Ensure govt. uses open source software, says report

A report by professors from the National Law School of India University (NLSIU) recommended that open source software should be promoted with greater institutional support from the government, such as by ensuring that existing policies to promote the procurement of open source software should be enforced, and grants should be provided to open source contributors. The report lays out a case for greater proliferation of free open source software (FOSS), by citing examples from different parts of industry which rely on it.

Open source software, unlike proprietary software, is developed and modified by the programming community, and generally made available freely to other developers. Open source technologies are common in even proprietary software, as companies and digital systems grow more and more complex.

In fact, companies that work primarily on building digital tools and services tend to rely very heavily on FOSS. “Our study indicates that for the organisations we studied, there is a clear preference for FOSS and it dominates their technology stack, though there may be other types of software that are employed for specific use cases,” the report said. “Email services and internally used applications are two categories wherein we noticed the use of proprietary software in an otherwise FOSS-oriented organisation.”

The study “specifically recommends changes to procurement guidelines, making procuring FOSS solutions the norm,” it says, and “imparting Information and Communications Technology [ICT] education in schools using FOSS”. 

e-governance systems

In 2015, the Department of Electronics and Information Technology (now a Ministry) put out the framework for the adoption of open source software in e-governance systems, a document that remains in force. However, procurement remains skewed towards proprietary platforms. At a discussion following the report’s launch, economist Renuka Sane indicated that officials tended to choose this route as it would be easier to assign responsibility if a cyber incident occurred. 

An exception in that framework was also carved out for vendors to avoid using FOSS if they had a justification. “Since the publication of this framework a decade ago, the use of FOSS in industry has soared exponentially and reliable FOSS-based solutions are available for almost every type of software requirement,” the study said. “Hence, it is recommended that the guidelines be modified to make procurement of FOSS solutions mandatory when they are available, and the closed-source software should be permitted for specialised or exceptional cases wherein FOSS alternatives are not available.”

“We recommend that the government provide grants to encourage contributions to specific FOSS projects. These can take a variety of forms, such as directly funding universities. It is worth noting that popular FOSS projects such as the BSD Unix and PostgreSQL database were developed at universities.”

The study was led by Arul George Scaria, co-director of the Centre for Intellectual Property Research and Advocacy at NLSIU. Suryaprakash Mishra, a professor of social sciences at NLSIU; Shubham Shinde, a technology policy researcher, and Rashi Singhal, an academic fellow at NLSIU, were the other authors of the study.