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Journalism of Courage
Why the AICTEs decision to partner with Microsoft is unimaginative
The All India Council for Technical Education AICTE has become Microsofts biggest customer for cloud services. By June 30,students and teachers at 11,500 technical institutions will be locked down to Microsofts online productivity applications and storage. Cloud services reduce the cost of computing and increase reliability,so this is a good route to go. But a better fork in the same road could have been taken. What would it have cost to develop a free and open source cloud? Or to catch the interest of free and open source software providers who already offer such services to large populations? Even if big brands are in favour,Microsoft has competition which may have been more open.
In the open source ecosystem,its redundant to ask who the stakeholders and beneficiaries are. Over the long term,everyone owns the ecosystem and benefits from it. Besides,in calculating the benefit to education,a computation of savings should be accompanied by a projection of profits accruing to communities,the nation,the knowledge economy. And to students,who could start developing software professionally even before joining the workforce. In terms of opportunity cost,the AICTEs decision to partner with Microsoft is prudent but unimaginative.
