EC votes for Open Source

Kolkata, Aug 19: Who can ignore Richard Stallman's cry for freedom and for free software? At least not the Election Commission of India, one of the pillars of democracy created by the Constitution.

With Stallman, a passionate evangelist of the Open Source software movement, in India on a proselytising mission, the Election Commission has decided to uninstall Microsoft Office applications from its entire workspace and replace them with the free OpenOffice.

OpenOffice is freely downloadable from the Internet (www.OpenOffice.org), can be shared with others without any fee and upgraded by users according to their needs since the source code is available, unlike in Microsoft software.

From September 1, every Election Commission office will have a PC loaded only with OpenOffice and Mozilla or Opera, the open source Internet browsers. Chief Electoral Officer Debashis Sen said: "At a meeting on August 7 and 8, we have decided to replace the Office suite of Microsoft with OpenOffice. One of the reasons is cost."

The Election Commission is the largest government body to have opted for free software and the open-source environment. OpenOffice development is a community initiative supported by Sun Microsystems.

The cost of the MS Office suite comes to around Rs 15,000 per licensed copy and Microsoft generally gives a 10% discount on institutional sales. For Microsoft, the switch would mean loss of substantial revenue. In West Bengal alone, the Election Commission has 100 computers in 65 sub divisions.

There is hope yet for Microsoft and database major Oracle. For the moment, Sen said, the commission has decided to stick with the Windows operating system (OS) and Oracle database.

“In the long run, we feel we should have a non-proprietary environment wherever possible,” Sen said. So Windows may also go away and be replaced with an open source OS like Linux.