Assocham demands fair, non-discriminatory regime for OSS

The government should modify the current policy on adopting open source software (AOSS) to provide a fair and non-discriminatory software ecosystem, industry body Assocham said today.
In a note submitted to the Information Technology (IT) Ministry, the chamber has proposed extensive stakeholder consultations to build a world-class, business friendly and a technology neutral IT procurement policy and environment.
In March this year, the government had announced a policy for adopting open source software (OSS), making it mandatory that such software is considered along with proprietary products, as it looks to bring in transparency and lower total cost of ownership of projects.

The policy is applicable to Central government organisations and those State governments that choose to adopt this policy.
The chamber says earlier Government reports on IT have been against any procurement preference and have advocated Open Standards and Interoperability, rather than open source alone.
"There are some who believe that in cases where open source software is available, no commercial software should be used. This can sometimes be counter-productive, since there may be cases when commercial software is better suited than the open source versions.

"It is not a good idea to force the use of specific software of any type. Instead, the focus should be on adopting open standards, and using open source as prudent," Assocham said.

The industry body is of the view that the Department of Electronics and IT (DeitY), has the important responsibility of growing the entire information technology (IT) ecosystem in the country.
This includes many aspects other than Open Source and e-governance, for instance, hardware, software, communication, manufacturing, new technologies like IOT, R&D, BPOs, services etc. Hence, DeitY which is the apex body has to be strictly technology neutral and should not mandate any technology at the expense of any other technologies, it said.
Under the Policy, all government organisations, while implementing e-Governance applications and systems will have to include a specific requirement in Request for Proposal (RFP) for all suppliers to consider OSS along with closed source software (CSS) while responding.

Suppliers will have to provide justification for exclusion of OSS in their response, if they do so.