Why does the Indian Government mandate proprietary software?
One of my pet peeves has been about the Indian government forcing citizens to buy or use proprietary software to enable them to perform their statutory obligations. Things have got better in some government departments, but worse in others.
Income Tax is one place where things have become better: many years ago, the official tax preparation utility was in Microsoft Excel which compelled me to boot into Microsoft Windows and run Microsoft Excel. A few years ago, a Java utility became available, but initially, this ran only in Oracle Java, and I wrote unhappily about this two years ago. I was happy to find that I could run the latest version of the utility under OpenJDK 8 and OpenJFX. At last, I do not have to use proprietary software to file my income tax return. My only complaint is that the Income Tax department’s official website still says that the Java Runtime Environment (JRE) can be downloaded from http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/javase/downloads/index.html. Is it too much for a free citizen of a free country to demand that this link should instead point to http://openjdk.java.net/ which is the home of the open source project? (The OpenJDK site does provides a link to the Oracle site for those who prefer that.)
The Ministry of Company Affairs (MCA) has become a lot worse and it is now an absolute nightmare for proponents of open source software. Everything to do with Company Law now requires an e-filing. And the first thing that the MCA portal says is that you must have a computer with Windows 2000 or later installed, and you must also have Adobe Acrobat 11. As long as this portal affected only corporate filings, I did not care too much, because I know from bitter experience that the corporate world consists largely of unreformed Microsoft junkies who care two hoots about open source software. But now the government requires individual directors also to use this portal. Last month, like many other independent directors in India, I had to e-file a DIR-3 KYC. This uses a PDF Form that opens only in Adobe’s PDF reader and not in any of the numerous open source PDF readers that are installed on my Linux machine. Adobe discontinued support for Linux a few years ago. So the only thing to do was to fire up my licensed copy of Windows in a Virtual Machine and fill up the form.
In my opinion, it is a gross abuse of the sovereign powers of the state to compel a person to buy and use Windows in order to be a director of a company. Actually, I seriously considered resigning as Director rather than do this, but then that does not solve the problem as different departments of the government are moving in the same direction of e-filing with uncritical dependence on proprietary software.
No, we need to change incentives in the government to prevent the Indian state from becoming a marketing agent of powerful software companies. I think there are many arms of the government itself that can help bring about this change:
Central Vigilance Commission (CVC): The CVC could declare that going forward, it would regard a government action that forces unwilling citizens to buy software from private companies as an act of corruption (on the ground that it provides a benefit to a private party and is also against the public interest). The reality is that the government outsources software development to large software developers who also act as authorized resellers for a large number of software product companies, and have every incentive to push the sales of these products on to their clients. This is fine when all these costs are evaluated as part of the total cost of the project during the bid evaluation. But when the government official allows the vendor to sell software to ordinary citizens using the coercive power of the state, that should count as an act of corruption. The CVC could allow existing applications to be grandfathered with a sunset clause, but it should not permit any new projects.
Competition Commission: As explained in the previous point, the whole business of government software development involves giant software companies using their market dominance in the enterprise market to gain unfair and unlawful market power in the retail market using the coercive power of the state. The Competition Commission can and should investigate all authorized reseller agreements for such anti-competitive conduct.
National Security Advisory Board: Widespread use of proprietary software in critical government applications can pose a threat to national security, and with the increasing threat of cyber attacks on India from some of its neighbours and other countries, this is also a reason for reconsidering the design of government applications like the MCA Portal. For example, under the so called Government Security Program the Microsoft Windows source code has been shared with Russia and China which are both associated with large scale state sponsored hacking activities. This means that when you and I use Windows, the hackers can see the source code, but you and I cannot. With open source software like Linux, the hackers can read the source code, but so can you and I. It is important that the national security apparatus in India takes these risks seriously and start advising other arms of the government to move away from proprietary software in citizen facing applications.
Law Ministry: If rapid technological change and product obsolescence leads to Adobe going bankrupt and the Adobe Reader being discontinued, the government might find that it cannot read any of the PDF files that constitute the source documents for its entire database. Many people of my generation have old Wordstar files which are almost impossible to read because the Wordstar software is now defunct: truly desperate people do try to buy the old Wordstar diskettes on EBay and then try and find a disk drive that can read the diskettes. For those readers who are too young to remember, Wordstar was the undisputed market leader at its time, just as Adobe is today. The law ministry should recognize that storing critical source documents in a proprietary format is an unacceptable legal risk.
Until one or other of these branches of the government steps in and forces a redesign of citizen facing government applications, we will be doomed to pay money to rich multinationals to use insecure software to interact with our own governments.
Posted at 6:15 pm IST on Mon, 3 Sep 2018 permanent link
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