Indian Government to develop its own Operating System and anti virus products

With due respect to the Indian government (I am Indian and quite a bit of work for the govt) producing a new operating system is a completely misguided effort. And anyway this sounds like a new <i>distribution</i> of linux (the article does say "Derived from debian"), not a new "operating system".<p>I would imagine the simpler explanation is that a few "scientists" at CDAC need to justify their existence and have convinced programming illiterate politicians/bureaucrats they are doing something useful fo a change.

I wish press would stop phrasing "will customize a Linux distribution for their own use and internally standardize on that" as "will create their own operating system". See also Red Flag Linux, which was described in the press in the same way IIRC.<p>One is millions to billions of man hours, the other in the low thousands. They're not synonyms.

Building a new OS can come later (if ever) - they first need to build decent websites for the houses of Parliaments - see <a href="http://164.100.47.132/LssNew/members/memberdebate14.aspx?mpsno=4064" rel="nofollow">http://164.100.47.132/LssNew/members/memberdebate14.aspx?mps...</a> (JS Pagination hurts my sensibilities - as does the more than occasional broken HTML).<p>I've written scrapers to gather data from these sites for my website, and besides dealing with the above mentioned issues, I have to constantly beware of not overloading their servers - as an example, simply fetching the next page for each MP listed in <a href="http://164.100.47.132/LssNew/Members/Alphabaticallist.aspx" rel="nofollow">http://164.100.47.132/LssNew/Members/Alphabaticallist.aspx</a> without a timeout crashes their servers :(.

Developing an OS is lame. First, the Govt OS is not going to be usable (compared to the modern OSs). Second, not everyone (even in the Govt) is not going to use it. The variety of apps deployed and being used in the Indian offices is mind-blowing. There is no way the Govt can convince all these offices to switch to a different platform without spending a huge amount as switching costs.<p>[Tangential: I want the Indian Government to come up with its own cryptographic protocols/algorithms like the NIST in the US does. Even if it is a variant of the prevalent crypto systems, it is better than nothing, at least for the top secret documents.<p>Anybody know what crypto algorithms/protocols the Govts other than US use for their classified information?]

Nothing New.<p>BOSS, the Debian-based Linux flavor mentioned in the article, has been available for quite some time (atleast 3 years). IMO, haven't seen anybody using it (including majority of people who developed it - NRCFOSS and C-DAC)

The Indian Govt. first needs to provide electricity to run electronic devices. Once they have figured that, and a million other basic necessities, maybe they can go ahead and waste some scientists on stuff like this.

Umm, I can't see a single source mentioned in the pluggd.in article, or the TOI article.(<a href="http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/tech/enterprise-it/infrastucture/Govt-to-develop-own-operating-system/articleshow/5913140.cms?curpg=2" rel="nofollow">http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/tech/enterprise-it/infras...</a>), or whether its a press release my Ministry of IT, or a blog post by an employee.

This is a very badly written article. We are not familiar with the kind or degree of attacks a government's information systems (in this case, Indian Gov) may be facing. We are also not familiar how many other governments have already done or are doing this (This stuff is generally not public).<p>When the defense ministry of the fourth largest military power is involved, there are reasons.

It sounds like they're doing it simply because they have a lot of break ins.<p>How is a new operating system supposed to ensure better passwords? 99% of break ins are because of really lame passwords, isn't that true?<p>Creating your own OS is for that reason like inventing your own type of house because you never remember to lock your door.

Please, the needs of a multi-lingual Asian government is vastly different from, what is popularly construed, the popular choice.<p>For e.g. Harfbuzz - the unified text layout engine for Linux. The competing technology is SIL-Graphite, which supports Smartfonts and compound alphabets. So what does Harfbuzz say ?<p><i>For established scripts though, there is not much reason to prefer Graphite over OpenType.</i><p>I am Indian and support this exercise - maybe 90% of it will be waste, maybe 10% wont be. Maybe finally we will have a Linux Desktop Summit in India, which is potentially the biggest market for open source software.

Maybe operating systems are something governments need to worry about. I would be happy if the National Security Agency submitted security patches.

Honestly creating an OS 40 years after desktops appeared on earth is a dumbass approach. And that not the desktops are dying too! It seems purely a plan to drain out taxpayers money as it has been the case in past for India anyway!

so tomorrow will they make their own cars because the driver couldn't keep off an accident.

What a waste of taxpayer money.