FREE / OPEN SOURCE SOFTWARE (FOSS) FOR SOCIAL SECTOR
Rohit Vishal Kumar # Reader, Department of Marketing Xavier Institute of Social Service & Indranil Dasgupta Chief Technology Officer L2C2 Technologies, Kolkata & Sujeevan P Chief Technology Officer Swatantra Software Solution and Support, Kannur, Kerala
#
CORRESPONDING AUTHOR
Rohit Vishal Kumar Reader Department of Marketing Xavier Institute of Social Service P.O. Box No: 7, Purulia Road Ranchi – 834 001, Jharkhand, India Email:
[email protected] Phone: (0651) 2200-873 / 2204-456 Ext. 308 Mobile: (91) 99341-11169
ABSTRACT
Organizations in the social and NGO sector mostly work on shoe-string budget and as such are forced to use pirated softwares for their day to day work. However, with software companies getting strict about software license compliance, and the funding agencies in Europe and USA also demanding declarations of using licensed software, it may not be possible to conduct business using pirated software for much long. Under this scenario, the paper presents the alternative to the licensed software – free and open source softwares. It takes a look at the various software licensing modes and then goes on to provide a birds eye view of the various alternatives that are available for proprietary software. Subsequently it illustrates some of the social sector projects which have been implemented using free open source software – both in Indian and abroad. It is hoped that the paper will provide the social and NGO sector some food for thought and make them think of free open source software as an viable alternative.
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1. INTRODUCTION Over the last few years, there has been tremendous growth in research conducted in the social science sector by various agencies – both governmental and non-governmental. Social research has gained an eminence in various decision making aspects of governance; however most non-governmental organizations (NGO) – which operate of shoe string budget – suffer from poor quality of data preparation and analysis due to their inability to invest in commercial analysis softwares. According to the report published in the Hindu Business Line, software piracy in India is close to 73% (Hindu 2006). The major factor for such a high rate of piracy is that there exist a significant price differential between the commercial version of the software and the one available in the domestic markets. For example, SPSS Base v15 for Windows (1 year license for a single computer) is commercially available for $ 1599 (or approximately for Rs. 80,000/-) from the SPSS website whereas the same can be available from the pirated market for approximately Rs. 1000/-. This discrepancy in prices act as a deterrent for various NGO’s and other research organizations to use legitimate software. With the growing awareness about software piracy amongst the software companies, various measures have been initiated by the software companies to prevent “loss-of-revenue” by taking recourse to legal action. Although this may benefit the software companies, but it does not auger well for the NGO’s and other small research organizations, because they can not afford to get caught up in the legal battle with the software companies.
Another important factor is the “Trusted Computing” campaign which will be launched by Microsoft with the release of its new operating system MS Vista. Trusted computing require that each component challenge, identify and verify any other component that it interacts with; failure to respond to challenge leading to suspension of service. In simpler words, software copied from a CD may not run because the operating system or the hardware does not recognize the software as a “trusted” software. Furthermore, each component can verify the other component by using remote authentication. So for example, the operating system can query with the software developer as to whether the software is already licensed or not? If the response is positive, i.e. the license is already granted, then the operating can refuse the software access to the resources and prevent it from running stating that the software is illegal copy. Trusted computing measures have been aimed to prevent software piracy and restrict malicious codes being run on a trusted computer, but it also places a lot of restrictions in the hands of the user. In short, the “copy-and-run” days of software piracy may soon be at end;
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each and every piece of software may need to be licensed and authenticated irrespective of whether it was legally purchased or not.
In such a scenario, the growth of free and open source software movement worldwide, provides a significant relief to these companies. However, this type development has been largely ignored due to significant ignorance on the part of Indian companies. In this chapter we propose to highlight some alternative softwares which can be used by the NGO’s and small companies without fearing about repercussions from commercial softwares. In section 2 we take a look the free and open source movement and the various issues associated with the free open source movement. In section 3 we provide a brief overview of the softwares available in the free / open source domain for social organisations. In section 4 we give a brief overview of real world application of the FOSS applications in various sectors and conclude the final section by looking at the advantages and disadvantages of using free and open source softwares. The objective remains the same throughout the article – to highlight softwares which are available at marginal or low cost, under free/open source license, for the purpose of conducting research. It is hoped that the review would provide a new direction to analysis in the Indian NGO and research sector.
