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Another Indian State Moving To FOSS
Posted by
kdawson
on Thu Jan 18, 2007 12:38 PM
from the dominoes dept.
from the dominoes dept.
james.infidel writes "The Hindu, a leading national newspaper, reports that the Communist government of Kerala (the state with the highest literacy rate in India) has announced its all-out support for FOSS in the draft IT policy announced yesterday. The draft also calls for preferential treatment for companies coming forward to work in the FOSS domain.
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Tamil Nadu (India) Shutting the Door On Microsoft 269 comments
aprasadh writes "The government of Tamil Nadu, a state in southern India, has begun initiatives to convert all of their IT systems fully to OSS-based software. (The link is a copy of a news item that appeared recently in the Deccan Chronicle, an English-language daily.) The managing director of the IT procurement, consulting, and training agency for the Tamil Nadu government describes the reasons why he has chosen OSS, and also how he dealt with Microsoft executives." From the article: "Initially, 99 per cent of government systems have been running on Microsoft systems but then 2007 will be a watershed year for the state IT sector... We have already dispatched 6,500 Linux systems to village panchayats and another 6,100 Acer desktop systems with Suse Linux operating systems are on their way. We are procuring 20,000 desktop systems for schools, which will run only on Suse Linux... I require at least 500 trainers to train 30,000 state officials across Tamil Nadu in the next six months."
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commies? (Score:2, Funny)
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Re:commies? (Score:5, Informative)
When people say "Communist government of Kerala", they actually mean a democratically chosen government which is influenced by some Marxist concepts.
Parent
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Re:commies? (Score:4, Informative)
Democracy and communism aren't mutually exclusive, you know.
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Re:commies? (Score:5, Informative)
The government in Kerala is elected by the public. Even a government dominated by communists cannot impose a truly communist state. Private enterprise exists in Kerala, which could not in a communist system. And the state government does not control the economy the way it would in a communist system. People can democratically remove the government in elections and choose a non-communist government. Because of all these reasons, I thought it was important to make this distinction clear.
Parent
Well..more like Socialist.. (Score:5, Informative)
But I am glad to find my state laying out the red carpet for FOSS.
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Re:Well..more like Socialist.. (Score:5, Informative)
The Communist Govt put forth night schools for Seniors so as to increase literacy across the state, as a result of which we hit 100% literacy rate.
Parent
Someone's missing something (Score:2)
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That'd explain it (Score:2)
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I think you misread the summary. He said highest literacy rate, not highest illiteracy rate. Kerala is essentially 100% literate.
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By the way, as a lay observer, I really admire Kerela and the way their communist party interpreted Marx in a non-Leninist, non-Maoist way. It really is a different animal from what most people think of as communism, but I think it's a lot closer to what Marx intended.
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Impact on population and demographics (Score:4, Funny)
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Tranlation of the draft IT policy (Score:5, Funny)
Computers make a difference.
1.2 In the production processes of today's world, information and knowledge mean a great deal more than material resources and physical inputs.
Knowing how to use them is good
1.3 ICT has opened up the possibility of radically different information exchange patterns by facilitating faster and more efficient dissemination of information. It can play a vital role in sustaining the democratic ethos of the Indian society and ensuring a high level of transparency in governance
Nobody controls the net
1.4 Having achieved high physical quality of life index and social infrastructure development, Kerala is ideally positioned to use ICT as a catalyst for the all-round economic prosperity and social uplift of its people
We haven't completely exhausted the budget
1.5 ICT and Information Technology Enabled Services (ITES) have by now turned into major sectors of economic activity in the country. Over the past one-and-a-half decades, these sectors have shown remarkable growth in the country, both in terms of export revenue and employment generation
This is a good source of tax revenue
1.6 In almost every sector of socio-economic activity ranging from industrial production to education and public healthcare, ICT now plays an important role in optimizing the processes, thereby improving the quality and efficiency of human endeavors
The net is cool
1.7 Growing importance of ICT in the present-day world leads to the emergence of a divide, which can be called the "digital-divide," between those who have access to sophisticated ICT infrastructure and those who do not. This is a matter of concern to civil society at large; and a challenge that has to be overcome through conscious intervention, both from the Government and the sections on the privileged side of the "digital divide
Web junkies don't riot
1.8 The Government has a comprehensive view of ICT as a vehicle for transforming Kerala into a knowledge-based, economically vibrant, democratic and inclusive society. By the term "inclusive," the Government means that the benefits of the socio-economic transformation possible through ICT should reach every single citizen of the State. This policy document defines the Government's vision, mission and strategy for achieving the same.
