Developers of the world -Unite!

A spectre is haunting the proprietary software industry: Free-Libre and Open Source Software (FLOSS).

Karl Marx would have been elated at the success of FLOSS today as a subversive and alternative to the global behemoths of proprietary software. As little as ants would be but equally hardworking and persevering, as diverse as workers may get to be, the FLOSS community across the world has rewritten the rules of intellectual contribution and technological growth. They have broken the shackles that tie them in respective nationalities and units and have created a new chain formed from intellectual and autonomous solidarity. They have created a business model so powerful and so transcendent that this has forced even proprietary software to adopt it in its own way.



Any primer on the software industry in the world today would tell you that the industry was dominated by corporate units. For example, in the most important operating system and word processing/office applications business, Microsoft Technologies has had a huge monopoly. This has been buttressed by a variation of ‘license raj’ that allows code written by Microsoft to be available in the form of high ‘APIs’ or keys that are available for licensees to buy. In essence, users are denied access to proprietary software’s code base and all one gets to have is the ability to ‘consume’ the product without having the ability (or only having a limited and constrained one as defined in the copyright license) to alter the product to their choice.

Free and open software on the other hand makes a qualitative leap by allowing the consumer to build upon/alter and improve the product. The success of operating systems such as GNU/Linux, internet browsers such as Mozilla Firefox and office applications such as OpenOfficeare and other FLOSS applications has meant that the user not only has enough choice on the product to consume, but that he/she has the power now to become a product developer since the source code is available. The availability of the source code comes with a license too, albeit of a philosophically and instrumentally different kind: a ‘copyleft’ license. This license does not come with a negative freedom aspect of preventing users to do something outside the license, but actually comes with a positive freedom that enforces users to keep the software ‘open’.

There are some basic differences between the ‘free software’ and ‘open source software’ streams. The former harps upon the philosophical notion of liberty in using and modifying software, while the latter talks about the fundamental leap in performance because of the advanced community-oriented business model that ‘open source’ provides.

Despite such distinctions, however, very few software products exist that are exclusively ‘open’ and not free or vice versa. The success of the free and open source movement was seen particularly in the collaborated effort that went into designing an OpenDocument Format (ODF) standard for word processing and electronic office document applications. This standard was arrived after nearly three years of toiling by the developing community across the world, which included individuals and other big companies specialising in enterprise applications such as Sun Microsystems and IBM. Now the ODF standard is widely accepted as an Office standard and has been adopted by Open Office, Google Documents and other applications. The presence of a unifying standard made the job of users using various applications easier. These multiple applications could communicate to each other sparing a headache for the users to have to face the problem of incompatibility of various application file formats even though they performed one single documentation/word processing function. Evidently this affected the monopoly strength of office applications offered by the biggest software company in the world, Microsoft Applications.

The logical thing to do would be to adopt the ODF standard for Microsoft Office products keeping the philosophy of universalisation intact. Yet, Microsoft chose to introduce its own open source standard OpenOffice Extensible Markup Language (OOXML). The logic that Microsoft provided was that the presence of many standards helped foster the free market as has been the case in other areas such as Picture Readers. The adoption of OOXML as a universal and full international standard, however, hit a roadblock as a majority of countries affiliated to the worldwide standards body, International Organisation for Standardisation decided to reject it in September 2007. OOXML still had a lifeline thrown in the form of a ballot resolution process that gave the countries another chance to review their decision based on Microsoft’s responses to their complaints made in September 2007. The most important complaints were the fact that the standards document was unwieldy and cumbersome and also fact that OOXML was not truly ‘open’ and was written in a manner to continue the monopoly status of Microsoft in the market. The ballot resolution process is to come out with a verdict next month holding in the balance the acceptance of OOXML as an international standard.

In the meantime, in another blow to proprietary software, Microsoft was fined a huge amount of $ 1.3 billion for having violated anti-trust laws by a European Union (EU) court. Such setbacks have had an unintended effect: Microsoft recently affirmed to make available several sections of source code interoperable with open source, signalling a change in philosophy to a gradual acceptance of the open source policy. Open source advocates and others have, however, reacted with cautious optimism but seen in the light of things, it is clear that the subversive called the open source movement has had a tremendous effect on the way the industry is run.

