Policy on Adoption of Open Source Software

 Preamble

Government of India (GoI) is implementing the Digital India programme as an umbrella programme to prepare India for a knowledge based transformation into a digitally empowered society and a knowledge economy. Under the overarching vision of Digital India, GoI aims to make Government services digitally accessible to citizens in their localities and to ensure efficiency, transparency and reliability of such services at affordable costs. To meet this objective, there is a need to set up a commensurate hardware and software infrastructure, which may require significant resources.

Organizations worldwide have adopted innovative alternative solutions in order to optimise costs by exploring avenues of “Open Source Software”. GoI has also been promoting the use of open source technologies in the e-Governance domain within the country in order to leverage economic and strategic benefits.

Further, the National Policy on Information Technology, 2012 has mentioned, as one of its objectives, to “Adopt open standards and promote open source and open technologies".

In view of the above, there is a need to formulate a policy for the Government Organizations to adopt Open Source Software. The “Policy on Adoption of Open Source Software for Government of India” (hereinafter referred to as “Policy”) will encourage the formal adoption and use of Open Source Software (OSS) in Government Organizations.

Open Source Software

Implementation Mechanism

i) GoI shall publish a policy framework for rapid and effective adoption of OSS covering the prioritization of the application areas and illustrative list of OSS & OSS Stacks etc, required for various functional areas.

ii) All future Requests for Proposals (RFPs) of e-Governance projects shall include a mandatory clause for considering Open Source Software (OSS) as a preferred option in comparison to Closed Source Software (CSS). Suppliers shall provide justification for exclusion of OSS in their response.

iii) Government Organizations shall ensure compliance with this requirement and decide by comparing both OSS and CSS options with respect to capability, strategic control, scalability, security, life-time costs and support requirements.

iv) Go I shall establish suitable support mechanism for the available OSS that includes Institutional Mechanism, Partnership with Industry, Academia and OSS Community.

v) Go I shall actively collaborate with OSS communities in India as well as at the International level and contribute wherever appropriate.

Point of Contact

All queries or comments related to the “Policy on Adoption of Open Source Software for Government of India” shall be directed to JS (e-Governance),DeitY (jsegov@deity.gov.in).

The e-Governance projects involve development of applications and databases for the delivery of citizen centric services through web or mobile platforms. Such applications are developed through various technologies, which could be open source software or closed source software. The source code of open source software is available to the developer community, which can make the necessary changes in the software as per any changes in requirements. This advantage is not available to the closed source software as their source code is not available to the developer community. This aspect of closed source software could pose a hindrance in ensuring strategic control with the Government. This is the main reason why, Governments worldwide are trying to promote application development in open source software.