India’s BJP Party takes the FOSS route
p2pnet news | Open Source:- On the right is an interesting list of software programs used by the BJP.
What’s the significance?
BJP is short for Bharatiya Janata Party, India’s largest political party with around 20 million ordinary members and about four million active members, and it’s determined to become one of the most high-tech political parties in the next two years.
And it isn’t squandering millions of dollars on Microsoft product. Instead, it’s taking the free and open source software (FOSS) route.
The BJP says it plans to implement Wi-Fi connectivity in all its headquarters plus nationwide IP video telephony and unified messaging networks, says Linux.com.
“We have found that it is possible to create an entire enterprise IT ecosystem using only FOSS,” it has Prodyut Bora, national convenor of the BJP information technology cell, saying.
“He says BJP plans to use CentOS as its server operating system and Ubuntu on desktops, along with many enterprise and infrastructure applications,” says the story, going on, “ePrints, for example, is used as internal document library, to build a BJP version of the MSDN Library. The choice of Qmail as mail transport agent is due to the fact that the IT cell staff believe in core competency and, as Bora says after a nine-month trial without any problem, “Qmail does exceedingly well what it is supposed to do: transfer mails”.
The party expects IP telephony to, “greatly reduce phone bills, and the videophones the party plans to use cost much less than full computers — 14,500 rupees (about $315) versus 30,000 rupees (about $650),” says Linux.com, going on, “Video telephony and seamless integration of fax, voice mail, and email would enable BJP leaders to send instructions to remote offices and know how they were executed much more quickly than in the past.”
The BJP also plans to be the first Indian political party to have its own Web connectivity between headquarters and state units, with about 100 caching servers to speed up access to its 36 official Web sites, says the story, adding:
“BJP leader Shri Lal Krishna Advani recently discovered that ‘one way of connecting to Young India is via the Web,’ and BJP President Shri Rajnath Singh says, ‘Unbiased and unfiltered feedback from the frontlines needs to flow up to the party leadership. I expect modern communication tools to facilitate such a dialogue’.”
Linux.com – Indian political party turns to FOSS, October , 2008
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October 25th, 2008 at 3:38 pm
Awesome win for FOSS.