QWERTY gone sanskrit.
The Indian IT ministry has floated the idea of developing a made-in-India operating system to reduce the national dependence on foreign software and increase resilience to viruses and IT-based attacks.
My reaction to this wavers back and forth depending on how I think about OSes: if they’re a resource, like oil, then “reducing dependency on foreign OSes” makes a certain kind of sense. But if OSes are machines or standards — like engines, or metric — then “reducing dependency” on them is ridiculous. A country that “reduces its dependency” on using the same classes of invention as are used abroad is literally vowing to reinvent the wheel.