The authorities don't want to rely on Windows anymore

Sep 16, 2015 07:54 GMT  ·  By

The Indian government is working on its operating system named BOSS, and it's planning on ditching any kind of Microsoft-related application.

India is not the first country out there that wants to stop being dependent on Windows or other Microsoft products. It's also not the first one that wants to make its own operating system, but that hasn't always gone according to plan.

China wanted at some point to do the same thing, but it's not an easy task. In fact, it takes years and years for a team of developers to come up with a distro that would be suited for the kind of use that a government might have in mind, so making "their own" OS is not always a feasible solution.

BOSS is based on Debian

According to a report on dnaindia.com, the BOSS distro Bharat Operating System Solutions is being worked on by the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing, with the help of Gujarat Technical University and DRDO.

That sounds like a good thing, but it's not exactly forthcoming. The truth is that BOSS is actually based on Debian, so it's not a home-grown operating system per se. It's also using GNOME as a desktop, so all that talk about being accessible to Windows users doesn't really apply unless they make some serious changes to it.

Their goal is to have this new Linux-based operating system take over in all branches of the government, including the army, and that's a tall order. The developers have their work cut out for them, and it will be a while until any real progress is made.

It's also worth noting that one of the Fedora cloud engineers, Kushal Das, has said that BOSS is actually a disaster and that the developers working on it don't know what they are doing. "BOSS is a disaster, last time we had a chat with the devels, they never had any clue about CVE(s)."

Another Debian dev, Balasankar C, has also had some harsh words to say about BOSS and about the fact that Debian isn't even mentioned in the announcement.

It remains to be seen if BOSS will amount to anything, or it will go in the direction of all the other state-developed operating systems.