2. SOFTWARE MARKETING AND F/OSS
Marketing of computer software is normally done under three types of license structure – Commercial, Shareware and Freeware. The Commercial model is the most popular and perhaps the most well known license. The commercial or the proprietary software is a software whose rights are owned exclusively by a group of individuals usually a company. The source code of the license is usually not available and the source code, along with the software, is protected by patents, copyrights, software license or some combination of the three. The user only gets to use the software after he has paid the software license fees and has received the activation key codes for the software. For example MS Windows, MS Office are examples of the Commercial or Proprietary software. Most of the software used in research – like SPSS, SAS, Statistica, Systat, Stata, NCSS etc – are all marketed under the commercial license.
The term “Shareware” was coined by Bob Wallace to describe his word processor – PC Write. However, Jim Knopf and Andrew Fluegelman are considered the father of the Page: 4
shareware concept as their software PC-File and PC-Talk pre-dated the PC-Write by several months (Wikipedia 2007). Shareware – also known as “Try Before you Buy” allows the user to download the full software and use it for a certain number of days and determine whether the program meets the users requirements. The program has a built in request for registration and payment and keeps on reminding the user to register the software. Once the user is satisfied with the program, the user registers the software after paying the requisite fee and in turn receives the activation keys which remove the registration reminder. It is by far the most popular method of distribution of software on the internet. Shareware should not be confused with “Demo” programs. Demos are different in the sense that they are self contained programs which are not upgradeable to the full program. Demos only allow some features to be tested. On payment of the registration fees, the user is usually send a new link from which to download the full program. The software developer retains all the patents, copyrights and trademarks of the program – the user gets the freedom to try the software to determine his suitability before actually buying it. The widely acclaimed plotting and graphing program – Dplot – is an example of a Demo program.
The third marketing model which is widely used is “Freeware”. It can be described as a copyrighted computer software which is made available to the user free of charge, for an unlimited time. The only criterion for being classified as freeware is that the software must be made available for use for unlimited time at zero cost. The software developer retains all patents, copyrights and trademarks of the software – the user gets the use the software without any payment to the software developer.
The above three software distribution models were the dominant models of software distribution till about the early eighties. However, as information technology became available to larger set of people, a growing dissatisfaction was felt amongst the developer community as regards to the software distribution model. One of the biggest drawback of the commercial, shareware or the freeware model was that the user of the software had no control over the software in terms of software modification or customisation. Frustrated by the lack of clarity and extensibility propagated by the Commercial system of software development, Richard Stallman in 1983 started the “GNU Project and subsequently the “Free Software Foundation” (FSF) and defined software and software development in terms of freedom available to the developers and users. Free software as defined by FSF is a software which can be used, studied, copied, modified and redistributed with little or no restriction. Freedom Page: 5
from such restrictions is the central concept of the Free Software and as such Free Softwares should not be confused with freeware where the software is provided free of cost but the software cannot be modified or studied as the copyright lies with the software developer. The FSF further defines four types of freedom namely – the freedom to run the software for any purpose, the freedom to study and modify the program, the freedom to copy the program and the freedom to improve the program and release the improvement for the benefit of the whole community (GNU Project 2007). Three major styles of software licensing are available under the FSF – (a) “Copyleft” License which permits the original author to retain the copyright and permit redistribution and modification under terms to ensure that all modified versions remain free so long as the original author wishes (b) “BSD Style” License in which the original author retains the copyright protection solely to disclaim warranty and require proper attribution of the modified works, but permits modification and redistribution in any works, even proprietary ones, for as long as the original author wishes and (c) “Public Domain” License in which the original author has abandoned the copyright.
