John Ribiero

BANGALORE (IDG News Service) — The Indian government will not back open-source software to the exclusion of proprietary software, according to Arun Shourie, India's minister for information technology and communications. The government is a key buyer of information technology in the country, and backers of open-source software were hoping that the Indian government would throw its weight behind open source. "In India we always like to think in terms of either-or. The formula we want to adopt instead is 'and also,' and encourage all kinds of software development in the country," Shourie told reporters shortly after the formal launch in Bangalore on Tuesday of the PARAM Padma supercomputer, designed by the government-run Center for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC) in Pune [see "India agency offers build-to-order supercomputer" Dec. 17, 2002]. "If there ... (more)