News.com writes about Indian President Abdul Kalam’s support for open-source software. Said Kalam in a speech recently: “The most unfortunate thing is that India still seems to believe in proprietary solutions. Further spread of IT which is influencing the daily life of individuals would have a devastating effect on the lives of society due to any small shift in the business practice involving these proprietory solutions. It is precisely for these reasons open source software need to be built which would be cost effective for the entire society. In India, open source code software will have to come and stay in a big way for the benefit of our billion people.”
In a related development (News.com), the Munich government is moving 14,000 computers from Windows to Linux, and from MS-Office to OpenOffice.