We're gonna spend lots of money
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Old news (Score:3, Informative)
NOT COMMUNIST (Score:3, Interesting)
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The fact that the USSR, Cuba, and China are/were not democratic doesn't mean that democracy and communism are incompatible, anymore than the large number of capital
Re:NOT COMMUNIST (Score:5, Informative)
To be frank, you're flat out wrong. It's not a matter of opinion, or some kind of "west vs east" brainwashing. It's a simple matter of definition.
You're mistaking "communism" with "marxism." Marxism is a political system based upon extreme socialism, but which usually misleadingly refers to "communism" instead. Marxism, in fact, advocated democracy as part of the theory, but later political figures who paid lip service to the concept paid that same lip service to democracy.
Communism, is an economic method that is very easily explained. Quite simply communism is the concept that a smaller group (commune or communist cell) within a larger economy can share some or all resources and the decision making regarding those resources. Theoretically this shared resource allocation and decision making results in greater efficiency. In practice this works very well for small cell sizes and very poorly for large cell sizes. This is because as cell sizes increase to the point where decision making is affecting strangers, people stop caring about them and act disinterestedly or selfishly. As a result correct decision making is not motivated and further the consolidation of so much power into so few hands lends itself easily to that power being seized by a totalitarian regime.
I would willingly admit that the communism, as defined by those who derived from the theories of Karl Marx, is not the opposite of democracy. In practice, it certainly is.
This is not the case. You are trying to define "communism" as only extreme applications of communism with very large cell sizes or in fact socialism, where everyone is in one cell. This is completely wrong. All states subscribe to a blend of capitalism, socialism, and communism and the communist component is applied almost everywhere in ways that are not Marxism. The atomic family within the US completely fits the definition of a communist cell. A family shares a home, utilities, food, etc. and the decision making is made collectively, although not necessarily equitably. Aside from that, within the US, co-ops, communes, and monasteries are all communist cells. For example, I know a lot of people in a server colocation co-op. They all donate time or old servers or money to maintain a number of co-located servers which they share for Web hosting, e-mail, IRC, and a number of other services. Together they get better rates, to the point of being absurdly cheap. That also fits the definition of a communist cell, even though they only share one given resource. In many places around the world villages act as officially recognized communist cells, most of which are democratically operated. To claim that all applications of communism are anti-democratic is simply uninformed.
Moreover, automatically assuming someone is brainwashed because you didn't bother to consider what communism really implies kind of detracts from whatever point you thought you were making.
The US was subjected to a planned and directed campaign of propaganda designed to confuse and misinform the public about what communism is, ironically, in a cold war against socialists. Claiming that people are brainwashed is not so far fetched. Economists recognize that every economy is to some degree socialist and to some degree communist or it is unlikely to be stable for any length of time. China and Cuba both practice more socialism than is the norm. The US is about average, but applies it in uncommon ways. China and Cuba are also both capitalist to a large extent and both are moving more and more in that direction.
If you're looking for extremely communist countries (as opposed to socialist), look to countries with very large communist cell sizes. Madagascar, for example, theoretically has three layers of government: communes, states, and national. Realistically, the states basically do not exist. Most of the country lives in small villages and each village, acts as a communist cell sharing a large number of resources. Whether that extreme cell size is benefici
Parent
Re:NOT COMMUNIST (Score:4, Interesting)
"Communist nation" is an oxymoron.
