Kerala, India Makes Open Source Investment

In Southwest India, the state of Kerala has committed to using, teaching, and developing open source software.

ZDNet reports:

“The Indian state, located on the country’s southwest coast, is partnering with Red Hat to train the technical staff of various government organizations and school teachers on desktop Linux and other open-source applications. The Linux vendor will also work with the state government to promote Kerala as a global destination for developing open source software.”

The wisdom of this plan is that as an early adopter, Kerala will develop valuable knowledge it can export to the global market, earning income helping others move to open source.

But in India, another state is also breaking ground in rolling out open source:

“Tamil Nadu, which embarked on a plan in January to put Linux in government offices, schools and villages, is making progress. Tamil Nadu is located on India’s southeast coast.

“According to C. Umashankar, managing director of the Electronics Corp. of Tamil Nadu (Elcot), the new operating system has gone down well with its computer users.

“We have switched over to 100 percent Linux in our office, which has more than 200 desktops and laptops. We have also been dispatching desktops with only Suse Linux,” he told ZDNet Asia in an e-mail interview.

“Although there was initial resistance to change, Umashankar noted, people warmed up to the software after an hour’s orientation.

“Elcot has opened a Suse Linux training center in its corporate office, and the first batch of 84 officials from the Department of Industries was trained in June. Trainers also conduct on-site training at various government offices.

“The current indications are that government users will fully accept the Linux OS in the days to come,” Umashankar said.

More than 3,000 Suse Linux desktops have been dispatched to government offices in Tamil Nadu, and Windows is not offered unless there is an absolute necessity.”

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Update on OpenOffice.org Mac Native Port

I’m a huge fan of NeoOffice and all the work its developers have been putting into it, but I am also keenly following the development of the native Mac OS X OpenOffice.org port formally supported by Sun.

Click the link above to see Eric Bachard showing off some of the latest development; it’s good.

I hope to see the two efforts collaborate productively. Combined, I think OpenOffice Mac/NeoOffice stand a good chance of becoming number one on the Mac, which will be a huge win for the community and for the entire world of open source.

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Jonathan Schwartz on OpenOffice’s Rapid Growth

Jonathan Schwartz, Sun CEO, talks about the importance of OpenOffice to Sun, and its rapid growth across the world.

“I’ve been across the planet for Sun, and everywhere I go, I see OpenOffice growing in adoption. It’s built, evangelized and localized by a massive community – it runs government agencies in Brazil, banks in India, high schools and universities across North America and Europe. We’re making huge progress across China. OO.o is in call centers and hospitals and legislatures and elementary schools, and localized globally, it exists in more languages than its (only) major competitor. It’s driven competition into a market which historically had none – and it’s created an opportunity for the world to standardize on an open, royalty and patent free file format for exchanging documents. Most recently in Norway, and eventually everywhere that believes in a free press.”

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