India shares open-source experience
The National Informatics Center, which is a part of the Indian government's Department of Information Technology, launched the site on Tuesday. In an email interview, a spokesman for the department said the site was set up to share the centre's experiences in the use of open-source solutions for building applications.
"The purpose of this site is to spread the knowledge base that we have assimilated so that others can also build applications using free and open-source solutions," he said.
The site will focus on database software and JDBC links, as well as Linux system integration issues, said the spokesman. It will also handle, "data migration issues, language issues for both JSP and PHP applications… and drivers for Linux".
"This can be looked upon as our contribution to open-source community," he added.
Although the site did not appear to contain much in the way of resources at the time of writing, it is symptomatic of a growing movement towards open source in the developing world. In July, India's president A.P.J. Abdul Kalam called for his country's military to use open-source software to ward off cybersecurity threats.
Kalam, a former head of India's defence research and development organisation and architect of its guided missile programme, has been a supporter of open-source software.