Hi,

I don't know how much our state government has been IT enabled, but with the very poor economic condition in mind, it would be good if our government moves to Free / Open Source Software, instead of paying proprietary licenses charges in huge amount to Microsoft and others.

With GNU/Linux -
* they can download the operating system
(or an Enterprise copy of Red Hat/Suse with some few hundreds of Rupees)
* they can even modify it to suit their needs
* they can make copies
* and no money flows out of the state.

This is just an idea which I think would be advantageous for our state _economically_ and _technically_.

~ Pebam Ringo

It's not just because it's cheap; it's because it's much more reliable, more secured, better performance and ......

Check out: http://www.dwheeler.com/oss_fs_why.html#motivation

Here are some extracts:

IBM studies found GNU/Linux highly reliable. IBM ran a series of extremely stressful tests for 30 and 60 days, and found that the Linux kernel and other core OS components -- including libraries, device drivers, file systems, networking, IPC, and memory management -- operated consistently and completed all the expected durations of runs with zero critical system failures. Linux system performance was not degraded during the long duration of the run, the Linux kernel properly scaled to use hardware resources (CPU, memory, disk) on SMP systems, the Linux system handled continuous full CPU load (over 99%) and high memory stress well, and the Linux system handled overloaded circumstances correctly. IBM declared that these tests demonstrate that "the Linux kernel and other core OS components are reliable and stable ... and can provide a robust, enterprise-level environment for customers over long periods of time."

GNU/Linux is more reliable than Windows NT, according to a 10-month ZDnet experiment. ZDnet ran a 10-month test for reliability to compare Caldera Systems OpenLinux, Red Hat Linux, and Microsoft's Windows NT Server 4.0 with Service Pack 3. All three used identical (single-CPU) hardware, and network requests were sent to each server in parallel for standard Internet, file, and print services. The result: NT crashed an average of once every six weeks, each taking about 30 minutes to fix; that's not bad, but neither GNU/Linux server ever went down. This ZDnet article also does a good job of identifying GNU/Linux weaknesses (e.g., desktop applications and massive SMP). Hopefully Windows has made improvements since this study - but the OSS/FS have certainly made improvements as well.

GNU/Linux is more reliable than Windows NT, according to a one-year Bloor Research experiment. Bloor Research had both OSes running on relatively old Pentium machines. During the one year test, GNU/Linux crashed once due to a hardware fault (disk problems), which took 4 hours to fix, giving it a measured availability of 99.95 percent. Windows NT crashed 68 times, caused by hardware problems (disk), memory (26 times), file management (8 times), and various odd problems (33 times). All this took 65 hours to fix, giving an availability of 99.26 percent. It's intriguing that the only GNU/Linux problem and many of the Windows problems were hardware-related; it could be argued that the Windows hardware was worse, or it could be argued that GNU/Linux did a better job of avoiding and containing hardware failures. The file management failure is due to Windows, and the odd problems appear due to Windows too, indicating that GNU/Linux is far more reliable than Windows. GNet summarized this as saying "the winner here is clearly Linux."

A similar study by Reasoning found that the MySQL database (a leading OSS/FS database) had fewer defects than a set of 200 proprietary programs used for comparison. In a similar manner to the previous study, on December 15, 2003, Reasoning announced its analysis results comparing MySQL with various proprietary programs. MySQL had found 21 software defects in 236,000 source lines of code (SLOC), producing a defect density of 0.09 defects/KSLOC. Using a set of 200 recent proprietary projects (totalling 35 million SLOC), the same tools found a defect rate of 0.57 defects/KSLOC -- over six times the error rate. Again, not all defects are found by their tool, and this certainly doesn't prove that OSS/FS will always be the highest quality, but it clearly shows that OSS/FS can be of high quality.

Cost: