Was
Microsoft chief Bill Gates’ dual-purpose, philanthropic-cum-business
visit to India basically motivated by the desire to strengthen his company’s
monopoly over the large software market in India? This is a view that
is held by many advocates of the free software movement, who are disappointed
by the willingness of state and central government agencies to rub shoulders
with Gates and rely on his software, especially the Windows platform,
when implementing their IT initiatives.
Unfortunately for Mr. Gates, at least one Indian state government, the
government of Madhya Pradesh, has publicly announced its decision to
use Linux software in its official IT programme, which includes its
e-governance (Gyandoot) and computer-enabled school education (Headstart)
initiatives. According to newspaper reports, Madhya Pradesh Chief Minister
Digvijay Singh told Bill Gates that in the choice between a closed platform
like Windows and an open source, free software programme like Linux,
the latter has won out both because proprietary software is not the
best way to put out public information and because of cost considerations.
This is a different position from that taken by some other state governments
like those in Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh and even by the central government,
which are not planning to make the transition from Windows to Linux.
The difference between proprietary and free software needs to be clarified.
The ‘free’ feature attributed to the latter does not imply that the
software is necessarily distributed or made available at zero cost.
Rather, as the free/open source software movement defines it, a programme
is free software if a user has the freedom to run the programme, for
any purpose; has the freedom to modify the programme to suit his needs;
has access to the source code to exercise the freedom to modify the
programme; and has the freedom to redistribute copies of the original
or modified programme, either gratis or for a fee. While this is the
technical definition of “free software”, in practice free or open source
software is in most instances available either free of cost or at extremely
low prices relative to commercial software.
Programmes distributed by commercial firms such as Microsoft, including
the Windows operating system, neither provides access to the source
code nor permit modification. Further, with the practice of providing
software patents, there are now units of code which cannot be used as
part of other programmes that are being written by third parties without
a licence and payment of a royalty. Combine these commercial conditions
with the dominance over the operating system market that Microsoft possesses
and we are faced with unreasonably high prices for any current version
of the software and exceptionally high prices for upgrades that very
often become imperative to use new versions of applications software
or new software products.
This makes cost an important issue. According to R. Gopalakrishnan,
Secretary to the Chief Minister of Madhya Pradesh and Coordinator of
the Rajiv Gandhi Missions in the state, who is a senior civil servant
advocating the use of open source software wherever possible, “even
after accounting for training and installation costs of open source
software, it may still cost anywhere between one-half to one-tenth of
commercial software depending on the application.” Further, in his view,
“the ocean of unnecessary features in commercial software makes hardware
expensive and obsolescence cycles shorter.”
The open source path, Gopalakrishnan argues, not only costs less, but
that expenditure has many more spin-offs, since it is invested in training
that creates a competence in the state that will become a long term
asset. Further, there are larger issues involved. The technology framework
of a government cannot be based on proprietary standards. And, “inherent
in the debate on open source software are issues of freedom, monopoly
and choice of the buyer.”
The vocal advocacy of use of open source software for IT-enabled service
delivery and governance by the government of Madhya Pradesh, is in keeping
with trends in other developing countries including China and many Latin
American developing countries, like Mexico, Brazil, Argentina and especially
Peru. They are increasingly seeking to exploit the opportunity offered
by the free software movement, the GNU project, and favouring the use
of free as opposed to proprietary software in the government’s computerisation
programme. Their motivation is clear: the bread and butter issue of
cost; and the more lofty ideals such as ensuring free information access,
permanence of public data and security.
In these countries the attraction of open source software lies in the
fact that its use by government and a large public could encourage local
software professionals to provide software support in the form of add-on
applications that are written at a cost much smaller than that required
to buy multi-featured packaged software. This would decentralise software
production, challenging the large transnational producers of packaged
and boxed-software, who have been able to convert the software industry
from a service industry to one with characteristics typical of large
scale manufacturing.
The debate has gone the furthest in Peru as a result of a Bill (Number
1609) being spearheaded by Congressman Edgar David Villanueva Nuqez,
which specifies that software used by state institutions should satisfy
free software conditions. This includes freedom to use, freedom to modify
and freedom to publish without restriction. Among the specified reasons
motivating the bill is the belief that “government use of proprietary
software is a national security risk; that hidden code could contain
"back doors," programs that allow remote control of computers
and reveal sensitive state information open to prying eyes.”
Other Latin American countries have also encouraged the spread of free
software. In Argentina, for example, a bill that would mandate the use
of open-source software throughout Argentina's government departments
is pending in Congress.
What has been disconcerting is that, in keeping with its big brother
image, Microsoft has sought every possible route – money, muscle and
propaganda - to stifle this trend in favour of open source software.
