India plans to write its own OS

Even if they come up with a proper working operating system, there will be a cost of moving from one platform to another, and it is better to spend that money moving from a proprietary platform to an open platform instead of to another proprietary platform.

Do they want to establish binary compatibility with Windows to the extent that device drivers written for windows will work on this new operating system? Without that, they would not be able to support so many devices, and essentially narrow the hardware choice severely. Will we be able to run Microsoft office out of the box? What about games? What about teamviewer and vnc?

if not, how do they expect products to come to the platform?

Unless they can convincingly answer these questions first, they are just wasting money.

It would be far far cheaper in the short and the long run for them to just pick one of the big linux distributions and encourage and support everyone who wants to migrate. Over time, they can setup their own repository which would have the applications that are commonly required, applications that are custom developed, and applications that are modified. Maybe then, they can come up with their own custom distro DVD which saves people downloading time.

And another national government throws its hat into the operating-system ring...
Has anyone noticed that, so far, *every* national government that has publicly thrown hats into the government-baked OS ring cites over-reliance on outside (read: Microsoft) operating system and application products? What has that gotten any and every governement that has tried that before except scorn and ridicule? As laudable (from a national-interest) standpoint the goal may be, you are still going against the defending champion that faces off against the best operating systems and environments the planet's best brains can cobble together, and, except for niche products, it usually wins. The PRC has tried. North Korea has tried. Cuba has tried. Even *Iran* has tried. All have failed (in most cases, with a whimper).

I await the latest thud.

"The only way to protect it is to have a home-grown system"

Isn't that the opposite of what open source is - which is to open your code to the world so it can be improved? 50 people versus the world's hackers. it's just not looking promising in my eyes at the moment.

however, as with all things, everyone's entitled to have their own opinions/thoughts. that was mine.

i think it's a great idea but could be managed differently.

I tried to share this in Facebook, but Facebook refused to do it. Just try it out yourself.

"Hack-proof?" Well there's one impossible requirement.

Every Indian is really excited when Indian IT development is noticed
and is discussed by the entire World. Here is what we found while
preparing for the US DoD approved IT security certifications.

Some excerpts :

(1) "The Sanjay Gandhi Postgraduate Institute of Medical Sciences
(SGPGIMS) has been delivering medical training over remote video links
since 1999. This started as an experiment in delivering training for
endocrine surgery
to remote students in India, and has seen continued success since it was
introduced."

(2) "Alternate Delivery Methods in IT-enabled Professional Training –
Training roles can be filled using remote training platforms. The SANS
vLive and onDemand training are good examples of this approach. The
Sanjay Gandhi Postgraduate Institute of Medical Sciences
(SGPGIMS) has been delivering medical training over remote video links
since 1999. This started as an experiment in delivering training for
endocrine surgery to remote students in India, and has seen continued
success since it was
introduced."

India own its own can take care of IT.

P.S. visit:

http://www.idrc.ca/openebooks/396-6/#page_109

http://www.sans.edu/resources/pandemic-preparedness/pandemic_preparedness_jwp.pdf

http://www.sgpgi.ac.in/index.html

What a welcome piece of news. India is going strength to strength and all this growth in just around 60-70 years after colonisation! Judging by the typical western comments that reek of jealousy (because developing nations are overtaking bust economies - read UK and US), this is something no one in the western world will like.

Can't wait to the faces of these same people in the west especially in the UK when they will have to eat their own words! This will be a great leveller!!

It should have been done long ago but welcome the initiative. Reading the others comments, other nationals think that it is a sacred right of USA to dominate others. But such belittling have done little in the past (super computers, microprocessors, computers, others) But INDIA will not be bogged down by such antics by some vested interested people. Go India Go!