In 1998, Netscape decided to make the source code of its Netscape Navigator Browser public. In response to this various notable figures in the field of information technology suggested a model of production which subsequently came to be known as the “Open Source Initiative” (OSI) model. Open Source describes practices in production and development (not only in software but in any industry) that promotes access to the end products source material promoting transparency and liberty in development. The producer gains by getting new insight into the production and manufacturing process which in turn helps improve the quality of the product; and the consumers get a better product at much lower cost as research and development costs are reduced substantially. The notable difference with “Free Software” is that OSI is not concerned with licensing issues – rather it exists mainly for gaining support for companies to open up their source code for developers to study and modify (Hicks, Lumens et al. 2005). Prima Facie the philosophy of FSF and OSI looks similar but there exists a huge difference between the two. The focus of FSF is to make the software and source code free under specific licenses, whereas the OSI aims as getting the source code free with a view of improving it without imposing any type of license. Software organizations tend to prefer OSI as it allows them to define their own license and release the source code under the terms of OSI. The OSI movement has not been restricted to software development but has been extended to various other categories like Beverage Development, Pharmaceutical Development, Media and Education. Page: 6
Due to accident or design the FSF and the OSI movement have come together to create the new mantra of software development – Free Open Source Software (FOSS) – which is providing a significantly viable alternative for non profit and NGO sector. In the words of Jonathan Peizer (2006):
“There is a compelling reason for the nonprofit sector to seriously consider Open Source as an alternative. Proprietary vendors have been making software piracy and even legal purchase much more difficult for erstwhile nonprofits, particularly in the developing world, because the end-users cannot afford to spend a lot of money on it. Between online registration and monitoring, regressive and costly software licensing fees and aggressive piracy policing proprietary vendors use, nonprofits are caught between a rock and a hard place. Authoritarian governments can use software piracy of proprietary applications as an excuse to close down nonprofits who don’t agree with their policies. It’s no wonder proprietary software vendors are seriously rethinking their donation and discount policies for this sector, and its high time they did.”
However, it may be noted that in spite the impassioned plea for consideration of open source in non profit sector, a word of caution is certainly in order. FOSS softwares may significantly reduce the software acquisition cost by bringing it down to zero; it has certain other costs attached to it which may hinder adoption of FOSS softwares in the non-profit and NGO sectors. Inherent in the FOSS model is the need for adopting the software for own need. Many small research organizations and NGO’s may lack the technical know-how and or the manpower to modify the software at the source code level. Then there is the cost associated with training the people to use the software for the specific needs. Most FOSS softwares are bare-bones technology demonstrations or are written with programmer needs in mind and as such may lack sophisticated graphical user interface (GUI) making for a steep learning curve. Maintenance and after sales service may not be readily available for the FOSS softwares which again may hamper NGO operations. Finally there may be problems of interoperatability and compatibility in data and document exchange with partners who may be using standard commercial softwares. Page: 7
Keeping the above limitations of FOSS in mind we now propose to give a brief overview of the softwares available in the FOSS domain for various computing needs. From the viewpoint of cost we may also include some freeware applications which are widely used.
3. F/OSS SOFTWARES FOR OFFICE AUTOMATION Office automation refers to the varied computer machinery and software used to digitally create, collect, store, manipulate and relay office information needed for accomplishing basic tasks and goals. Data storage, electronic transfer and the management of electronic information comprise the basic activities of an office automation system (Encyclopedia of Small Business 2002). The history of office automation began with the typewriter and copy machine which mechanized previously mechanical task. Now a days it is increasingly being understood in terms of mechanization and conversion of information to electronic form. In this section we give a brief overview of the softwares that are provided by FOSS for various activities. Except for the Operating System – all the other applications mentioned here are cross-platform in nature, meaning that they can easily be run on MS Windows (if it is already pre-installed) or in Linux.
3.1 Operating System
An operating system is a computer program which manages the hardware and software resources of a computer. At the foundation level all operating system perform the basic task of managing systems memory, prioritizing system resources, controlling input, output and network devices and managing files. Microsoft WindowsTM is perhaps the most dominant operating system. According to one estimate MS Windows accounts for 87% of all desktop operating system worldwide (Wohl 2005). However, with the passage of time, the dominant position of Microsoft has been challenged and a viable alternative is available for desktops.
