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Project: Linux  Articles
Open source movement key for Internet growth in India
By Madanmohan Rao <madanr@microland.net>
Posted: ( 2000-10-30 05:47:04 EST by )
Comparing the Indian Internet market to others like the U.S., net activist
John Barlow said that countries which did not have deep ties to the
industrial economy would be more unfettered to harness the Information
Age. Indians have a particular strength in being able to deal with
uncertainty, ambiguity and chaos, according to Barlow.
The Open Source movement is an extremely powerful model for software
development and advancement, and emerging economies like India particularly
have a lot to gain from adopting it, according to John Perry Barlow,
self-styled "Net prophet." Barlow, co-founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (www.eff.org) and
an outspoken proponent of free speech in digital media, gave an address at
the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore, as part of a two-city tour in
India which also included Bombay. Complex software is best developed when it is allowed to grow organically -
there is a limit to how much top-down design you can do, Barlow said. He pointed to Apache's solid dominance in the Web server market as evidence
of the power of the Internet-based open software model. Apache, a freely
available Web server based on the Linux operating system, accounts for over
half of all servers on the World Wide Web. "I am opposed to Microsoft's way of dominating the industry. But at the
same time, I think the U.S. lawsuit against Microsoft's anti-competitive
practices is a waste of time," said Barlow. The writing is on the wall - Microsoft as a centralised company cannot hope
to compete with de-centralised and distributed models of development like
the Open Source movement, he said. Comparing the Indian Internet market to others like the U.S., Barlow said
that countries which did not have deep ties to the industrial economy would
be more unfettered to harness the Information Age. Indians have a
particular strength in being able to deal with uncertainty, ambiguity and
chaos, according to Barlow. "Cyberspace will always be undefined," he said. However, India needs to improve its bandwidth to the international Internet
- the current 364 Mbps is "pathetically inadequate" to really plug into the
global economy. Deregulating international connectivity should be the top
priority of the country, and not passing e-commerce regulation as in the
recently passed IT Act 2000, according to Barlow. Governments in the information age are often not just clueless, but
dynamically anti-clueful, he said. Barlow also cautioned Indians against blindly emulating Silicon Valley or
U.S. business models. There is a lot of opportunity in bringing the Net to
the villages in India; there already are interesting patterns of access
emerging around the community centre model, as opposed to the individual
dial-up model which dominates the U.S. market. Along with Esther Dyson, Barlow is co-founder of Bridges.org, a non-profit
organisation geared at stemming the international digital divide. Freeware and shareware have a key role to play here, he said. People can
make more money through skills and minds via relationships, rather than
through bloated prices for intellectual property. "In the information age, value is based not on scarcity but on
familiarity," said Barlow. Addressing concerns over the aftermath of the Black Friday tech market
crash in April and its implications for the Internet economy, Barlow said
the wildly inflated stock valuations were "silly" and that we are now
"thankfully back to doing business with hard work and a reasonable path to
sustainability and profit." He was particularly critical of the U.S. recording industry in their
efforts to crack down on sites like MP3.com and Napster.com. Barlow drew
parallels to the early days of the video cassette industry, which the
Motion Picture Association of America tried to suppress for five years;
today 70 per cent of the U.S. movie industry revenues comes from video
sales and rentals. The Grateful Dead, the rock band with whom Barlow was a lyricist for some
time, pioneered a business model where taping was freely allowed in
concerts; the band became much more popular for its live concerts than for
its studio albums. Barlow cautioned India against getting stuck in the "IPR trap" that the
U.S. entertainment industry was heading into. He also urged Netizens to
actively remove bureaucratic hurdles in the Internet economy. For instance, it is not possible in India for individuals to register
".co.in" domain names - only organisations can. "I'm sure this is because
the registration process here is controlled by a bunch of old power hungry
academics," Barlow remarked. Looking ahead down the road, he said that if there is one word to describe
India's future in the Internet Age, it is "hope." He said the Net must be protected as a medium where nobody can shut out
anyone else, no matter who they are or what they say. "Don't block out hate
and porn - educate, understand, and convince people of choices and
priorities," he urged. "You can't own free speech. We may be in one of those moments where you can
be utopian and still make sense," Barlow concluded.
Why does Linux make sense for India?
Electronic Frontier Foundatation
Bridges.org
Other articles by Madanmohan Rao
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