The 2005 Right to Information Act was a significant milestone for India, a firm commitment to openness and transparency. The UPA’s promises of a public data project has only strengthened that commitment, promising to sweep away the nation’s dusty piles of secrecy and bureaucracy. But with increasing computerisation comes a related, but often overlooked imperative — that all government software be open source.

If you have been keeping up, however peripherally, with developments in computing and information technology, chances are that you have encountered the term “open source” before. At its heart, the concept is quite simple. A computer wants instructions in its “native language”, machine code. Here is a small sample of machine code:

wO<98>\oCa^Fd^^3^Tx<99>z,|9dY $*Uxi8D^@sdu^_^e+@/

Programmers, however, work with a more human-readable language, which is then translated to machine code. This “source code” looks something like this:

if weather = “rainy” then display image of(rain) else display image of(sunshine)

Now, if you sell commercial software, you need not give anyone your source code. The translated machine code is all that your users need to run your applications. Indeed, most companies see the source as something to be protected; customers are delivered opaque machine code that they can use without being able to see how it works. The user gets his program, which is what he cares about, the company gets to protect its business secrets, and all is well. Right?

“Wrong”, say a growing number of people. Enter the free, libre and open source software movement, which believes users should have access to the source code of any program they purchase, and the freedom to modify it, as fundamental rights. This is naturally enough, a controversial topic in the business world — few companies want to give away the secrets behind their software, or the right to control its use. The debate takes a more serious turn though, when what is involved is not commerce but government, and what is being hidden are not business secrets but the implementation of policy and law-enforcement. The salient issue here is not “freedom”, but transparency.

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