Of Open Source, Microsoft, India and Paraguay

One of the recurrent recent themes of IT in the UK has been how moves to open source by local and central government have been stymied by Microsoft - the most famous example being the Newham Council saga. Of course, that's not a problem unique to the UK: it's a pattern repeated around the world, as some recent stories highlight.

Here, for example, is something similar in India's state of Tamil Nadu:

The Jaya government’s IT arm - the Electronics Corporation of Tamil Nadu (ELCOT) - has taken out a tender for the supply of 9,12,000 laptops to be delivered this year. Over the next five years, close to 7 million laptops produced at a cost of over Rs 10,200 crore [about $1.3 billion] would be distributed. Jayalalithaa has sent a memorandum to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh asking for central funds to implement this scheme.

With so much at stake, the IT intelligentsia in India is accusing Microsoft of using a mixture of American diplomatic offensive and its ‘embrace, extend and extinguish’ strategy to make 7 million poor students of Tamil Nadu dependent on its products with their free laptops...