Further Inroads of FOSS in Allahabad High Court

This is the fourth post of the series 'FOSS INNOVATION IN INDIAN COURTS: Inspired by the Allahabad High Court'. It talks about how FOSS made further inroads in the Allahabad High. 

FOSS INNOVATION IN COURTS: Inspired by the Allahabad High Court

Introduction|| Computerisation of Indian Courts|| FOSS Introduction - Allahabad High Court|| Further Inroads of FOSS in Allahabad High Court|| 

इस इस चिट्ठी को हिन्दी में यहां  पढ़ा जा सकता है।

At the beginning of this century, the websites of all courts were being hosted on the NIC server and was being managed by them. Similar, was the case of the Allahabad High Court website. If we wanted to have any change then NIC would often refuse by informing us that this is how the Supreme Court wants to maintain website. We could not change our website. We decided to change this, by setting up our own web server. 

We sent a proposal to the State Government to set up our own server. It was accepted and funds were released. Soon we set up own web server, mail server, storage area network (SAN), database servers in our premises. This happened in the first half of the first decade of this century. We decided to use FOSS for the same. Our operating System is Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server and web server is on Apache HTTP as well as Apache Tomcat. It is first for any court in India. Our database is managed by Linux based Mysql, Postgres and Oracle

Initially, it was taking a lot of time to set up the server. After three weeks, we asked the supplier about the reason for delay. He answered that had we taken Windows based server, it could have been installed in a day. He had not installed any web server on Linux: obviously he was taking time. It was installed after a month. But the waiting period was worth the delay. It never caused us any trouble.

We also added RSS feed technology for important decisions and administrative orders – first anywhere in the world for any court.  RSS feed is very common nowadays, but it wasn't at that time. When I asked the computer centre of the High Court to implement it neither they nor the NIC staff knew about it. But once I explained them, High Court's computer team implemented it easily.

It was not only that the computer section or the NIC were ignorant about it, but it wasn't common world over. Sometimes in 2006, there was a global conference of Sun Microsystem in Bangalore on FOSS. I was invited to speak there, and I did inform them about our website. After the talk, during question-answer session, the first question was - "What is RSS feed", and the second one was - "what is the difference between Free Software and Open Source Software." These concepts were not clear to many at that time.  

Slowly but surely, all computers in the judges’ chambers were replaced with Linux desktops (now Ubuntu distribution). The Courtrooms were initially provided thin clients then desktops (now all are Ubuntu distribution based) so the orders and case dates could be directly uploaded on the web server. To make ourselves clear, FAQ page of our website (at present not linked on the Home page) states that,

'Allahabad High Court has taken a policy decision to work in Open Source Software and use open standards … 

 Our Website is also best viewed in Firefox.' 

In the next post, we will talk how talks about how our experiment changed the attitude of the E-Committee and it also adopted FOSS.

#FOSS #FreeOpenSourceSoftware #OpenSourceSoftware #AllahabadHighCourt #IndianCourts #ECommittee