoption. Surprisingly, the report notes, more advanced information societies such as the Nordic countries, the U.K. and the Netherlands show a lower degree of OSS development. This, it attributes to lack of government support to OSS in its early days. This has been remedied to an extent by recent progressive policies in this region.
Asia and OSS
At the forefront of OSS development in Asia are India, China, Japan and South Korea. The report notes: “India is the most atypical country, because in spite of its low IS level, it has attained a significant level of OSS development.” This, the report surmises, is due to the higher educational level of its population and its involvement in programming for American and European companies. However, it must be noted that outsourcing projects, a small fraction of which involve coding and deal with non-services jobs, are often for proprietary firms, and are closed source in nature, barring large Open Source distribution firms such as RedHat, Sun Microsystems and IBM (to name a few) that do have a substantial presence here. Even leading outsourcing-based firms have barely shown an inclination or commitment towards OSS development.
In comparison, the development in China is driven and controlled by the Government: its main OSS supplier, Red Flag Linux, is partially State-owned. While the growing electronics hardware sector (products require Open embedded systems) has fuelled development of OSS applications in Japan and South Korea, the report notes that the Korean Government has particularly promoted OSS as a means of boosting the country's ICT sector. Also, the presence of a local leading OSS distributor has favoured its adoption by companies in the private sector, contributing to the growth and maturity of the ICT sector.
Though OSS development has been remarkable in all three countries, the “language barrier” has meant that most of this work is barely visible abroad, thereby isolating them. The report mentions Asianux, the alliance formed by these countries, to develop a version of Linux for the Asian market.
In the rest of the “developing world”, the Brazilian Government has managed to foster the development of OSS in all areas of its ecosystem. Despite a level of IS similar to the rest of Latin America, Brazil forges ahead due to the government support — adopting a policy favouring OSS fairly early in the day.
The report acknowledges that the government has actively promoted OSS in most public software domains: the publication of regulations, mass migrations in public sector agencies and companies, OSS product development (goods and services) at the public universities and the creation of a collaborative portal for community players.
The India story
On India, the report notes that while a great quantity of OSS may be developed in the country – primarily attributed to “development subcontracted by European and American firms” where labour costs are on an average four times lower than in developed countries – implementation levels of OSS are not too high. “This is due in part to the government not wanting to create a conflict of interests with the proprietary software companies that provide a great deal of work to local industry.” Public policy in this regard has been “relatively neutral, motivated by the desire to keep American companies in the country,” the report accurately observes.
However, the report does not take into account the progressive policy strides taken in the field of e-governance where a recent policy mandates the use of Free and Open Source Software in all public projects. With large e-governance projects on the anvil, and many in the process of being implemented, this policy is certain to give a boost to India's OSS record. The report (recorded in 2010) perhaps omits this policy because it may have been finalised after the completion of the report's research period. However, the policy has been in its draft stages – and has been a point of conflict between proprietary firms and FOSS support groups – for three years now.
Another glaring omission in the discourse on India's public policy (in this report) is the pro-FOSS policies of the Kerala Government, as well as other States such as Tamil Nadu that have actively promoted implementation of FOSS in education and e-governance domains.
The larger role of the government, however, in promoting OSS through public initiatives has been partially acknowledged. The report mentions National Resource Centre for OSS (NRCFoss), an initiative of the Union Department of Information Technology that focuses on training, localisation and promoting OSS through policy and adoption.
On the Indian private sector, the report states that OSS has been favoured by some technology companies to avoid licensing costs. However, the first to adopt OSS among Indian tech companies were those providing software development services to foreign companies, that had the internal technical resources to support OSS environments.
The report predicts that despite the “mature OSS market” its penetration over the short-term will be concentrated mainly in server environments, where it is forecast to reach a market share of 20.8 per cent in 2011.
The lack of strong support for OSS applications leads us to believe that it will not achieve high development growth rates, even though the greater presence and support from OSS companies will increase its penetration, it adds. Some examples of OSS applications available are those used for meteorological forecasts, surveillance and petroleum exploration.
Community participation
The report finds that there is a network of more than 80 user groups across the country, although not all are of the same size or equally active. These communities, the report observes, carry out localisation projects and adapt educational and development projects to local needs.
The largest groups are located in cities such as Bangalore, Delhi, Mumbai, Kolkata, Chennai and Hyderabad, and smaller user groups have been created in smaller cities. The report's list of active communities in India includes BOSSGNU/Linux, Debian, Ubuntu, IndLinux, focused on local adaptation projects; Anjuta, dedicated to the IDE project; OpenOffice, producing local adaptations and improving functionalities; and Fedora, centred on local adaptation activities.
