Re: Government's OS BOSS dying a slow death due to lack of patronage
in-line :-
On 9/24/14, Faheem Mitha <faheem@faheem.info> wrote:
>
> On Wed, 24 Sep 2014, shirish शिरीष wrote:
>
>> Hi all,
>> Saw this in the newspaper today :-
>>
>> http://telecom.economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/policy/governments-os-boss-dying-a-slow-death-due-to-lack-of-patronage/43300186
>
>> For people uninitiated, BOSS is Debian+some homegrown code. As nobody
>> (except people from defence and BOSS own people) has access to the
>> source repository, we have no idea as to how much they take from
>> Debian or Ubuntu's source repositories and how much of it is being
>> made by C-DAV people for BOSS.
>
> What is C-DAV?
As Jonas shared, it was a typo. It's actually C-DAC.
>> I have much less knowledge about BOSS so hopefully somebody can shed
>> more light if they want.
>
> The mind boggles slightly at the Government of India supporting a Debian
> based distribution. I hope that doesn't sound offensive.
>
> Is there some reason they don't just use Debian? Specialised localization
> requirements, perhaps?
When they started they said that + it was supposed to be used in our
defence (DRDO) and it's sister organizations. How much it is used by
the defence and how much money is spent on development and what is/was
the output of that money is not known as everything is in red-tape.
They could have easily put some things in public domain (translations,
any UI additions etc.) and some things in private if they wanted to
years ago and even today but for reasons unknown they have chosen not
to do that. It could also be that the team who are supposed to be
working on BOSS are insulated and not prodded to join the community
and haven't learnt what it means to do development in the open, take
criticism, be transparent etc.
I am sure we could all go on speculating but unless we don't have
somebody from C-DAC who can share/give an authoritative answer, all
the speculations will be just hot air.
> Regards, Faheem
--
Regards,
Shirish Agarwal शिरीष अग्रवाल
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