Its been more than a year. I, Shishir and Subir dai from FOSS Nepal Community proposed a FOSS Support Cell for Nepal Government which would help Nepal Government to work on Open Source and Open Standard. Until then and till now Government(High Level Commission for IT- HLCIT) was supporting FOSS Nepal Community to promote FOSS in Nepal. Basically as an understanding among HLCIT members and FOSS members, HLCIT asked for the concept note of Support cell to which we responded by presenting a concept note. The ball was now on HLCIT's court. After that also HLCIT and FOSS Nepal revised the note to give it a final shape. Finally Budget was allocated for Support Cell in FY2065/2066. The whole year the procedure went from one table to other and more than few dozen discussions and meetings were held. HLCIT never refused the concept note and we always got assurance for the establishment of support cell. I remember 7 months were left and we had very detailed meeting with HLCIT staff Deepak ji regarding the programs we can complete in this FY, required furnitures, office space, computers and other fundamental things. They assured us that not its almost final and we will establish it soon. Then also many discussions and followup were done. Four months left for the end of Fiscal Year. Still nothing had changed. The support cell was still an assurance to FOSS Nepal. After few days, Members of HLCIT were given leave from their responsiblity. The progress so far was halted. It took nearly two months to come back to topic as new members were appointed. We carried out the followups and discussions and finally came up with some programs to stop the budget from freezing. We proposed for partial migration of HLCIT Software assets to FOSS. This bring us to remaining one month of the end of Fiscal year.
I, personally, was frustrated by this issue.
- I wonder if this is the case with office dedicated to ICT equipped with IT intellectuals, what about others?
- If one program, for which budget has also been allocated and things can be started at any time, cannot be done. Then what can we expect to be done?
- Open Source is not FOSS Nepal's product which we can sell or whose use is benificial just for FOSS Nepal.
- Open Source is for each and every citizen and its asset of everyone.
- The Support cell was never going to earn for FOSS Nepal community. It was solely Government's body and would work for the government.
- Had it been done, FOSS Nepal members would just gain a supporting reference in its presentation saying "Nepal Government also takes FOSS seriously and started working on it."
- The benifit of support cell was for the Government.
- The Government donot do anything for nation and also for itself and if anyone is willing to help this is the response.
But now in the horizon of two fiscal year, we have seen some light of hope from newly appointed members of HLCIT. Lets hope the rounding of this story as "jilebi" ends and we get something as sweet as "jilebi".
