MeitY passed the “Policy on Adoption of Open Source Software for Government of India” in 2015 which mandated all software applications and services of the government to be built using OSS. However, government services continue to float tenders for proprietary software, even where numerous OSS solutions are available and widely used. For ex, this year the National Highways Authority of India (NHAI) floated a tender to procure proprietary Microsoft products, including Microsoft’s SQL server.
@rahulporuri and I discussed how we need to continuously monitor such tenders and failures to implement FOSS policies + produce a repository documenting the same. The next steps would be to then raise public awareness (such as through op-eds) and work to amend these lapses.
This topic is meant to:
- Seek inputs on how best we can document our findings
- Seek volunteers
- Get other comments/feedback on how we can take this forward