India to Launch its Own Operating System 'BOSS'

Centre for Development of Advanced Computing has announced the launch of BOSS-Bharat Operating Systems Solutions, a Linux based operating system GNU/Linux version 3.0 in 18 languages, reports The Hindu.

The OS is equipped with Bluetooth for short-range communications and has features such as RSS feed reader and PDF viewer to edit. BOSS GNU/Linux is a key deliverable of the National Resource Centre for free/open source software (NRCFOSS).

M. R. Rajagopalan, Director, C-DAC, said BOSS being a free software, would help reduce the IT spends and would be most beneficial to the end-users and the organizations that adopted this software.

S. Ramakrishnan, Director General, C-DAC, said several State Governments had recognized the advantages of using open source software. C-DAC had also entered into a pact with National Informatics Centre and State Governments of Tamil Nadu, Chhattisgarh, Kerala and Bihar for deploying BOSS for their e-governance projects.

He also said that the positive response from the government organizations has encouraged them to initiate 3-tier support centre and also has plans to extend the support to its customers via a 24x7 help desk.

The Chennai centre is working on developing a SaaS (Software as a Service) delivery stack based on model driven architecture. Besides, it has taken up the initiative in cloud computing by setting up a laboratory. C-DAC is also aiming to broaden the facility of its data centre to government organizations.