Another Indian State Moving To FOSS

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.

Re:Well..more like Socialist..

[Marxist Hacker 42]

So if you're in that state, can you answer the question the obvious troll raises? What sort of communists (or even Socialists) are against free public education systems as a government service? Or is the troll a fake and you don't really have an illiteracy problem there?

NOT COMMUNIST

[posterlogo]

Do a little homework. It's an Indian state. ALL of India is a democracy, politically. Where economy is concerned, Kerala operates under welfare based democratic socialism. They have a parliamentary system of representative democracy, just like most of the democratic world. A quick google/wiki search might help james.infidel avoid sounding like an ignorant in the future.

Quid Pro Quo

[Enrique1218]

India is profiting from outsourcing of American jobs. But, what are they suppose to buy from us. Software seems to be one of the last industries to actually employed Americans. If India is going to FOSS, then software industry would suffer from the lost customers. Call me stupid, but isn't trade done best when the door swings both ways. I don't see how we are to sustain our economy with growing trade deficits with Asian countries. I don't see the silver lining in India going FOSS.

Re:NOT COMMUNIST

[vidarh]

two of the most prototypical communist nations,

"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.