The UNIX like family of operating system, specially LINUX systems, provide a mature and a stable alternative for desktop operating system. Linux is a generic term which refers to any operating system that uses the Linux Kernel. The Linux Kernel forms the heart of the operating system and various companies have taken the kernel and have added enhancement
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to it and released them under their own brand name. Red Hat Linux, SuSE Linux, Slackware Linux, Ubuntu are some of the major distribution that are available in the marketplace.
----------------------Figure 1 about here ---------------------Usage of Linux brings in significant advantage to the less endowed NGO sector. The cost of acquisition being low – sometimes just the cost of CD’s to get a copy from the neighborhood Linux guy – the organizations can save substantially on the licensing fees. It provides a stable desktop with Graphical User Interface and almost all applications that could be ever used in any organization. Support is provided for a fee by the original distribution vendor or by the worldwide user base. A study by Enterprise Management Group (2006) conducted on 200 companies in USA found that companies using Linux based operating system less time in managing the system and that Total Cost of Operations was about $ 60,000 per annum less than companies using MS Windows. Thus Linux can provide an alternative for small and NGO organizations looking for legitimate operating system without incurring the added costs of licensing.
3.2 Office Application Suites:
One of the key tools required in any office organization is the Office application suite. Office suite provides a is a set of software applications which are designed to perform the basic task of word processing, number crunching, presentation and data storage on a small scale. MS Office again tends to be the dominant and consist of the following basic applications – MS Word (for word processing), MS Excel (for number crunching), MS PowerPoint (for presentation) and MS Access (for data storage).
OpenOffice.org is a free office application suite which is available under the FOSS banner for use to organizations. OpenOffice.org was released in 2000 with the intention of reducing the dominant share of MS Office by providing a free, open and a high quality alternative to the public. It provides the following components – Writer (for word processing), Calc (for number crunching), Impress (for presentation), Base (for data storage), Draw (a drawing program) and a couple of utility tools. It is fairly mature and is capable of working with documents and files created by MS Office. MS Word Document files created in the Page: 9
proprietary .doc format are opened without loss of formatting provided complex formatting was not used. Similarly MS Excel files created in the .xls format or MS PowerPoint files created in the .ppt format are open able without much loss of formatting. OpenOffice.org uses Extensible Markup Language (XML) as its underlying document language which makes these documents open-able in different platforms. Notably, Microsoft has announced that future versions of MS Office will also use XML format for its documents. Another advantage is that OpenOffice.org can produce Adobe’s PDF files, thereby eliminating the need for expensive conversion programs.
The popularity of OpenOffice.org can be gauged by the fact that 62.5 million downloads were reported from the OpenOffice.org website and large scale users include Singapore Ministry of Defense, The French Gendarmerie (Police) and the Supreme Court of India (Wikipedia 2007). ----------------------Figure 2 about here ---------------------3.3 Web Browser & Email Clients:
With the growing popularity of Internet, web browser and email clients have become an integral part of any workplace. The dominant Internet Explorer and Outlook Express from Microsoft faces stiff competition from the open source based Mozilla Firefox and Mozilla Thunderbird wrb browser and email client respectively.
Mozilla Firefox is a cross platform browser which if freely available from the internet. The Mozilla Firefox browser has various features which make web browsing a more enjoyable experience. It’s key features are tabbed browsing, incremental find, live bookmarking, an integrated download manager and search system. It can also be configured for advanced net features to increase the speed of surfing. It was created with security in mind and integrates strong cryptography and other security enhancements. It is estimated that Mozilla Firefox about 60 million users worldwide and has 13.71% of browser market share as on July 2006. (Janco Associates Inc 2006)
Mozilla Thunderbird is a cross platform email and news client developed by the Mozilla foundation – the creators of Firefox browser. It incorporates Junk filtering, Extensions and Page: 10
Themes and industry standard security features. However, it is not the only email client available for windows based platforms. The Bat, Sylpheed, Pegasus Mail, Eudora are some of the most commonly used email clients. 3.4 Software for Research:
For the purpose of research, various softwares are available under the FOSS license. Scilab and GNU Octave are general purpose numerical analysis languages which replicate all the facilities of the commercial Matlab program.
However, these programs are not geared
towards statistical analysis. For the purpose of Statistical Analysis – R Language – is the software of choice in the academic and the free software community.