Not long ago, advocates of the proprietary software model were calling the open source movement as ‘communist’ and ‘market-unfriendly’. But the relative cost-free nature, liberating outlook and transparency offered has made open source hugely popular. In India, for example, FLOSS advocates have been successful in getting a state government announcing statewide education and use on FLOSS. FLOSS makes immense sense for resource constrained governance bodies in India as well as help creating myriad developer communities in a participative model.

The challenge remains for FLOSS evangelicals to take forward the process of educating the populace in the country to be familiar with basic programming and application usage skills. This requires the state to play an active role to facilitate this process.

Monopoly and proprietary software have an advantage in influencing state and governmental institutions because of their large market base and ready capital. Unscrupulous ways of influencing state governments have persisted in India, for example, where executives of proprietary software cajole government heads to promote their brands in lieu of some form of charity given. FLOSS activists must overcome this huge challenge in order to get their philosophy accepted and model implemented for the good of people who are still on the barren side of the digital divide.

Lagaan..an interesting analysis and the movements..

I have always wanted to enter a blog on an interpretation made out of the Lagaan movie, by one of my closest friends, whom I consider should become a prominent theorist very soon.

The angle summarily goes like this: Bhuvan, the role played by Aamir Khan, is likened to Gandhi. The entire team that Bhuvan assembles is similar to the Congress Party....and so on...

The angle can be described thus: Gandhi fights the British by playing their own game.. The villagers are taught to play cricket...the Analogy...Contest the elections that the British call for...(its a non-violent game, after all).. the inner contradictions are done away with.. (note the structure of the Champaran village, the Mukhia's increased land holding, some holding much more land than others)...even the Britishers are given the benefit of doubt.. Note the British Umpires shown as upholding fairplay....The Muslim is also part of the team and plays an important, though secondary role...The Dalit is included too...but wait..he is weak, deformed and is guided by Bhuvan....Note the Independence movement analogy...The Untouchables are brought into the freedom movement fold, Gandhi fights hard to remove Untouchability, terms the Untouchables as 'Harijans'....Even the Raja is accepted as an Indian, after all, despite the fact that he suffers none of the ordinary villagers' plight in having to partake their earning, their food and their rations.. The Raja is also co-opted into the fight against the British, after all there is no "formal" compliant against him taking part of the villagers' hard earned money...and the Raja also supports the villagers' in their game against the British, well, in an informal way....Notice the similarity with Gandhi's position on the princely states..and the fight to overthrow the princes..he always took a much more moderate stand compared to the fight against the British...the Malabar/ Travancore movements are case studies....

The Lagaan team is a all-encompassing conglomeration, overcoming class, caste and religious differences.....Gandhi's greatest achievement as India's leading Congress freedom fighter was the same...he was the only person who could unite Indians as Indians against the imperialist British!.

Well...there is also the British girl who falls in love with Bhuvan....So did a host of Britishers who fell head over heels to the Mahatma's grace and charm as a non-violent freedom fighter (in the platonic sense...Meerabhai, C.F.Andrews...etc..)...

I am not sure if Ashutosh Gowariker is this big an intellectual to make a movie this deep in its thinking..reminiscent of the Congress' model of the freedom struggle, but the fact remains.. Lagaan symbolises the Indian freedom struggle, led by Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi..the movie shows the Congress' role in the freedom struggle as a metaphor in the cricket game that is played between Bhuvan's team and the Englishmen....if Gowariker did this intentionally, then Lagaan would go down as one of the most astute symbolic movies of our times in India.

The interesting thing is that Sudhanva Deshpande in the Frontline also somewhat alluded to the same angle that my friend was talking about.

