On Sun, Aug 9, 2009 at 11:02 PM, Kapil Hari Paranjape<[email protected]> wrote: > Hello, > > One point that is worth noting is that Indian academic institutes and > banks in the late 80's and early 90's got their systems from Indian > software organisations which specialised in Unix. > > An interesting thesis topic for a sociologist is how this "Unix > country" became a "MicroSoft country" in the late 90's and the early > 21st century. > > At least part of the reason was that these organisations looked upon > Linux and GNU as "toys" for "hobbyists"---not for professionals. They > failed to recognise that Unix itself had similar roots.
I'd written a mail on this earlier in a thread where NASSCOM rejecting FOSS standards was discussed. I see the reasons as being less sociological than pragmatic. My views are as under: 1. The '80s were the era of the servers and '90s that of the desktop. Clearly MS won on the desktop front thro' OEM support and programmes while Linux and other software vendors had virtually none. 2. In the '80s, Unix was recommended not because of any love for Unix/ hatred for MS, but because it was the most viable hardware independent multi-user OS then. In a similar vein, MS Windows di turn out to be the most viable option as other OSes were tied to Hardware e.g Apple. 3. Smart marketing by MS by giving grants, freebies apart from some nice looking software and luring the powers that be. Notwithstanding all this, our policy makers were blind sighted enough not to see the power of their decision making in creating a change or learning from history. They were/are not paid to do so I guess. If only the Indian Govt had adopted FOSS explicitly earlier, we could've saved millions in software costs as a country and also become a major player influencing software trends. It is still not too late. -- Mohan Sundaram _______________________________________________ To unsubscribe, email [email protected] with "unsubscribe <password> <address>" in the subject or body of the message. http://www.ae.iitm.ac.in/mailman/listinfo/ilugc