In a June 2001 interview given to Chicago Sun-Times reporter Dave Newbart,
Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, while admitting that Linux was “good competition”
to Microsoft in the operating systems area, lamented that government
was funding open source work. It should not, he felt, since “Government
funding should be for work that is available to everybody.” But according
to him, “open source is not available to commercial companies”, like
Microsoft. As he put it: “The way the license is written, if you use
any open-source software, you have to make the rest of your software
open source. If the government wants to put something in the public
domain, it should. Linux is not in the public domain. Linux is a cancer
that attaches itself in an intellectual property sense to everything
it touches. That's the way that the license works.”
This use of the epithet “cancer” to describe a fledgling competitor,
only partially reflects the threat posed by the GNU General Public Licensing
(GPL) system to commercial firms like Microsoft, who are unable to extract
the best out of open source software to bundle it with their more expensive,
hidden-code software products. The method adopted by GNU was to adopt
copyright conditions (“copyleft” as it is termed) that prevent free
software from being turn into a component of proprietary software. To
quote Richard Stallman, lead member of the free software movement: “
The central idea of copyleft is that we give everyone permission to
run the program, copy the program, modify the program, and distribute
modified versions--but not permission to add restrictions of their own.
Thus, the crucial freedoms that define "free software" are
guaranteed to everyone who has a copy; they become inalienable rights.”
The real danger posed by the free software movement was captured by
Tony Stanco, a senior policy analyst at George Washington University's
Cyberspace Policy Institute and the founder of Free Developers.net,
a group that promotes the universal adoption of free software, when
he said: "Once these governments create their own industry it liberates
them, gives them an income source and allows them to tap into the world
economy like nothing else, because software is the highest value-added
product out there."
Evidence of that danger is growing. A study by consulting firm IDC released
in January 2001 titled “Server Operating Environments: 2000 Year in
Review” indicated that while Windows accounted for 41% of new server
operating systems sales in 2000, growing by 20%, GNU/Linux accounted
for 27% and grew even faster, by 24%. And the evidence that for similar
applications open source software like GNU Linux has a lower total cost
of ownership than Windows is overwhelming.
Microsoft’s efforts to subvert legislation requiring the use of free
software by state institutions in Peru took many forms. Besides launching
a propaganda war about the dangers to Peru’s IT sector and foreign investment
climate, Microsoft reportedly enlisted the US ambassador in Lima to
try to persuade the Peruvians to kill the legislation. The US ambassador
John Hamilton wrote to the President of the Peruvian Congress expressing
his dissatisfaction with the legislation. This was an obvious effort
at intervening in the democratic process just to satisfy Microsoft’s
whims.
Around the same time, Bill Gates, Microsoft chairman, called on Peruvian
President Alejandro Toledo and donated $550,000 to Peru's school system.
Interestingly, Bill No. 1609 included a scheme titled Plan Huascaran,
that sought to provide internet connections to the very same schools
Bill Gates’ money was targeted at.
This thrust into the school system as a way of buying out competition
from free software seems to be a common practice on the part of Microsoft.
Microsoft's South African office is reportedly giving free software
to all of the country's 32,000 public schools and depriving itself of
almost the whole of the $1.9m revenue it earns from South Africa's education
sector. But such philanthropy has been received with scepticism. Teresa
Peters Executive director of bridges.org, a nongovernmental organisation
that works on diffusing technology in emerging economies, argues that
one of the possible consequences of the South African government accepting
that package is that the adoption of Linux and other systems that compete
with Microsoft will be limited.
At home in the US, Microsoft’s late 2001 offer to provide $1bn worth
of software, hardware, training and support to 16,000 poor US schools
as part of a proposed antitrust settlement with US authorities was opposed
on the grounds that this would only serve to strengthen the company's
monopoly in PC operating systems. The offer had to be rejected.
Given this track record Gates’ philanthropy in India is suspect as well.
After providing $100 million to strengthen the fight against Aids, Gates
announced that Microsoft will make its largest investment outside the
US in India by pumping in $400 million (about Rs 2,000 crore) over the
next three years to spread computer literacy, outsource more software
and boost its business in the country. Of the $20 million would go towards
spreading computer education through ‘Project Shiksha’. Computer training
would be imparted to over 80,000 school teachers, who in turn will train
about 35 lakh students in five years. The software major would also
partner State education departments to set up 10 Microsoft IT Academy
Centres and collaborate with over 2,000 school labs. It is not surprising
that this move has been received with scepticism in some quarters.
To quote Stanco once again: "That's their strategy, they throw
money at these projects and hope that the movement goes away. But they
won't be able to spend their way out of this. More countries are realizing
that if they want to be an IT player worldwide, they need to promote
open source at home."
Is such a development likely in India as well? Not so long as there
is no agreement between governments in this large, quasi-federal country.
As Gopalakrishnan put it in a recent article: “Why has there not been
a national policy as yet on promotion of open source software? Part
of the reason is the policy leadership of southern Indian states where
the issues were more focused on IT production than on IT use.” Clearly,
the free software movement faces a much bigger challenge in this country.