Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) is India’s largest political party, with around 20 million Ordinary Members and about 4 million Active Members. In June, BJP announced its goal to become one of the most high-tech political parties in the next two years, and free and open source software (FOSS) will play an essential role in this project.
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How will all this happen? Prodyut Bora, national convenor of BJP information technology cell, says, “We have found that it is possible to create an entire enterprise IT ecosystem using only FOSS.” He says BJP plans to use CentOS as its server operating system and Ubuntu on desktops, along with many enterprise and infrastructure applications (see table). ePrints, for example, is used as internal document library, to build a BJP version of the MSDN Library. The choice of Qmail as mail transport agent is due to the fact that the IT cell staff believe in core competency and, as Bora says after a nine-month trial without any problem, “Qmail does exceedingly well what it is supposed to do: transfer mails”.
Its really a big step from a major political party like BJP (who was in power in last parliament session, and has good chance of coming to power in the coming elections). I could have never imagined a political party in India to take such steps for themselves.