Just because western media has chosen to call these states communist does not make it so. They don't even call themselves communist, but socialist, just as the Soviet Union also never claimed to be communist, since making that claim would shake the very ideological foundation that the Soviet leaders used to excuse their massive abuses of power and lack of democracy. Their excuse was that the sacrifices of the people was needed to build a society that could once in the future become communist - Soviet leaders presented this future as anything from a couple of generations to a thousand years into the future, all the while they moved their country ever further away from the ideological principles they claimed to believe in.
You certainly appear to not have "considered what communism really implies".
For one, communism implies the withering away of the state. The state in Marxist theory has as it's primary purpose the oppression of one class by another, and so in a classless society the state would cease to exist in any meaningful form. Or did you miss that part of Marxist theory? It's the central thesis of Lenin's "State and Revolution"
Presumably you also missed the whole "classless" part. A society where the state retains power over the populace simply can't be communist as that power need to be exercised by someone, and those "someone" would have privileges that make them a separate class from the populace at large. And unless you truly are brainwashed it should be blatantly obvious that countries like Cuba and China are as divided by class as countries like the US.
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While I am not in wild disagreement with the other things you write this is simply not true. In fact, communism means the dying off of the state, see the great other posts in the current subthread or read up on marxist theory. Or, heck, even Wikipedia [wikipedia.org]:
(em
Go for it Kerala! (Score:2)
Surely the fact that Kerala has a communist majority in its democratically elected government is pretty irrelevant beyond making a headline to get USians excited?
Quid Pro Quo (Score:3, Interesting)
Microsoft attempted to reverse the decision (Score:2, Funny)
FOSS? (Score:2)
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The problem with communism though is it continues to use humans to make business decisions.
My personal favorite solution- bypass the humans and use expert systems on computers to make business decisions.
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Capitalism also works, only not with humans. But the proof that communism works with computers is in the multi-tasking code in the operating system of your choice (Unix, Linux, MacOS, even Windows in a poorly designed way, all show that without corruption and with enough data input, communism works). The problem encountered in running such operating systems on human beings is a severe lack of data collection, usually restricted down to just price a
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No, modern operating systems use preemptive multitasking, which is more like a dictatorship. The scheduling analogue to communism would be cooperative multitasking, of the sort implemented in "classic" Mac OS -- and it turns out it doesn't actually work s
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Far more dangerous than freedom in the population, is freedom in a ruler. A good example is Hong Kong- no political freedom to speak of, but maximum ecconomic freedom, which basically means the corproations can do whatever the hell they want. By contraining the ruler to predetermined programming, the population can have comparatively more
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Correct- think how much better it would be if the US Constitution were as constraining as an operating system! "Library not found" would take on a whole new meaning.
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For instance: Greed bubbles in the stock market. They happen every 20 years or so because human beings forget that greed is evil. A machine would never forget- and would avoid investing in stocks whose price to (earnings+assets)/shares ratio is greater than 1 to begin with (which is *ALWAYS* a bad idea).
Another good example would be the 1954 Ukranian famin
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What I don't get is why communists in India don't have mandatory public education.
The article and many like it are more than a little inflammatory. By "communist government" they mean "democratic government run by a political party that favors the ideals of communism." Communism is not even a form of government, it is a economic method. When people talk about "communist governments" they are often referring to places that instituted extreme amounts of socialism which resulted in a totalitarian government
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there are 3 programmers of Indian descent within eyeshot of my cube and more down the hall. there are what, 700 million? people there. Ghandi was arguably one of the greatest leaders in all of human history. India is a nation with a brilliant history spanning millenia, and a rapidly modernizing, vibrant economy developing a democratic government that has to deal with dozens of ethnicities and religions
700 million? (Score:3, Informative)
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more p.c. way to say "Microsoft lock-in"? (Score:2)
*SNIP*
On second thought, don't say that. What was that about my high pitched voice!