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

http://www.pluggd.in/indian-government-operating-system-anti-virus-software-297/

by rkord • 16 years ago

25 34 16 years ago

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

eplanit3• 16 years ago

SELinux was an extraordinary contribution by the NSA, and is now pervasive in Linux distributions.

plinkplonk2• 16 years ago

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 distribution of linux (the article does say "Derived from debian"), not a new "operating system".

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.

eplanit3• 16 years ago

I agree, re-inventing the wheel is misguided -- and I've never known a government to produce technology (sure wouldn't trust government-made technology).

karanbhangui2• 16 years ago

Forgetting the Internet? How about all the stuff NASA made? How about crypto contributions from NSA? How about GPS from the US Navy?

nickpp• 16 years ago

Respect due for a government?! Wow, yours is a strange and different country...

And from what we can see, it's not deserved.

eru4• 16 years ago

The phrase looked more like rhetorical device to me.

anamax• 16 years ago

Giving a govt the respect that it is due does not say anything about how much respect is due.

yarapavan• 16 years ago

Nothing New.

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)

niyazpk• 16 years ago

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.

[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.

Anybody know what crypto algorithms/protocols the Govts other than US use for their classified information?]

plinkplonk2• 16 years ago

" I want the Indian Government to some up with its own cryptographic protocols/algorithms like the NIST in the US does. "

Fwiw they do use their own algorithms. I know (and have worked with) people doing exactly this. Like most of the NSA's work in the USA what they do is classified. I am sure every government worth its name does similair things.

Locke1689• 16 years ago

I am sure every government worth its name does similair things.

Eh, this is arguably bad. Cryptpography is only secure with massive peer review. The United States manages because the NSA is one of the largest cryptographic organizations in the world. Very few governments have the specialty mathematicians, cryptographs, and computer scientists to establish a suitable internal peer review process. India may be one of those countries, but I'm not sure.

eru4• 16 years ago

> [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.

Why? They could just use the standard algorithms that have been proven hard to crack in the open.

arnorhs• 16 years ago

It sounds like they're doing it simply because they have a lot of break ins.

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?

Creating your own OS is for that reason like inventing your own type of house because you never remember to lock your door.

eru4• 16 years ago

You could get away with passwords. There are some zero-knowledge protocols you can do with humans, instead of handing over a password.

You would probably not need a new operating system, since revamping logins (and similar) stuff would suffice. But you could get rid of passwords.

winter_blue• 16 years ago

What a waste of taxpayer money.

robertandy19803• 16 years ago

eviral• 16 years ago

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

shabda• 16 years ago

Umm, I can't see a single source mentioned in the pluggd.in article, or the TOI article.(http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/tech/enterprise-it/infras...), or whether its a press release my Ministry of IT, or a blog post by an employee.

lappie• 16 years ago

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.

arihant3• 16 years ago

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).

When the defense ministry of the fourth largest military power is involved, there are reasons.

robertandy19803• 16 years ago

I can vouch for pluggd.in but not TOI, trust me. Refer http://www.pluggd.in/party-uid-the-big-opportunity-it-servic... and http://www.pluggd.in/iit-jee-engineering-education-in-india-... as some the most internationally appreciated coverages that this blog has done.

Govt. in India has had a poor track record in technology and overspending too.

arihant3• 16 years ago

Comparing TOI with Pluggd.in is a terrible parallel. TOI (Times of India) is world's largest read english daily with very high reputation in the country.

That said, I do agree with you that Indian Gov have had some past cases of overspending. But when things like 9/11 (New York) and 26/11 (Mumbai) happen, it's the Government we blame first. India is shifting towards a massive (given the population) National electronic ID infrastructure, security is needed.

Moreover, creating an OS is hardly a significant expense in a country's budget. After an event like 26/11 and given the fact that India is about to host multiple worldwide sporting events in next 1-2 years, this hardly looks like a waste.

jerf• 16 years ago

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.

One is millions to billions of man hours, the other in the low thousands. They're not synonyms.

robertandy19803• 16 years ago

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!

sandGorgon• 16 years ago

Please, the needs of a multi-lingual Asian government is vastly different from, what is popularly construed, the popular choice.

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 ?

For established scripts though, there is not much reason to prefer Graphite over OpenType.

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.

rmanocha• 16 years ago

Building a new OS can come later (if ever) - they first need to build decent websites for the houses of Parliaments - see http://164.100.47.132/LssNew/members/memberdebate14.aspx?mps... (JS Pagination hurts my sensibilities - as does the more than occasional broken HTML).

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 http://164.100.47.132/LssNew/Members/Alphabaticallist.aspx without a timeout crashes their servers :(.

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

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