NEW DELHI | BENGALURU: Industry bodies US-India Business Council and the Confederation of Indian Industry have urged the government to reconsider its push for open source software that will cut the cost of licensing from big companies such as Cisco, IBM and Oracle In submissions to the Department of Electronics and Information Technology (DeitY), which were seen by ET, the two bodies suggested the government replace the clause on mandatory use of open software with “best-fit and best-value technologies that support interoperability through open standards”.“The policy on this issue should emphasise open standards, interoperability and other key factors that create a level playing field for vendors of all types,” US-India Business Council President Mukesh Aghi told ET in an email response.Aghi said while it may be tempting to save money in the short-term, “open source may end up costing the government more money over a period of time, because it doesn’t take into account the total cost of ownership, including software development, maintenance and change management”.CII’s National Committee on IT & ITeS, headed by Microsoft India Chairman Bhaskar Pramanik and Mindtree CEO Krishnakumar Natarajan , made broadly the same arguments but said it did not want to add anything to its submission to DeitY. Open source software is one whose source code is available for modification or enhancement by anyone.DeitY announced the open source policy in March, making it mandatory for all software applications and services of the government to be built using open source software, so that projects under Digital India “ensure efficiency, transparency and reliability of such services at affordable costs”.For technology giants, billions of dollars are at stake. The government’s spending on information technology is expected to increase 5.7% to $6.8 billion in 2015, of which $860 million will be spent on software, according to research firm Gartner “In the future, the government has to spend money on IT and 15-20% of it can be shaved off comfortably by killing the licensing cost. The costs of migration are a one-time costs. We will have to absorb those costs over a period of time,” said Professor Rahul De, Hewlett-Packard chair professor in quantitative methods and information systems at Indian Institute of Management, Bengaluru.According to DeitY Secretary Ram Sewak Sharma, the decision to use open source software is not “ideological” but “pragmatic” as it leads to more robust systems and avoids lock-in with vendors.“The cost will be much lesser in this (open source) case. We are not here to support one vendor or the other, we are here to optimise the cost, without getting into vendor lock-in by using robust open source technology,” Sharma told ET last month. Lalitesh Katragadda, former head of products at Google India , supported the government’s move.“Any software built using public money should be open source. Why should each state have to replicate the same app if it can be reused?” he said. iSPIRT, the product industry think tank, wants both open source and open API (application programming interface) policies to be in place for all systems to be used across the country as they are fully compatible with each other.DeitY has put in place policies around open data, open standards and open code for its internal apps, open APIs and open source.“When the architecture and each of the individual layers of the stack are open, closed source software becomes like a piece of the jigsaw puzzle that does not fit, ” said Venkatesh Hariharan, director, Alchemy Business Solutions