The Hindu Business Line : From Microsoft to the land of monks

After working in Microsoft for about seven years, John Wood sought a change. Standing in the middle of the Himalayas in 1998, he reminisced his life as `a specialist in international markets' that required him `to be in seven places at once'.

His work at Microsoft was like a game of Twister played on a global scale, he writes in Leaving Microsoft to Change the World, from Collins (www.harpercollins.com) .

"Be in Johannesburg on Friday and Taiwan on Monday, ready to do presentation, take meetings, and do press interviews. The job was financially rewarding but full of high pressure and stress." It was as if the mantra was, "You can sleep when you are dead and buried."

Wood began to wonder: "Is this all there is - longer hours and bigger payoffs? I had adopted the commando lifestyle of a corporate warrior.

Vacation was for people who were soft. Real players worked weekends, racked up hundreds of thousands of air miles, and built mini-empires within the expanding global colossus called Microsoft."

While the company could rely on him, his friends and family could not; and so, Wood was paying a heavy price: relationships. He received a jolt, returning to his Sydney flat `after a ten-day trip to Thailand and Singapore'. The answering machine was not blinking. "Must be broken," he thought, and pushed the button anyway.

"Beep. You... have... no... new... messages," the mechanical voice announced. "It might as well have added the word `loser' at the end," adds Wood, wryly.

A clincher was a two-day review with Steve Ballmer, `Microsoft's hard-charging, demanding, and voluble second-in-command', who `tended to shout and harangue' at meetings. Thereafter, Wood escapes to see a slideshow about trekking in Nepal.

"Maybe if you went high enough into the Himalayas, you could not hear Steve Ballmer screaming at you," he jokes to a friend.

Up there, trekking, Wood works on his dream: of getting books to villages. His project, `Room to Read' takes shape.

In a $2-per-night room with no electricity, where Wood stops by after `eight hours of hiking with a heavy pack' in Bahundanda, he reads Dalai Lama's The Art of Happiness. Wood retells: "The Dalai Lama wrote that when we gave something away, we actually got something back in return: happiness. If we were to use our money simply to buy ourselves things, there would be no end."

Back in Kathmandu after `three glorious weeks of trekking', with no `phones, e-mail, or newspapers', Wood pulls up Hotmail and sends `the best sales pitch' of his life to 100 people in his address book.

The subject line read, `Books for Nepal - Please Help'.

Wood spoke in his mail about Pasupathi, `a man who administers 17 local schools in the remote province of Lamjung'. Pasupathi is not a deskbound bureaucrat; he walks `ten miles of donkey trails every day to visit the rural, dirt-floor schools set up to educate children in small mountain towns', and `his goal is to help children to gain an education'.

In a chapter titled `debating a radical change', you'd find Wood battling with a dilemma: "Did it really matter how many copies of Windows we sold in Taiwan this month when millions of children were without access to books? How could I get fired up about our electronic-commerce initiative in Hong Kong, or antipiracy efforts in China, when seven of ten kids in Nepal faced lifelong illiteracy? Did my job really matter? A successful year would only help a rich company get richer... "

Not far from where Wood stood monks were chanting, amidst flickering candles. "I wanted to join the monks in meditation, to empty my mind of all thoughts... "

Great read, if you have room in your mind!

Open source needs a national policy

Selfreliance should be the guiding factor behind the propagation of open source code, reasons this book.

It is tough to put Wood's work down, but here is another book that you can't be closed to: Open Source and the Law from Priti Suri & Associates, published by LexisNexis (www.lexisnexis.co.in) .

The purpose of the book is "to provide an overview ranging from history of open source in India, policy matters, risks, contractual issues, diverse types of licences, intellectual property (IP), IP ownership, overview of Indian tax for technology companies and, finally, evolution of the judicial precedents," informs the New Delhi-based law firm that has authored the book.

First, what is open source? Where users can view and modify the source code. As you know, `source code' is the list of programming lines, written in a computer language.

Open source philosophy is that "collaborative efforts and co-creation by different people sharing their individual knowledge enhances progress and facilitates development of better software."

A section captioned `India and open source' mentions that Red Hat India has made available its Linux version in five Indian languages, viz. Hindi, Bengali, Gujarati, Punjabi and Tamil, so that "users can surf the Internet in these local languages."

The book hopes that open source may hold promise for Indian software companies who find it difficult `to come up with innovative products'. Because open source `reduces the importance of products by raising the importance of services.'

Though there is no specific legislation in India governing open source, there are many adopters.

"Corporations like Eveready Industries India Ltd and Indiabulls, nationalised banks like Central Bank of India and Canara Bank, public sector undertakings like National Fertiliser Ltd and the engineering department of the Delhi Municipal Corporation, to name a few, are already using OSS (open source software)," states the book, citing case studies on www.in.redhat.com.

The President, A.P.J. Abdul Kalam's views on OSS are well known. "In a speech delivered at Navy's Weapons and Electronic Systems Engineering establishment in July 2004 in New Delhi, he called for the usage of non-proprietary software especially by the military to ward off cyber security threats," recounts the book.

"A nodal agency or department should be established to focus on OSS and interoperability in e-government applications," suggests the book.

"The logo of FSF (Free Software Foundation) India explains the core reason behind promoting OSS through policies," argue the authors.

It seems FSF India has chosen `charkha' morphed into a computer CD as its logo, to signify `weave your own code,' in keeping with Gandhiji's message of `weave your own cloth'.

Accordingly, self-reliance should be the guiding factor behind the propagation of open source code, reasons the book.

The site www.gnu.org.in/logo gives credit for `Concept & Design' of the half-charkha, half-CD logo to Niyam Bhushan.

Useful addition to the bookshelf.

Tailpiece

"I don't believe in passwords!"

"Why?"

"Because I support open source!"

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