The Indian Government is already trying to DIY FOSS - Should it?

In a previous post, I wrote about 8 things a government can do about FOSS where I talked about categorizing the governments actions in 8 distinct ways. From what I've been reading online, it looks like the Indian Government is already trying to Do-It-Yourself (DIY) FOSS. To recap, DIY-ing is the very last option in the "8 things" and it's risky. Especially in the case of FOSS, DIY is risky. Given the scale of government operations, any DIY solution that the government comes up with gain widespread usage, which can then lead to inertia. Remember that DIY-ing requires not just building expertise in FOSS but also continually maintaining it. If the Indian government doesn't maintain the necessary expertise, it risks the FOSS project falling behind the curve.

Let's look at the Samarth eGov project as an example of the Indian government DIY-ing FOSS.

Samarth project aims at creating an Open Source, Open Standard enabled Robust, Secure, Scalable and Evolutionary Process Automation Engine for Universities and Higher Education Institutions. The project is being implemented by University of Delhi (DU).

In "Universities Onboard" section of the webpage, 57 Central, State and TEQIPs (Technical Education Quality Improvement Programme) are listed. In the "Coverage" section of the webpage, they state that the software is currently being used in 20+ States and UTs of India and boasts of that more than 14,000 users. See what I mean by reach? How many FOSS projects can you think of that are used this widely and were adopted this quickly.

Note that I can't find the exact date when this project was launched. I'm seeing news reports from mid-2020 about various Universities beginning to use the Samarth eGov platform but I can't find official documentation on when it was officially created. The product booklet contains a "Product Snapshot" from 2019 so maybe the project started in 2019. I don't know. Do you?

But my main issue with the Samarth eGov project is that I can't find the code. I should have probably started with this. The description above of the project uses the words "Open Source" so where is the code? I've scoured the entire website and I haven't been able to find a link to a code repository e.g. a GitHub/GitLab/BitBucket repository.

By comparison, FOSSEE is also a DIY FOSS initiative by the Indian Government. One of the projects under the FOSSEE umbrella is the eSim project and in their Downloads page, they provide links to code repositories where we can browse the source code, all of which are hosted under the FOSSEE organization on GitHub. That's what I'm looking for. Where is the source code for Samarth eGov and why is it not listed on the main website?

Also. Why did the Indian Government even fund the creation of a new FOSS project? Samarth eGov is supposed to solve the ERP issues facing Indian Universities so did they evaluate existing FOSS ERP solutions, for example ERPNext? What are the downsides of ERPNext that Samarth eGov fixes? Did the Indian Government try to adopt ERPNext and run into issues? If so, what were they? Instead of creating an entirely new FOSS project, did the Indian Government evaluate the possibility of contributing to an existing FOSS project and improving it?

Until recently, I naively thought that it was a good thing when Governments get involved in FOSS. I don't think so anymore. I can't tell if the Indian Government has devoted the necessary expertise for this FOSS project to succeed because I can't see the software. I should stop calling it a FOSS project because the code isn't accessible, from what I can see.

Do you know of other FOSS initiatives by the Indian Government? If so, please tell me about it. I'd love to see more examples of the Indian Government DIY-ing FOSS.

Popular posts from this blog

Animation using GNUPlot

Image
Animation using GNUPlot I've been trying to create an animation depicting a quasar spectrum moving across the 5 SDSS pass bands with respect to redshift. It is important to visualise what emission lines are moving in and out of bands to be able to understand the color-redshift plots and the changes in it. I've tried doing this using the animate function in matplotlib, python but i wasn't able to make it work - meaning i worked on it for a couple of days and then i gave up, not having found solutions for my problems on the internet. And then i came across this site, where the gunn-peterson trough and the lyman alpha forest have been depicted - in a beautiful manner. And this got me interested in using js and d3 to do the animations and make it dynamic - using sliders etc. In the meanwhile, i thought i'd look up and see if there was a way to create animations in gnuplot and whoopdedoo, what do i find but nirvana! In the image, you see 5 static curv
Read more

Thoughts on the National Deep Tech Startup Policy

The Principal Scientific Advisor to the Government of India published a draft policy to support and nurtue the unique requirements of Deep Tech startups in India. I just finished reading it and put together a few comments in a FOSS United forum thread . I will probably read it again a week or so later and try to update my comments on the thread with any new insights/thoughts I have.
Read more

Arxiv author affiliations using Python

So, I wanted to get author affiliation information from papers on arXiv. arXiv provides with an API to bulk query their database and get information. Following that, I look for the attribute 'arxiv:affiliation' in the html data. Here's the code - import urllib from BeautifulSoup import BeautifulStoneSoup   url = 'http://export.arxiv.org/api/query?search_query=all:astro&start=0&max_results=1000'   data = urllib.urlopen(url).read() soup = BeautifulStoneSoup(data) #print(soup.prettify()) #list = soup.findAll('arxiv:affiliation') #for i in range(len(list)): #        print list[i].contents   test = [tag.string for tag in soup.findAll('arxiv:aiffiliation')] Now, the problem I'm having is that I'm getting affiliation of all authors which I want to split into sets of affiliations of authors of a paper, which I'm stuck on at the moment. Once I get that part, I can move on to the next part of this pet project, displaying these
Read more