Print

Comment

Email

Digg

Del.icio.us

Reddit

Twitter

The chicken-and-the-egg question persists in the Indian open source movement-for, to grab the imagination of computer users, you need penetration and availability, while to ensure this happening, you need to first grab the user imagination. The highly diasporic quality of Linux distros in India points to several convergent issues. But as programmers in the Perl community are known to say, "There is more than one way of doing it."

The evolution has been endemic, and parallely, intuitive, as curiosity down the years was fuelled by the need to be virus and crash-free-which later metamorphosed into sheer necessity for today's users of open source software. Even beyond mail servers where Linux, for one, occupies an almost 70% mindshare in the small and medium enterprises. Linux and other open source technologies today dominate the mail server market share, and are slowly gaining ground in other categories.

On the desktop side of things, a much-needed, though belated, open source star act was needed to divert attention from a dominant Windows. This came from the government in May this year with its decision to ship free software (comprising largely Tamil applications) from Bangalore-based Centre for Development of Advanced Computing. This had the blessings of a known open source votary, President Abdul Kalam, and was feared to be a likely blow to Microsoft. This was mainly on account of the government's direct role in shipping Mozilla's open source browser, Firefox, as well as OpenOffice.org and other open source applications on CDs.

One Microsoft source dismissed the entire "Linux on CD" distribution exercise as hooey, the product of a well-planned stunt. Microsoft is fast moving ahead with its goal of making Windows available in 14 vernacular languages by the beginning of next year. Ostensibly, over the last five years, while MNCs and their Indian rivals talked of "globalization", localization has been the buzzword in the push to gain mindshare and drive the horizontal app development moves of the growing open source developer constituency.

Minus the Hassle,They Say
In a diverse market like India, open source, which can be modified without legal hassles or code access issues, is now emerging as the key to serving a market where multiple languages, especially in urban centers, are a business opportunity by themselves. "Open source teams are easy to assemble and the members of these teams are often full-time company employees who can work without the pressures of a commercial project," says one open source developer.

Over 3 lakh developers now work on Linux in the major stakeholders of open source-besides the core Linux vendors, there is the government, OEMs, research institutes like the IITs, Homi Bhabha Centre for Science, the IISc and other major stakeholders. State governments are looking at ways to expand their use of Linux and open source technologies in e-government projects. Open source votaries say that the government can save at least $300 mn a year by promoting the shift from Windows to Linux. However, progress at the policy level has been lacking, says leading open source consultant Atul Chitnis.

A key member of the 4,000-strong Bangalore Linux Users Group (BLUG), Chitnis counters the view that OEMs have helped foster the growth of Linux in mission-critical applications. "Well, OEMs do support open source in a highly visible way, but for Linux as a platform for developing their closed source apps," Chitnis says. But in the two primary markets for open source technologies- enterprise and SMEs-open source database clusters, Linux on the mail server and Apache have flourished. The last mentioned holds 60% of the Web server market share in India, according to some industry estimates.

India's LUGs (Linux User Groups) have played a stellar role in uniting the community and speeding up resource-sharing efforts. While the Mumbai and Kolkata LUGs have specialized in localization programs, the Bangalore LUG has been uniting the user community and bringing them closer to the developers. Efforts like that of Deepak Phatak of IIT, Mumbai, are notable. Phatak has begun an effort to create an open-source license that will let programmers share ideas while also letting them retain the rights to their own software modifications. The license is likely to be on the lines of the Berkeley Software Distribution or the MIT License programs. Over the past two years, the number of open source licenses out of India has exploded and endeavors like Phatak's aim at harnessing the power of over 2.5 lakh new engineering graduates every year.

Microsoft rejects any suggestion that the status quo on the developer side could change. "We compete with Linux and other open source varieties on the strength of our technologies. Open source fears don't keep me awake at night really," said Sheila Gulati, Director - Developer and Platform Evangelism, Microsoft India, at the announcement of the company's annual coding competition, Imagine, in May this year.

On the server, Linux usage in India has increased without anyone having to convince people. Worldwide, the overall Linux share is expected to touch 33% by 2007. The environment for Linux and its acceptance has grown tremendously. About 80% of the Internet-facing servers in India are non-Windows and 60-70% of this figure comprise Linux servers, according to industry estimates.

To take on the commercial applications leaders, a semblance of co-operative spirit is being seen on the corporate front. A consortium of Linux distributors, The OpenLX Alliance, currently has nine companies from India, one from Dubai, and one from the US. The alliance is now working on pitching for joint business contracts of products and services on Linux across the globe.

