What did we tell ya folks? India is the going to be the place for IT. And that god their going the open source way.
"The government of India has started taking precise, wide-reaching steps to usher in a Linux wave in India, and that cannot be good news for proprietary software vendors like Microsoft. Yesterday, the IT ministry had a meeting of around 70 people, from companies like HP, IBM, Sun and TCS, government agencies like BARC and CDAC, state governments like Kerala, West Bengal and MP to evolve a level playing field for Linux vis-a-vis proprietary software (read Microsoft).
All the IITs too were represented at the meeting that went on for 4 hours. There was consensus in the meeting that Linux was a secure, robust and cost-effective system. As far as concrete pro-Linux acts go, government tenders may soon stop specifying Microsoft or any other vendor"s name while floating software tenders, thus throwing open the way for Linux vendors to grab lucrative government contracts hitherto barred from them. The government is also setting up special interest groups with officials of industry and academia to find out how Linux can be deployed in e-governance, defence, education and so on. "