I am India's expert in strategic defence and the father of India's strategic program, including the Integrated Guided Missile Development Program. I said in my blog titled 'Nuclear Supremacy For India Over U.S.', which can be found by a Yahoo search with the title :-
That on February 11, 2009 I wrote: The failure, on January 20, 2009, of a Brahmos missile to hit its target was followed by a RAW-arranged media blizzard of reports of the failure of India’s missile programs and of DRDO. I knew that that failure, as of the recent ISRO-made European satellite, was due to sabotage -- which I have repeatedly referred to over the years -- by C.I.A.-RAW. There has been no media blizzard of reports on the discovery that the United States had switched off, during the missile’s flight, the signal to the test zone from the Global Positioning System (GPS) which the missile used for guidance, resulting in the failure. This failure of the missile was pre-arranged by C.I.A.-RAW with India’s army chief, who was present during the test, to ‘neutralise’ what I wrote on January 15, 2009 about his having been bought by the United States and his rejecting various indigenously developed weapon systems, etc. After this “General Kapoor went on to let the media know that the army might call off the Brahmos deal. The proposal for purchase of 240 of the missiles for two regiments of the army, he indicated, was to be shelved until the missile’s capability was proven” ( "Mystery of an Indian Missile Test Flop" in Truthout, an online magazine). I am aghast that India should use ANY electronic support from the U.S. -- or Russia and other countries -- particularly in the defence field, much less for a signal to guide its missiles -- even after what I have written about “National Security Crisis Due To Microwaves From Satellites” (February 26 ‘06), “Why Are American Companies Providing India’s Satellite Navigation System -- Gagan” (October 24 ‘08) and a piece on March 23 ‘08; I have been writing to the press with such warnings since 1996-97; in December 1982 I warned about such sabotage in a letter to Prime Minister Indira Gandhi. After what I wrote on December 18 ‘08 about a similar danger from Russia and referred to the plans for Russia to lease out to India several nuclear powered attack submarines, Russia cancelled those plans. But, as I have said, similar dangers exist in importing nuclear power plants and numerous other kinds of civilian and military equipment. Sabotaging and suppressing India’s research and development by C.I.A.-RAW is also an aspect of the colonial grip over India which will only be broken with the nuclear destruction of New Delhi; see my blog.

After British rule, India has been under C.I.A. rule. I have written in my blog about how Robert Crowley, former Assistant Deputy Director of Clandestine Operations of the CIA, gave documents of his own top secret operations to his friend, historian Gregory Douglas and described in detail how the C.I.A. has done “business” with Russian intelligence agencies for many decades, how the C.I.A. directly arranged the plane crash which killed Homi Bhabha but relied on Russian intelligence agencies, with which it did “business”, to assassinate Shastri who had given a go ahead for an Indian nuclear weapons program. The Russian intelligence agencies -- large parts of which were brought on the C.I.A.’s payroll -- brought down the Soviet Union. After a letter of mine in Indian Express in the early nineties which appeared under the editor's heading “Grab This Opportunity” regarding a Russian proposal to form a Russia-China-India alliance, P. V. Narasimha Rao sent the head of India’s submarine-launched ballistic missile program to Russia to get help, where he died as Shastri did. When, in a letter to the press, I pointed out that this was the “help” the Russians had provided, the Russians hastily withdrew a delegation that was visiting India. It will be the easiest thing in the world for Russian or other intelligence agencies to install devices in submarines etc. with which they can track them and, in keeping with their “business” relationship with U.S. intelligence agencies, enable the Americans to track them, too. I have said there should be an iron-clad rule against importing ANY defence equipment and I have also described the perils of importing electronic equipment, nuclear power plants and numerous other kinds of civilian and military equipment; see my blog.

India has smart people like anywhere else. However software is still not well established science.

I venture that will become a black hole swallowing huge amounts of money at best.

What kills this in the bud is the Windoze compatibility requirement.

Otherwise, everything from scratch, its possible.

so far: LLLOOOOLLLZZZZ !!!! :)

You can have Windows (proprietary), Linux (open source), or MacOS (some of each). Why start building something else? Android is Linux, I think WebOS is too?...

Anyway, the one thing we know about India's national IT industry apart from promising impossibly cheap products for poor people, is that they want to read all your Blackberry e-mail.

