[FSF India] Public-Funded Knowledge : Free v/s Commercial

[Raj Singh]

I have been advocating sharing of information (data, software, ...) among
the various educational institutes/CSIR/ISRO/DRDO/BARC/CDAC/CDOT etc. --
particularly if we want to raise the academic teaching standards of RECs
and State/Private Engineering Colleges within our country.

I feel that public-funded institutes have the obligation to share and give
freely their contributions to all who ask for it -- obviously barring the
security-related strategic stuff.

An example of this kind that springs to the mind is CDAC's word-processing
software for Indian languages. It should have been given freely to all
government departments, goverment-funded institutes, etc. as it was
developed with "public" money. CDAC should have been in turn supported to
further enhance this software by the money which was otherwise spent on
commercial word-processing software by these bodies -- this is a very large
amount if one totals up all that has been already spent on this type of
procurement till date. In contrast, CDAC was "forced" to ask money for it
from others as they had to "commercially" justify the development of this
package.

Similarly for NCST developed Hindi software. I understand that NCST
subsequently tied-up with Microsoft and this formed the kernel of Indian
language support touted by Microsoft for MS-Word in 1999. So, now the
government and Indian public is paying Microsoft for what (in some sense)
was developed with public money and "belongs" to them !

-- Raj