The Hindu : Kalam backs `open' software initiatives

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Sunday, Jun 01, 2003

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National

Kalam backs `open' software initiatives

By Anand Parthasarathy

Bangalore May 31. In a subtle departure from the practice of past Indian Presidents — distancing themselves from the nuances of government policy — the current incumbent has come out unequivocally for the use of open source computer software, and has pulled no punches in airing his unhappiness that the country is still mostly using proprietary software solutions. Predictably, the global Information Technology community has been quick to note his words.

A.P.J. Abdul Kalam used his speech in Pune last week, at the dedication function of the International Institute of Information Technology (I{+2}IT) to express his concern that so many sectors, including government and education, were still dependent on costly proprietary software packages, calling it a "most unfortunate thing'' and adding:

``In India, open sourcecode software will have to come and stay in a big way for the benefit of our billion people.'' He also reminded the IT industry of the importance of Indian language computing solutions: "We must have (Indian) search engines, word processing tools, optical character recognisers, speech recognisers and machine translators''.

Dr. Kalam's remarks on open source which were apparently triggered during his walk around the I{+2}IT, when he saw most PCs running Windows and similar software, have been quickly picked up by IT news services abroad: The U.S.-based CNET yesterday carried a dispatch which highlighted a remark the President made in his Pune speech about his interaction with the Microsoft Chairman, Bill Gates, when the latter visited India in November last. It was picked up the same day by Business Week:

"While walking in the Mughal Gardens we were discussing the future of information technology including... software security.... I made a point that we look for open source codes ... our discussions became difficult since our views were different''.

This was about as candid as an Indian President has ever been about his interactions with one of his high profile guests. Dr. Kalam's strength of conviction and clear perceptions about the nation's techno-road map may perhaps explain his bold statement in an area where the Government has hitherto been quite ambivalent.

He adds that while the Indian IT industry can proudly claim that 260 of the Fortune 500 companies are its clients, he would rather like to hear that "260 of the Fortune 500 are Indian multinational companies''.

The fact that his speech is so quickly reported by the technical media abroad is again something for which the President must be given credit. Since he assumed charge in June 2002, the official website of the President has been jazzed up and the text of his Pune speech as well as later speeches are available for perusal. Indeed the CNET news item provided a link to the full text (http://presidentof india.nic.in/S/html/speeches/

others/may28_2003.html).

Unlike the political classes the current President possibly does not feel the need to leave any escape avenues open so that he can later claim he was `misquoted'.

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