Thiruvananthapuram: Free and open source software (FOSS) may just be ready to shed its tag of being a poor cousin of proprietary software, as a range of users from classrooms to boardrooms are finding it a profitable option to expensive proprietary software.

Users as diverse as government schools in Kerala to the Life Insurance Corporation, and private sector majors to NGOs have warmed up to the FOSS advantage. Significantly, not all of them have adopted FOSS merely on the cost advantage, but also for the pleasure of being different.

According to a study on economic impact of FOSS in India by Rahul De, a Hewlett-Packard chair professor at IIM-Bangalore and professor Shishir Jha of IIT-Mumbai, across 20 organisations covering public and private sectors, educational institutions and NGOs, the appeal for FOSS is rated high, and the users have recorded significant cost savings.

Experiences at two of the 20 organisations studied for the survey are eye-opening: General insurance major New India Assurance Company has got about 4,000 of its 7,000 desktops into FOSS mode and the tangible and intangible savings are put at roughly Rs 80 crore. The IT@School project in Kerala, which has free software operating across 50,000-odd desktops across the state, makes a neat saving of Rs 49 crore.

"It is tricky to evaluate actual savings made by adopting FOSS, but our survey shows that cost-savings are indeed accruing to those who use free software", says professor De, adding that across the 20 sample organizations considered for the survey, there were about 1.5 lakh desktops and the changeover to free software meant considerable savings for the organizations concerned.

But how have even public sector majors, who are perceived to be slow adapters, switched so nimbly to FOSS? Says professor De: "That has been a revelation. The survey showed that there have been FOSS champions within organizations, both public and private, who have pushed the idea". The LIC, for instance, has got 18,000 of its 30,000-odd desktops on FOSS mode.

The improvement in ease of use of free software has also led to the increase in organizations adopting FOSS. "A decade ago, FOSS products may have been difficult to use, but one can't say the same about FOSS brands like Ubuntu, Fedora or Suse, which can match proprietary software in ease of use", says professor De.

The survey estimates that anti-virus software sales in 2010 may touch Rs 2,000 crore, and that the entire cost can be avoided if FOSS products are adopted. Industry sources say, that if nothing else, the compulsions brought about by the economic slowdown would be a compelling incentive for the drive towards FOSS.