The R programming language – commonly know as R – is a programming language and software environment for statistical computing and graphics. It was originally developed by Ross Ihaka and Robert Gentleman at the University of Auckland, New Zealand and released in 1996 (Wikipedia 2007). Since then, R has gained significant popularity in the academic circles the world over. It has been described as an integrated, interactive package for data manipulation and analysis that includes functions for standard descriptive statistics and for Exploratory Data Analysis. In terms of inferential statistics it has many varieties of the General Linear Model including the conventional special cases such as Analysis of Variance and MANOVA. Advanced features include correlational packages for multivariate analyses including Factor and Principal Components Analysis, and cluster analysis. Advanced multivariate analyses packages that have been contributed to the R project include Structural Equation Modeling, Hierarchical Linear Modeling and taxometric analysis. All of these are available in the free "packages" distributed by the R group. In addition to be a package of routines, R is a interpreted programming language that allows one to create specific functions when needed (Revelle 2006).
R can be freely downloaded from Comprehensive R Archive Network (CRAN) at http://cran.r-project.org/ and is available for Windows, Linux and Macintosh operating system. The programming language used in R is based on dual parentage – the S programming language developed by Bell Labs for statistical analysis and the Scheme programming language and it has a strong object-oriented flavour. Unlike other statistical packages like SPSS, Stata, Minitab, which provide point and click interface (or GUI’s) R is
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primarily command driven. As such, in the initial stages, users are intimidated by its programming interface. Furthermore usage of R requires a much deeper understanding of statistical theory and procedure than other statistical programs.
R is capable of reading data from a wide variety of softwares, both commercial and otherwise. Import or export of data is supported from simple text files, from Excel spreadsheets, Binary files, relational databases and from various commercial packages like Stata, Systat, SPSS, SAS, S-Plus etc. Data can also be pulled in directly over the network into R. (R Development Core Team 2006).
R can be extended via packages and the programming provides flexibility to extend or modify packages to suit ones requirements. In fact, the C-RAN website provides details of more than 400 packages which have been developed for use with R. Some of the well known packages are – actuar (actuarial analysis), agricolae (agricultural research), bayesm (Bayesian econometric analysis), boot (bootstrap analysis), cat (categorical data analysis), cclust (clustering), cocorresp (community ecology analysis), dyn (time series analysis), gap (genetic analysis), ifa (factor analysis), sem (structural equation modeling) etc. In fact, any imaginable statistical analysis can be conducted in R using either programming or a package. The Rcmdr (R Commander) (Fox 1997) package provides a graphical user interface to R and is comprehensive enough for most of the data analysis work which is undertaken on a day to day basis. 3.5 Other Software:
Besides the above, various other softwares are available under the FOSS license to meet the requirements of any organization. Herein we give a bird’s eye view of those softwares for the common knowledge of the organizations.
For desktop publishing, Scribus provides the same advantage as MS Publisher and for creating PDF documents PDF Creater provides the same functionality as Adobe Acrobat. For the purpose of project management, Planner and Open Workbench provides the necessary alternative to MS Project. For 3D animation and graphics, Blender, Wings 3D and POV-Ray provide low cost alternative to commercial softwares. GIMP provides a free replacement to the commercial and proprietary Adobe Photoshop and Corel Paint Shop. Similarly for
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diagrams, Dia provides the open source alternative to MS Visio. For file compression and decompression, 7-ZIP provides a better replacement with much lower compression files for audio and video formats, as compared to WinZIP and WinRAR
Another software of interest is the CiviCRM which has been developed as the open source constituent relationship management solution. It is a web-based solution and has been developed with the aim of meeting the needs of advocacy, non-government and the non-profit sector. It allows the NGO’s and other non-profit sector to manage relationships without spending a small fortune on commercial CRM solutions.
It is certainly difficult to do justice to all the FOSS softwares that are available to any organization on the web. LOOPlist (https://wiki.ubuntu.com/LoopList) provides a comprehensive detail of the open source software which run natively on Windows platform. In the next section we focus on some social sector projects which are extensively (in almost all cases completely) based on open source and free softwares..