Well Connected, But...
Open source, especially Linux, has gone from a tech toy for engineers to a serious business choice. In the MIS 100 survey conducted last year, MIS Asia found that over one-third of organizations surveyed had Linux installations. Educational institutions and government departments still predominated as early adopters, but it's also starting to find favor in commercial sectors such as banking. Open source databases in India continue to make inroads into SMEs, offering more robust, high-performance, and advanced DBMS features and functionality as SMEs look for low-cost solutions. More enterprises are deploying open source databases than ever before, with many looking at mission-critical deployments in the coming years. Today, there are at least five viable open source database products available, and flexibility is built into any investment proposition, according to vendors like RedHat. Database clustering on RedHat's Red Hat Enterprise Server is showing a good growth rate in India, say sources, though exact figures are unavailable.

Vendors like SlashSupport are now offering comprehensive open standards support and services, like counselling on patch downloads, to meet the growing demand. The future of open source databases remains bright, with products expanding to include advanced features and continuing innovation, in addition to enabling evolving technologies like XML, Web services, and content management. Starting with small application deployments, Linux has the potential to further widen its current 27% server market share in India with the wider adoption of open databases. Another reason behind the allure of these technologies for SMEs lies in the fact that PHP, Apache and MySQL perform better with Linux as they were written for Linux, say developers like Chitnis.

The traditional LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL and Perl, PhP) open source combo has worked wonders in India, he adds. In fact, though these programs were not originally designed specifically to work with each other, the combination is popular because of the low cost and the ubiquity of components which are bundled with most current Linux distributions. When used in combination they represent an interoperable solution stack of technologies like Java/J2EE and the .NET architecture. And, this is to the advantage of SMEs using Linux, who manage mostly open source applications to stabilize their investments.

However, the choice and flexibility of the LAMP combo has not always been readily lapped up by the larger enterprise datacenters, where the Windows Server and Windows Exchange combo still enjoy a huge lead over Linux. Often, incoming mail servers in India are Linux-based for the additional security and firewall compatibility they offer, while outgoing mail is handled by Windows Exchange, says a systems administrator with HP India. "It's a clear combination of the two which works well for us."

The stampede to hold hands with Linux has often been emphatic. Oracle's e-governance Centre of Excellence (CoE) in Bangalore now works completely on Linux desktops from Red Hat and SuSE. Around 5,000 Oracle developers migrated to Linux desktops in one single move last year. In order for Linux to become more commercially acceptable, key challenges still have to be met. These include distribution, standards, support, compatibility and validation from major independent software vendors. Infosys sees an addressable $300 mn Linux market worldwide.

Migration Pains
Right. While Linux might be cheaper in some cases, where deployments are complex or where there is proprietary third party software involved, the economics of migrating to open source generally don't stack up. This is a key challenge ahead. Many users still do not factor-in all the costs associated with a specific platform, including hardware, software, support, services, management and migration. The costs of the operating system are only a very small percentage of overall costs. Besides, large and midsized companies have hundreds to thousands of applications that require Windows and would be extremely difficult- and expensive-to transfer to an open-source platform.

Where Linux and its other open source kinsmen really stand to gain at least 20% is in the high-volume and replicated applications market, since over 80% of these deployments use Intel-compatible platforms. Intel and Linux is a combination which delivers overall cost savings. Though, on corporate desktops, Microsoft's stranglehold does not make things easy for Linux. The silver bullet for open source in India will also factor in government agencies and companies with aging systems. Here, open source models, combined with open source standards, can make it easier to add new services and capabilities to legacy systems-instead of tearing them out and replacing them wholesale. But again, migration costs will be the key challenge.

Greater standardization by Novell and RedHat and the integration skills of Linux apps vendors will drive the move towards conformity of non-proprietary apps with quality requirements-whether it be migration, or widening the scope of open source app servers and databases in mission-critical environments. Worldwide, Linux distributors are working on raising specific open source products, such as Linux, JBoss, Eclipse, and Tomcat, to the level of a "technology standard" with their own circles of tech training and support tailored to individual customers. Further, refining of criteria for open source applications in context to the environments where they are needed will be a key step forward for OEMs and Linux OS vendors.

This is especially true of environments where users have complex documents or unique Windows applications for which there is no Linux or generic browser alternative. OpenOffice.org, for example, is known to co-exist on many desktops with Microsoft Office '97 on Windows XP, according to reports. Therefore, an important factor is that for companies that identify relatively few Windows applications or complex Office documents, Linux may be a suitable OS, and workarounds such as Wine, Windows Terminal Services or PC virtualization may be appropriate for users who require some Windows or Office compatibility.

A final tally for the open source crusade does not exist, and a clear winner in the open source vs closed competition is yet to stand up and be counted. However, for the major stakeholders-the user and developer groups, OEMs, ISVs and enterprises-just the very journey ahead is exciting. With "more than one way of doing it".

Ravi Menon

Page(s)   1