Maya OS - Interesting Journey

 There was a recent announcement of the release of Maya OS in India. I saw that news and got interested. There were lot of comments on X as well about the fact that Maya OS is based on Ubuntu. It should have been based on Debian, a more stable and secure platform. Being interested in the domain of security, this was enticing for me. So I looked at it from different vantage points.

From a high level view, I see a trend where lot of nations are trying to get out of Windows OS. There was a news of Germany and Russia treading the same path. Below is the list of reasons.

1. Windows being a product from US head quartered company, there is a risk wherein state administration can force Windows to behave in an adversarial fashion for the rest of the world. This is not hypothetical. There are too many instances of the same starting with financial sanctions for outright adversary to controlling the functionality of defense technology sold to allies that will work only to the extant allowed by state administration of the seller. One can argue that in very secure environments that are within controlled network, it is difficult to exercise the level of control from outside. But, as we move forward in time, we see the operating systems need more and more network feature and some form of connection to the mother ship(OS company) for upgrades or other aspects. It is operationally difficult to prevent payloads being passed from mothership to individual devices hosting the OS. Lot of nations and nation groups have launched their own GPS satellites for the similar reason.
2. With so many devices hosting Windows, there is lot of focus and surface area ready to be exploited by bad actors. With such a large pool, comes out large pool of vulnerabilities.
3. Countries using specific OS within small number of critical departments provide a very small surface area to be exploited by large number of attackers. Only the dedicated and state funded actors generally focus on attacking these devices. So you kind of raise the cost of attack for the attacker. They can't pick easily available vulnerability, rather they will have to develop something by themselves.
4. Reducing software supply chain risk is big part of this effort where the state should have few options and some of them controlled by the state itself rather someone outside the state.
5. Saving forex can be a motivator. But, very low in the list if at all. This is true specially when it comes to government departments. If some of these OS turn out to be user friendly and the state if ready to allow civilian use, then saving forex for general public becomes a decent motivation.

The Chaos

When I was looking for this topic, I found there is another OS called Bharat OS that was released some time back and is also in use in certain pockets. Bharat OS is trying to provide alternative to Android. The reviews suggest BOSS version 9 and above are really smooth to work with. It is based on Debian OS. This was developed by state owned company called C-DAC. The same company is involved in development and launch of Maya OS as well, which is Ubuntu OS based OS. The look and feel of Maya OS is very close to Windows 11. So looks C-DAC is releasing different operating systems to provide for different level of user experience and security combination products. This will help ease the transition out of Windows. To maintain an operating system is no easy task. Managing more than one makes it even more difficult. This is going to be a journey for sure.

The Order

Intent seems right. There are few thousand employees in the C-DAC and other partner organizations launching the Operation Systems. With that type of human resources, it should be possible to manage the OS and the journey. Looking at the history of this effort so far, I can see few years have passed and there are versions released over time. So this doesn't look like one off release and forget. The initiative is very much alive. This opportunity create a very large talent pool that has product development and management experience. I can see this will help software product development in other spaces as well. India has done well in software services space. But, not so much in software product creation so far. I can see initiatives like this will help on software product creation side. 

India had an option of not wasting time and money on such initiatives and keep using Windows/Android products just like most of the world does. They picked up an hard but India first kind of initiative. There are many other examples I see in recent past, be in terms of UPI development and use when they already had VISA/Mastercard or even Rupay network for payments. One off right initiatives can be result of chance. But, when you see more than one thing going in right direction, it gives you a sense of nation starting to move in right direction. We will see lot of failures and missteps along the way. That is natural. As someone really smart said, "Failure doesn't matter, success does", we will have to look for successes and not get bogged down too much about failures to see the trajectory of nation. I think it is time to bet in favor of the this country now.