Indian Companies Embracing Linux Faster Than Ever

cpatil writes "CNBC-TV 18 India has just announced that India's largest Insurance company, LIC(Life Insurance Corporation of India) sealed a deal with Red Hat to use its desktop and server software. LIC has roughly 160 Million customers, making it a non-trivial deal. Leslie D'Monte over at rediff also has a closer look at Linux deployment in India."

Re:What about Windows?

[MadUndergrad]

That's probably true. I'm sure general computer use is growing so fast that they're embracing software left and right. The real question is how much market share each respective OS has.

Re:More indians taking american jobs

[grasshoppa]

Screw that, if another country is more efficient handling our crap jobs ( and let's face it, the programing jobs that are getting exported are the crap jobs ), then by all means let's let them.

Re:More indians taking american jobs

[Anonymous Coward]

it's all about efficiency. I wouldn't characterize a job as "crap" or "notcrap". Germans create a lot of the world's best MRI machines, Japanese people create high quality ink and photocopying machines. Indians happen to create application software efficiently. These are not "crap" jobs, these are jobs that can be done elsewhere more efficiently. Do we see Indians creating skyscrapers, or becoming the world's best lawyers? No, that is something that Americans have the highest efficiency.

relax, don't get emotional, try to figure out what your value add is and work towards those jobs.

Many thanks to the KDE developers!

[Anonymous Coward]

I have found Ubuntu to work best. I initially tried GNOME because that was the default desktop. It worked well, but my coworkers suggested I install and try KDE for a better experience. They were right. I did find the Tamil translations of KDE to be of a higher quality, and more widespread.

One problem I recall involved Galeon. It has decent support for Tamil, but for some of the configuration dialogs there was a mix of English and Tamil translations, and sometimes the Tamil translation would be missing outright! Now, I am thankful that I also understand English quite well, so I was able to switch over and finish the configuration that way.

Other core GNOME applications (like the Users & Groups utility, for instance) do not even have Tamil translations. It is unsuitable for purely Tamil-speaking users to deal with such translations!

I have not had any similar problems with KDE. The translations are always complete, and I think they are very well done. My many thanks to all who have provided such excellent work!

Re:blah blah and yeah

[giorgosts]

Here in Greece we have the tax authorities database (www.taxisnet.gr) running Oracle on RHEL, and that makes us another 8 mill. customers. So I guess proffesionals know about their business and install what's best for them. What about the consumer though. Can he make the switch?

Re:KDE offers better Tamil, Hindi and Urdu support

[MarkByers]

KDE is the leader when it comes to supporting the popular Indic languages like Urdu, Tamil, Hindi, and Bengali.

If you could link to some statistics it might be interesting to see.

According to Gnome's website [gnome.org].

Gnome v2.14

Hindi: 94.10% complete.
Tamil: 66.64% complete.
Benglai: 80.33% complete.

According to the KDE's website [kde.org]:

Kde stable:

Hindi: 57.06% complete.
Tamil: 66.13% complete.
Bengali: 23.93% complete.

Critical mass

[teslatug]

Linux has gotten to the point where Microsoft's FUD can no longer hurt it. There are enough companies that have adopted Linux now that nothing that Microsoft says can cause clueful companies to ignore a Linux solution. Sure Microsoft will make or keep some sales due to FUD, but that no longer hurts Linux but perhaps the companies themselves.

The next battle may be with patents, but with IBM so involved with Linux, I seriously doubt Microsoft would go head to head with Linux for fear of stepping on IBM's toes. I actually wish there would be a big patent battle. If there was it would probably fizzle out with the result being some cross-patenting agreement, but there is a miniscule chance that companies and the government would realize the mess of patents if we had an apocalyptic patents battle.

Stateless Linux

[Chemicalscum]

Since this is a major integrated desktop and server deployment. It is an interesting question to ask is RH using its stateless Linux technology. It seems to me that the adoption of the approach is one factor that can drive a Windows to Linux desktop migration as is happening with LIC. The Fedora Project defines stateless Linux as:

The Stateless Linux project is an OS-wide initiative to ensure that Fedora computers can be set up as replaceable appliances, with no important local state.

For example, a system administrator can set up a network of hundreds of desktop client machines as clones of a master system, and be sure that all of them are kept synchronised whenever he or she updates the master system. We provide several technologies for doing this.

This is an obvious improvement over the situation now when a legion of MCSE services the networked MS Windows fat (in fact boated or obese) clients. By adopting this technology a large corporation can avoid the even greater bloat that will be enforced by the Vista upgrade.

It seems to me that there are three major approaches to the forthcoming corporate migrations to the Linux desktop by those corporations forward looking enough to want to avoid the cost and dislocations of the upcoming upgrades to Vista and who at the same time want to make cost savings and improve IT efficiency.

1. There is the Novell approach which is to replace the Windows fat client by a better more cost effective Linux fat client, i.e. SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop.

2. There is the IBM approach which uses a Java Rich Client Platform (the Eclipse RCP) that is OS agnostic and which allows a smooth transition from Windows to Linux. This involves the Websphere based Workplace technology, the OOo based IBM productivity editors and new Hannover Notes client which runs natively on Linux.

3. Finally there is the RH stateless Linux approach outlined above.

Re:KDE offers better Tamil, Hindi and Urdu support

[archen]

I'm not sure how you neccesarily arrive at that conclusion. Although I agree that the statistcs don't really seem to mean much. If you dig deeper into the "packages" translated, kde has WAAAY more applications to translate then what are considered part of gnome base and gnome desktop.

Why is Gnome being translated into Old English anyway?

Re:Simputer vs tivo

[alphakappa]

It's a pointless argument. Many of the american 'hits' are actually designed and created in India. For example, Portalplayer which powers the iPod, or the Slingbox... many of these small american companies are simply headquartered in the silicon valley for business purposes, while their entire design and development teams are in Bangalore/Hyderabad. As long as the major customers are in the US, that's how things will be. It's pointless to try to distinguish them as Indian or American companies. They are both.

Indian Companies don't advocate FLOSS

[x86processor]

Companies in India use FLOSS a lot. From my contacts, and experience with FLOSS in India in the past 1 1/2 years, this is the list that I have prepared:

  http://shakthimaan.com/misc/database.html [shakthimaan.com]

David Axmark, the co-founder of the mysql project was here in India, recently, and recently gave a talk at IIT-M (http://www.chennailug.org/ [chennailug.org]). He said that Indian companies are major consumers of free/open source software, but, don't produce/contribute back to the community.

Recently, there was the Debain Defconf meeting in Hyderabad, and about 1000 "developers" from India had participated, only 2 of them were Debian contributors.

Companies seldom market about FLOSS in India, where the "majority" of the masses read their news from newspapers, get updated from radio broadcasts and television broadcasts.

LIC

[Anonymous Coward]

offtopic -1

LIC offers insurance services in India, as government owned company. It has monopoly since ages, since private companies were not allowed to provide services in India.

One of the most important fact is LIC services are ineficient, very expensive and theft oriented. People in India are afraid of claiming anything, because no claims are settled by LIC.

LIC has loads of money to share.