The Kerala Legislative Assembly (Niyamsabha) has shifted to free and open software, following the expiry of support period to Windows XP. It has also started producing all its documentation, both digital and printed materials, using the free and open source office suite LibreOffice from yesterday (July 17, 2014). Zyxware Technologies in association with International Centre for Free and Open Source Software (ICFOSS) and Swathanthra Malayalam Computing (SMC) provided support for the implementation of this move and this transition took about three months to complete, according to a The Hindu Business Line report. Zyxware apparently oversaw the technology transition at the Legislature Secretariat while SMC and LibreOffice provided the required Malayalam computing tools. ICFOSS also released a Handbook to support this migration process. SMC notes that this migration was significant because the complete documentation at Niyamsabha is done in Malayalam, which is a complex text indic script. As indicated by the report, around 80 operators from eight branches of the Kerala Legislature Secretariat write over 500 pages of text on an average day during the assembly session. The transition become necessary after the Kerala government recently mandated (pdf) all Kerala government departments, institutions and public sector undertakings (PSUs) to migrate to free & open source operating system by June 30th, 2014. Why FOSS? The licensing cost of Open Source software is legally nil. With support, installation and training costs factored in, FOSS still offers a lower total cost of ownership. Being free and open source, the software is also significantly easier to customize and causes less dependence on vendors. FOSS initiatives in Kerala The Kerala Government was the first state…
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