Development of VMS has been outsourced by hp to India a long time ago. Besides, India practically own the domain specific application market.
All those USassians who claim that India's developers are too stupid should better check their own state of mind and watch their economy going south.

Wine isn't really "working". It only really works when you try something that Wine was specifically tailored to run (Office, WoW). And even so, it's far from perfect. Not to mention that you still have to download yourself some DLLs and frameworks, which isn't always legal.

If those eastern engineers ever ask Wine staff how easy is to run Windows software - without relying on anything with M$ brand - they would give up immediately.

I guess they will end up creating just another Linux distro with a hindu symbol as its logo.

This is obviously a great project that will finally demonstrate the programming power of the Indian nation.
Or not, as the case may be.
I'll be interested in the result anyway.

People should read the latest Microsoft EULAs, uninstall all antivirus/antispyware to see what happens and go knock at Microsoft's door and ask for the sourcecode of Windows before making jokes.

So what they are planning to do is to distribute a closed-source binary blob that only they have control over? One that no one else has a clue as to what it is doing, or what code it contains? And people are supposed to willingly install this on their computers (or buy then with it preinstalled), and trust their data to a bunch of disgruntled employees on "the mothership" running their computers? Absolutely not! There would have to be some kind of a privacy law to prevent this!

(Sent from my Windows 7 computer, which accesses the network and does other mysterious things whenever "it" wants to, even when I am not using it).

Let's hope they construct their OS more robustly than their Commonwealth Games athlete bungalows.

Given that they invented bungalows, it doesn't bode particularly well...

This clearly has much more to do with the .in govt awarding juicy, pork barrel IT contracts than it has to do with independence, backdoors or any such ruse.

Though if they build OSes as well as they build athletes accommodation, then it should compete quite favourably with Winblows from a technical POV.

The OS is called RTW (REinventing the Wheel). Did read it right Satyam is involved in the development?

Of course, if you did want to create an IT ecosystem in which you had the ultimate powers of eavesdropping, supression, tracking and control, all by means of designed in backdoors, this is the way you'd do it.

Not that I'm paranoid in any way...

It does sound like a bad way of spending a lot of money to get a questionable result. Bye bye interoperability, device drivers, etc.

"Sify also reported Saraswat's comments that the OS will be proprietary."

You're citing Sify as a source? The only thing that one can rely on Sify to supply is spam, in my experience.

Great! I look forward to seeing this new home grown OS running the critical systems of all major Indian businesses.

Best news for the economies of the rest of the world in quite some time. Just don't fly Air India for a while.

I look forward to their plans for world peace, and ending poverty.

So - India wants security by obscurity. That's a good start. It's closed source, so there's no easy way for third parties to validate their security measures. They want to "protect our security system", and yet in all likelihood there will be back-doors by design, for national security purposes, always a handy pair of contradictory aims. And finally, they want it to be able to run Windows apps, and yet presumably be free of Microsoft intellectual property.

Funnily enough, Microsoft has been exactly the same thing themselves*. It's taken them nearly 30 years, with countless developers - and judging by the regular flow of security patches even for XP, an OS they first released nine years ago, they haven't quite nailed security yet.

Good luck with that.

(* Well, apart from excluding MS IPR, obviously!)

Practically off the shelf: Linux plus the WINE sub-system. That's already working, they just need to customize the kernel to obfuscate Linux, and perhaps make the WINE sub-system the effective shell. Could be seamless.

The only difficulty is that M$ uses secret tricks to sabotage such software. Going back to DR-DOS, M$ deliberately put in a specific trap so that DR-DOS couldn't run Windows (3.1, or whatever it was then). The other tactic M$ uses is endless needless extension of API: engineered incompatibility.

By the way, emulation with extension was IBM's strategy with OS/2: it actually runs genuine Win31 code (or even versions of DOS) as just another task.

Oh right, and this will go with India's $10 laptop? Somebody fire these moronic politicians who make these goofy claims.