4. F/OSS IN APPLICATION
Contrary to popular belief, FOSS softwares have been deployed in various fields leading to significant gains. And most of the deployment have been in the social sector. Here we provide a snapshot of some of the deployment of FOSS for various purposes, both in the country and abroad
4.1 Application in Education Sector The Goa Schools Computers Project (GSCP) in partnership with the Goa Education Department was initiated in 1995. It is a community-based project for computer education for the students of Goa. In addition the Project seeks to promote after-hours use of the computer facilities by adults in the community for e-mail access, information and IT entrepreneurship development. Since 2002, the Goa Government has provided 750 PC's to Goa's 350 secondary schools, thus enabling every secondary school in Goa to have at least 1 PC - the first state in India to achieve this goal. Simultaneously, GSCP has provided over 450 mainly recycled PC's to over 100 schools, which has reduced the PC student ratio to 1:60. The project methodology is to first determine the program design to ensure that
schools
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understand its obligations and raise funds in community to instill wiring, maintain equipment etc. Then teacher training is arranged and curriculum is developed. Then PC's for schools are either purchased locally with funds raised by the school or a local donor or from PC's donated by Government or companies in India or US. Then computers are refurbished (if used) and installed and the course starts with regular monitoring. After helping students to acquire basic computer skills, the subsequent challenge is to ensure that computers are used by teachers to encourage cognitive thinking among children and make learning an enjoyable experience. The vision of the project is to help all secondary schools in Goa to obtain a lab of at least 8 internet-ready computers with the help of the government, industry, and the community. The project runs on FOSS software and has provided enormous savings to the education sector and the Government of Goa. (for further details see: http://www.goasudharop.org/gscp/)
Another state where computers have been introduced in
schools is Kerala where the
‘IT@School’ Project has been successfully implemented in the district of Kannur. Here is the description of the project in the words of Sujeevan P. – whose company Swatantra Software Solutions and Support (S2S2) technologies implemented the project in Kerala:
“The project was initiated in year 2002 and lot of things have changed since then. The project was supported by the local Member of Parliament (MP) Shri A. P. Abdullakutty and funded through the MPLAD scheme.. Once the project has been identified , the next step was to utilize the limited resource the most cost effective way so that maximum number schools could benefit from the scheme. National Informatics Center, Kannur, convinced of using disk-less workstations based on GNU/Linux operating system, decided to try the same technology for setting up the school labs. Using disk-less PCs to boot over a network server, the requirement of high end hardware could be minimized and the money thus saved could be used for setting up more number of facilities.
In the first phase of the project 49 schools were identified. The state owned technology enterprise unit Keltron had all the infrastructure to provide the hardware facilities to schools and Keltron was chosen accordingly to implement the first phase of the project. In order to deploy the best suitable technology for disk-less workstations, an installation and feasibility test on LTSP server and etherboot was carried out by Swathantra Software Solutions & Support, Kannur at Keltron Control Center, Kochi. GNU/Linux operating system RedHat 8.0 distribution was used and configured for setting up an LTSP server (on Intel P4 machine) . Page: 14
After the successful feasibility test, it was decided to deploy LTSP as the solution for setting up disk-less workstations in schools. The LTSP server is a Pentium IV machine with CDROM drive and hard disk. The disk-less workstations are of Intel celeron machine without any hard drive and cdrom drive. Since project involved setting up installation on new hardware starting from scratch, the procedure was a bit simpler. All the machines, video cards, network cards, hubs, and other accessories were of identical type. This reduced the complexity of the setup to a minimum. Making the setup working on one server was good enough and this configuration could be copied to other machines. To boot diskless workstations from remote server, etherboot (www.etherboot.org) was deployed. Boot image downloaded from the site rom-o-matic.net was burnt into the ROM chip of each and every Network Interface Card (NIC). For example, all machine are equipped with Realtek 8139 NIC and the etherboot image corresponding to this card burnt into its EPROM chip.
