India lays down 'open' challenge

The article was interesting, but made some points that I thought were somewhat misleading. It described two characteristics of Open Source, its merit of being free and the opportunity it offers of improving or replacing modules that don't match your needs, and neglected an important corollary of the second characteristic, that the opportunity to peruse source, or run it through an analysis program, can give one much more confidence in its fitness for purpose, especially when that purpose is something like the security of ones data from attack. This compares very favourably with the sort of hacking that is required to determine the behaviour of Windows; also I have yet to hear of a member of the Open Source movement trying to use the courts to prevent the revelation of the defects of his product.

"Until now free and open source software has been one of the ways in which the US spread its values around the world, the soft guy approach that seems to oppose, but in fact is symbiotic with hard-edged capitalism on the Microsoft and Intel model."

This is a false opposition. Linux runs on PCs (and some other platforms, with manufacturer support), so it is symbiotic with Intel, but the values it embodies are not therefore required to be sympathetic to those of Microsoft. On the contrary, one of the reasons that it has been so popular on PCs is that it differs from Windows (more than it does from some other operating systems).

"All that nice code won't run unless Intel and AMD, neither of whom is particularly noted for being soft and cuddly, continue to make the processors and Dell and Sony continue to squeeze component suppliers and ship the systems."

This is just wrong. Some of that nice code is platform specific; I suspect that much of it is identical to the corresponding modules in SUN, Apple or IBM implementations. If Intel or AMD introduce new processor architectures, Open Source developers will need new C compilers and LINUX will need new kernels. What fraction of the code is the latter? Only something really drastic (thirteen-bit characters firmly embedded in the hardware?) would cause a long delay. Microsoft might like a new processor to have features that would make life difficult for a rival software developer (Windows functions in ROM on the processor chip?) but there is no reason why the computer manufacturers would want to use a component that would reduce their market share.

"...one should always be suspicious of any movement that so fails to reconcile its divisions that it needs three names..."

Bill Thompson has at least two names. Does that mean he has a split personality? Open Source is a free movement, and that means that people are free to name it how they like.

"And while the Indian Linux community is currently fragmented, as Raj says, this could change very quickly."

He doesn't say why India needs a Linux community of its own. Are there common problems in India that differ from those of Linux users elsewhere? Any Linux developer belongs to the world-wide Linux community, and can communicate with it via the internet.