BY MADANMOHAN RAO: Open source movement key for Internet growth in India

[Frederick Noronha <fred@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Open source movement key for Internet growth in India 

By Madanmohan Rao <madanr@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> 
Posted: ( 2000-10-30 05:47:04 EDT by FreeOS ) 


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.  


http://www.freeos.com/articles/2557/2/1-3/