After the successful testing of the machines, they were sent to the schools. To begin with, each school have one server and 3-5 diskless workstations. Local network was setup using standard hub and cables. A custom made RedHat 8.0 installation is done inside the server and LTSP & DHCPD configured to use dynamic IP for the network. In order to make Xwindow load much faster than the default GNOME or KDE , the thin window -manger "icewm" is installed on all the server. Icewm is configured with custom menu and selected applications. The other installed GNU software package include, Openoffice, multimedia, Internet applications, programming tools and many applets for educational use( physics, chemistry,maths etc.). A custom made single CD (GNU Utilities for Education) is used for setting up the installation fast and simpler.
The use of Linux provides significant advantages. For example only one powerful machine required as a server. For a small school setup with 5 terminals, the server can be a Pentium 4 machine with 512 MB of RAM. Now a days such server can be bought under Rupees 25,000. Existing older PC like Pentium I can be used as terminals. Low end pc with 32 MB ram and a network card is the requirement. Such machines can be procured under Rs 10,000. It is very cost effective and a 10 pc setup for a school can be done within Rs. 1.5 lakhs. Other advantages are that all software are installed on server machine and as such there is no need for multiple installation, making the system easy to upgrade, backup and maintain. UPS for uninterrupted power supply is required for the server machine only and the choice of operating system makes it free from virus attacks. “ Page: 15
4.2 FOSS application in Rural Livelihood
FOSS softwares have also been successfully used to bring information technology to the rural masses. The Jagriti e-Sewa project in the region of Punjab is a prime example of how open source can deliver technology to the rural people with low cost. The objective of the project was to provide digital connectivity for need based agricultural solutions, communication, health care, governance and other diverse services. The project involves setting up information kiosks, called Jagriti e-Sewa kendras in nodal villages of Punjab. Each of these centers are franchised to educate youth as well as ex serviceman. The whole system operates on 'Appropriate Technology Deployment' concept. For example, ordinary telephone lines are used for intranet operation, the software doesn't require any license as it runs on Linux. The kiosk, software and services can be operated by any individual who already has basic skills on computer operations. The services to be made available depend upon the locationspecific needs of people of that area. In specific reference to Punjab, the IT-enabled services which have been provided are Punjabi e-mails: sending and receipts, Delivery of Prepaid cards: Cell Phone, VCC, Internet, Internet Phone Cards, Booking of Travel Seats: Buses to Delhi Airport, Railway Tickets, Life Insurance Policies and Agricultural input/ produce linkages. The project is already operational in Four Districts of Punjab namely, Jalandhar, Nawanshahr, Kapurthala & Amritsar. The project has been able to serve a population of 30,000 so far at minimal cost. (for further details see: http:// www.jagriti.com)
In the Laos People Democratic Republic the Jhai Remote Village IT Project, which is community funded project, is a key example of how F/OSS opens up remote villages to mainstream. The direct objective of the project is to enhance the economic and social selfdetermination of villagers by providing the ability to communicate locally, regionally, and internationally. The project links five villages in the Hin Heup District, Vientiane Province, in a wireless Wide-Area Network (WAN). The project responds to villagers' express needs for telecommunications, business opportunities and enhanced education for their children through the development of a solid-state, low- wattage computer that can be powered by a foot-crank, a high-bandwidth wireless network and support for village small businesses. The network has immediately enhanced business and trade opportunities in market towns and the capital, Vientiane, and the establishment of a local market for sales of textiles and other products among the villages. Villagers will also connect by voice and email with family
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members and others in the Lao diaspora who now live overseas. The project provides the villagers with
the opportunity to perform simple business functions, such as typing
documents and creating spreadsheets, giving them access to tools to increase the viability of their family businesses and of the rural lifestyle that is at the heart of traditional Lao culture. (For further details see: http://www.jhai.org)
4.3 F/OSS application in Health Sector
F/OSS has been successfully used in the health sector. For example, In India, one of the leading hospital – the Breach Candy Hospital, Mumbai – runs completely on open source and free software. The project was self funded by the hospital trust and implemented by the technical staff of the hospital. Every computer (servers and desktops) in the hospital runs on Red Hat Linux and the hospital administration uses the self managed, self deployed and highly customized open source software for monitoring room / bed occupancy, report preparation and archiving of reports for histopathology department, capturing data from diverse specialized pathology labs directly to the report of the patient which can be accessed anywhere and in real time. (For further details see: http://www.breachcandyhospital.org)