It would be remiss for me not to talk about Rajkumar Santoshi's "The Legend of Bhagat Singh" here...The movie surprises everyone for its remarkable candour and its depth. The best part of the movie when Bhagat Singh exhorts his comrades of Hindustan Republican Army (which he and his comrades rename Hindustan Socialist Republican Army) to fight not merely for independence but for economic independence...not to leave the country in the hands of "burre sahibs" after throwing the yoke of the "Gore Sahibs"....Surely this dialogue was confirmation that Bhagat Singh, the revolutionary was by heart the Communist...Its no fluke that most of Bhagat Singh's comrades, including Shiv Verma, Ajay Ghosh, and others named in the Lahore Conspiracy Case, later on turned out to be leading Communist Leaders in the country.

Interestingly, Harkishen Singh Surjeet, the senior CPI(M) leader of today started his revolutionary career as a foot-soldier in the Naujawan Bharat Sabha, the organization started by Bhagat Singh.. Surjeet, who used to cycle from Amritsar to Lahore to attend organizational meetings and to carry couriers, was arrested by the British for his role in an anti-British-rule incident..He introduced himself as "London Tod Singh" in his speech in the court later.. Its a pity that the bourgeois media pays scant respect to this veteran freedom fighter just because he is a communist..

I would put it emphatically that if Bhagat Singh was alive today, he would have been a torchbearer of the Communist Movement in the country. Pity, because probably the great Gandhi signed the Irwin Pact and didn't bother to ask for Bhagat Singh's release from capital punishment as a quid pro quo when he could have surely done atleast this...This is a huge blot on the widely accepted leader of India's freedom movement...that has never sufficiently been answered by Gandhians/ other Congress freedom fighters.

"Colonialism: Janus Faced": Prof Gopal Guru's Ambedkarite argument on the Manmohan speech

Prof. Gopal Guru added the missing piece to the entire "Did British Colonialism have a beneficial side to it" argument today in the TOI. In a brilliantly articulated essay, Prof Guru talks about how " Liberalism forms the ideological continuity between an imperialist nation state and the colonies. ". He articulates how the language of rights, hitherto unknown in Indian society, the "earlier society based on the language of obligation" was wrought into the Indian governance setups due to the influence of liberalism.

He says, "The creation of the modern public sphere by the colonialist did promise conditions for the realisation of these rights. These enabling conditions prompted Dalit-Bahujan leaders to start the self-respect movement that primarily sought to contest caste in civil society. Mainstream nationalists of all political shades were either indifferent or completely opposed to self-respect movement. They were generally reluctant to take up the caste issue, as they, including Gandhi, wanted to avoid any fragmentary impact on the nationalist movement. The mainstream nationalist response was directed against the colonial configuration of power. The Dalit-Bahujan response was primarily directed against the local configuration of power — capitalism and Brahminism. The Dalit-Bahujan perspective, thus, offers a critique of both orientalism and apologists for colonialism. Within this framework, they argued as to how Hindutva and even mainstream nationalists can justify their fight against their inferior treatment at the hands of the orientalist while the latter themselves sought to inferiorise Dalits and shudra masses."

Yet, he argues the Dalit Bahujan leaders did not abandon the fight against British colonialism's rapacious character either. "However, Dalit-Bahujan leaders did not disempower Dalits and Bahujan masses by divesting power from them to the benevolence of the British colonialists. This was evident from their critique of the British Raj that they offered from time to time. They often severely criticised the British for their callousness and insincerity in responding to Dalit questions."

In my opinion, Prof Gopal Guru has a well articulated point. From the perspective of the teeming millions of India subjugated to the throes of crass and iniquitous casteism, the issue and notion of "self-respect" was greater in importance than "self-rule" (the main "muddha" of the mainstream nationalist movement), even if it didn't result in the leaders of the "self-respect" movement ending up buttressing the pro-British line. In contrast, they were equally anti-imperialist, but articulated their protest against colonialism not by straitjacketing every issue within the "self-rule is paramount" paradigm. If "Swaraj was their birth right", self-respect and dignity were rights of paramountcy themselves. The British encounter, in its own "unintended" ways, brought about tenets of liberalism (themselves a result of the Enlightenment) to the dark annals of Indian society. There is a lot of truth in this argument.

