Pankaj Jangid wrote: > > Government can hire people for support. Two advantages this way: > > 1. They will get talented people on board and the cost of support this way > will be less then what they pay to the proprietary players for support and > consultancy. > 2. They are creating jobs which is good for them to use as a card for the > next election. > > From the various opinions expressed here, IMHO, adoption of FOSS and Open Standards by a Govt. goes much beyond using FOSS on Govt. computers and having competent vendors to support FOSS installations. The Govt. has to create a National knowledge infrastructure that is everything related to FOSS.
This includes:- 1) Introduction and sponsoring of FOSS education in Schools, Colleges and other educational institutions. 2) Sponsoring the development and advancement of FOSS programming in Educational Institutions. This also includes providing high bandwidth and unlimited online storage space for FOS software development and download. 3) Organise and encourage youngsters from the school level to participate in FOSS programming camps (Like summer of code). 4) _Identify_ and encourage the development of FOSS alternatives to expensive commercial closed softwares for Graphics, Animation, Drafting, HRD, Accounting etc. 5) As the first 4 processes gain momentum, adopt open data standards in all Govt. institutions. By this time FOSS the knowledge infrastructure should be able to handle this heavy load. 6) Provide tax benefits to private organisations to adopt open standards. Specially encourage Software training institutes to teach FOSS instead of closed software. If these points are acceptable, they can be added to the FOSS manifesto as a common minimum program that is expected of any Govt. that comes to power. -- Regards, Rony. GNU/Linux ! No Viruses No Spyware Only Freedom. -- http://mm.glug-bom.org/mailman/listinfo/linuxers
