Prostrate yourself before the GNU, commands Indian DEITY

The best-acronymed government department in the world – India's Department of Electronics and Information Technology (DEITY) – has laid out a new policy (PDF) commanding the nation's government to use only open source software.

The policy statement is rather blunt:

Government of India shall endeavour to adopt Open Source Software in all e-Governance systems implemented by various Government organizations, as a preferred option in comparison to Closed Source Software (CSS). The Open Source Software shall have the following characteristics:

• The source code shall be available for the community/adopter/end-user to study and modify the software and to redistribute copies of either the original or modified software.


• Source code shall be free from any royalty.

Compliance with the policy is “mandatory” and applies to all central government agencies for state agencies when they replace or upgrade “e-governance” software.

There's an out if an agency needs software that isn't readily available as open source, but the policy insists on calling for only open source products in all future RFPs.

When the UK government adopted open document format, Microsoft made its displeasure known. The Reg's trawl of the web has turned up no such reaction this time, from Redmond or others. That may be because India's still a smallish market, in terms of sales.

There's also lots of wriggle room in the definition of “e-governance”, which DEITY says is “A procedural approach in which the Government and the citizens, businesses, and other stakeholders are able to transact all or part of activities using Information and Communication Technology tools.”

Between that loose definition and the get-out clause for apps that aren't easily found as FOSS, it looks like India's not blocking proprietary software entirely, but is making it plain it prefers open source whenever possible. ®

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