Yet, this doesn't absolve Manmohan Singh's speech "extolling" "good governance" by the British. I would still continue in Prof Patnaik's 'Dr Singh is a neoliberal intellectual" vein. If Dr Singh had the gumption to speak the language of Phule and Ambedkar in his speech at Oxford, it would have made sense, but what Dr Singh said in Oxford can still not be interpreted in the Ambedkarite context.

The Manmohan-Oxford Issue, Arguments, Counter-Arguments, My Take

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh's statements while delivering a lecture in Oxford, acknowledging the beneficial consequences of the British Raj has created a controversy among the intellectual circles in India. But first the political overtones. The BJP came up with a criticism immediately, at the same time as the ultra-left coming up with its own critique of Dr. Singh's lecture.

The BJP criticism has to be pooh-poohed for these set of rightists were never even part of the Indian freedom movement. The ideological godfathers of the BJP in the RSS had always considered the national movement for freedom not worthy of their cause (which is to create a Hindu fascist state out of India). Scores of RSS ideologues before India's independence were actually pro-British and supported the extension of British rule in our country. As for the Hindu Mahasabha, it's greatest leader, V.D.Savarkar, after his incarceration in the Andamans, from where he left prison after writing pathetic mercy petitions, actually adhered to the diktats of the British to keep his freedom (from imprisonment) assured. V.D.Savarkar's volte-face from a nationalist to a Hindu fundamentalist has been well documented indeed. Hence the entire "nationalist" argument provided by the BJP in the end leads to mere politicking to make an issue. These set of rightists in their six years of government always tried to delink India's autonomy and link India's foreign policy to the global project of imperialism still followed by such countries like the US of A, allege anti-imperialists and leftists.

As for the ultra-left (the CPI(ML))'s criticism is concerned, their theoretical understanding of the current Indian state still suggests that it is "semi-colonial" (which is of course a nuanced and slightly variant position from that of the remaining Naxalites (Maoists) who consider the Indian state to be "imperial"). Taking this theoretical stand in perspective, the Ultra-left's criticism of the PM's speech needs to be put into context. As the CPI(ML) feels that the current bourgeois government's disposition is not merely favoring the elements of semi-feudalism and malignant monopoly capitalism, but also there is a comprador link between the Indian bourgeoisie and imperial capital, any statement by the Prime Minister eulogizing or even acknowledging a role for the Imperial Britishers in India' s progress confirms their theoretical understanding of both the Indian State and that of the Indian Bourgeoisie.

Surely, the contention that the Indian state is semi-colonial can be almost easily disputed (considering the relatively impressive success of parliamentary democracy, the strength of India's democratic structures, India's relatively independent Foreign Policies etc); thereby putting the entire wholehearted criticism of the Ultra-Left under a slight question mark of whether this criticism is overhyped and amounts to name-calling.

Now that I have put the political debate into perspective, its now time to understand the intellectual debate that has unfolded on this issue. The first salvo on Dr. Manmohan Singh's speech was provided by Prof Irfan Habib, renowned historian from Aligarh Muslim University. Prof Habib's criticism was taken into consideration by The Hindu's editors who contexualized it in their editorial on this issue. Contentious for Prof Habib were these lines from Dr. Singh's speech: "..Consider the fact that an important slogan of India's struggle for freedom was that 'Self government is more precious than Good Government'. That, of course, is the essence of democracy. But the slogan suggests that even at the height of our campaign for freedom from colonial rule, we did not entirely reject the British claim to good governance. We MERELY [emphasis mine-Srini] asserted our natural right to self-governance".

