Bill Gates first visit to India in 1997.

THE HINDU newspaper journalist writes" Mr. Gates' interest in India is obvious. Computer use in India remains very low, but is growing. E-governance is just beginning to happen. Imagine the future, as e-governance and other government computer-linked services increase rapidly. Imagine all government computers running on Microsoft software — a potential market of hundreds of thousands, eventually even millions. No wonder it is so important to tie India to proprietary software. There is another reason for the Gates interest in India. Though a lot of application software — like word-processors or spreadsheets — is available for GNU/Linux, much more needs to be written if open source software is to completely replace Windows on the desktop. India is believed to be home to 10 per cent of the world's developers of software. If India's software community can be chained to the development of proprieatry software, then one source of GNU/Linux-based applications will dry up!
Sunday, Dec 01, 2002