The Worldcare TeleHealth Project in Malaysia is the complete anti-thesis of the above example. It is aimed at providing specialist medical opinions through a cost-effective e-health network in order to make the best medical services accessible to all levels of society across Malaysia The main idea of the project is to spread health care services to remote areas by transmitting electronic information and imaging’s through the internet to other areas of the world where different doctors could look at the case study and give their review upon it. Viewing and reporting of teleconsults is done through the Web based OpenMed Viewer, allowing the geographical barriers to be broken. It allows transmission of film-based radiological images as well as scanned paper documents, voice annotations, digital picture images and ECG scans from the remote areas of the country to the experts who after diagnosis send report again through the Internet. Hi resolution x-rays, MRIs and CT scans are sent through the industry standard DICOM protocols to the OpenMed Radiology application for viewing on 2k x 2.5k hi resolution diagnostic workstations. It has been implemented in 41 health centers present in both east and west of Malaysia and is running successfully in all of them. (For further details see: http://www.worldcare.com.my)
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4.4 F/OSS application in Other Sectors Freeware open source applications have also been used extensively in other sectors, for example the Open Infrastructure for Outcome Systems in Sri Lanka, The Microfinance Open Architecture Project in Bangladesh, The Swyam Krishi Sangam Smartcard Project in India, the Pakistan On-Line Project in Pakistan are all based on free open source softwares (CSDMS 2005).
Besides the above, various governments across the world have also shown a significant interest in f/oss softwares. In south and south east asia, the government of Bangladesh, Nepal, Pakistan, Cambodia, Malaysia and Laos PDR have shown a major interest in using F/OSS software. In fact, the Malaysian government has set up a $ 36 million fund to invest in open source technologies. Closer home, some of the key Indian organizations have been extensively committed to the use of open source. C-DAC, which builds and operates the PARAM series of super computers, has used UNIX for developing and running the supercomputers. Bhabha Atomic Research Center (BARC), Indian Railway Catering and Tourism Corporation (IRCTC), Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO), National Informatics Center (NIC) are some of the government agencies which are committed to open source deployment (CSDMS 2005).
5. CONCLUSIONS
On the overall, we have seen that there are a myriad softwares available for social research and NGO organizations to make a serious attempt to convert to open source. Although many people have stated that the cost of free software is felt in training and maintenance, there still seems to be a lot of debate on the subject. However, support in F/OSS softwares is provided by a large group of volunteers and it has as per the EMA report “response times are typically 30 minutes, up to eight times faster than industry average” (Enterprise Management Associates 2006). Most of the manuals and how-to are available in PDF format which are downloadable and reusable as per user convenience.
It should be noted that even though the F/OSS world provides a significantly mature platform for organizations wishing to convert to F/OSS, blindly jumping into the F/OSS poll is certainly not recommended. Any organization wishing to make the changeover to open source and free software should carefully consider the following – (i) Cost of Acquisition (ii) Page: 18
Availability of trained resource personnel (iii) Support Services (iv) Availability of required softwares and applications and (v) Extent of modification required for adoption. Only after seriously considering these factors should an organization make a commitment to the open source scenario.
The F/OSS model, provides an alternative model for organizations on a shoe string budget to carry out their work without being snared in the web of license. In case it is desired to keep certain aspects of the work away from the public eye, the organizations can opt for paying for a commercial license which allows them to keep their work from being distributed under the open source license. Thus the free / open source movement provides freedom to the research organizations in NGO sectors to work as desired and with flexibility without any loss of productivity. The free/ open source movement does depend on the community giving back to the software (or the rest of the community) and it is only through cooperation can better softwares can be build which would further enhance the workplace.
Acknowledgement: The authors wish to acknowledge and thank the support and feedback received from Mr. Sankarsan Mukhopadhyay of Red Hat Linux India and from Mr. Fredrick Nooranah in the initial stage of writing the paper.
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FIGURE 1:
Fig 1 : Redhat Linux running Gnome Desktop with various applications
Fig 2: OpenOffice.org Writer showing a Complex Document
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