Prof Habib, in his letter to The Hindu, questions the notion of "good governance" alluded to by Dr Singh. He quotes, "The supreme truth that our IAS is a creature of the Anglo-Indian ICS is apparently a gift of such overwhelming value that we can forget the loss of lives of millions of Indians in famines like those of 1896-97, 1899-00, 1943; forget too the heavy taxation of the poor; the suppression of modern industry by all possible devices; the miserable level of expenditure on health and education; the exclusion of Indians from all high offices and positions of power; and the suppression of civil liberties (Dr Singh's attribution of a "free press" to Britain notwithstanding). Indian civilization did not "meet" the British empire; it was laid low by the latter by sword and shot."

Prof Habib is scathing and rightly so. Dr. Singh's eulogies of the British "good governance" cannot stand the scrutiny of truthful analysis of British rule. True, the unintended consequences of British systems of administration brought such implements such as the Railways, the Postal system etc., but the key word is "unintended"; the intentions seemingly remained on strengthening the colonial structure to squeeze India's economic wealth better in order to further British enterprise in the form of her markets and industries. Prof Habib has infact written a series of essays where he elucidates how India could have done better off without the colonial rule intervention from the 18th to the 20th century. Here is where Prof Habib departs from Karl Marx himself in his analysis of the effects of British rule in India.

The next great critique of Dr Singh comes from Prof Prabhat Patnaik. Prof Patnaik's argument has to be contexualized considering the left's view of Dr. Singh and his policies and ideas on economic "reform". The Left characterizes Dr. Singh as a person who though brought reforms in good intentions, has created an environment which is seriously jeopardizing India's autonomous economic path. By linking India's economic development with the maze of international markets, by linking India's fiscal exercises with the diktats of the WTO-IMF-WB combine, the Left feels that India is doing gross injustice to those who are directly being affected greatly by such policies and whose lives can be ameliorated by ensuring a socialist path of development. A look at Dr. Utsa Patnaik's articles to look at the problems faced by the agrarian sector due to the impact of the policies of neo-liberal economic reforms, the study of poverty in the late 1990s, a survey of problems of unemployment etc all point toward a semblance of truth in the Left's constant harpring and refrain against neo-liberal economic reforms.

Getting back to the issue though, Prof Patnaik feels that by referring to the British models of governance in India as "good" and "beneficial" (albeit in a nuanced way), Dr. Singh is continuing in his neo-liberal vein. The linking of governance to the issue of corporatization/marketization etc is a neo-liberal thesis, Dr Singh being one among those subscribe to this; allege the Left and so does Prof Patnaik.

Prof Patnaik's critique of Dr Singh's speech can be read in the upcoming People's Democracy issue. A peek into the article has been provided by the TOI correspondent, Akshaya Mukul, who doesn't unfortunately refrain from using terms such as "Don" to refer to the economics professor.

As an analogy to the entire critique of Dr. Singh's speech, one can take the case of the Internet. The Internet, all of us know, was spun off from the ARPANET funded by DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency). Indeed, the DARPA's purpose for the development of such a network was to suit defense research, a major lot being spent on that during those days, inevitably because of the ensuing Cold War between the two big countries representing two different systems (the USA & the USSR). If a neo-conservative today, says that the Cold War was beneficial because it resulted in the Internet, he would have been criticised by the liberal, by the peacenik or anti-militarist and by the social-constructivist. If however, a technologist would have said matter-of-factly that defense research spun off research and scientific advances in communication technology, the statement would never have been made an issue.

Analogous to the above example, Dr. Singh's speech has welcomed criticism from the intellectual circles owing to the fact that Dr. Singh is seen ideologically as a neo-liberal, as also because the British rule is seen in its entirety as wholly unwholesome to India at all.

Yet another angle to the entire "Britishers were beneficial" point has not been covered at all in the media or even by the intellectuals. This was the point provided by Dr. B.R.Ambedkar, who during the course of his political career, despite conscious to and ferociously opposed to colonialism, acknowledged that the amelioration of India's Depressed Classes from the wretched entanglements of casteism and social oppression was slightly possible due to British rule. This angle was not mentioned by Dr. Singh himself though in course of his lecture. My Ambedkarite friends here are not surprised at all though. But again, that's material for yet another blog perhaps.