BOSS 6.0: India's New Defense Mechanism?

Recently, Microsoft rolled out Windows 10, and the government of India went, “Nay, not anymore.”

A new operating system has been developed by the National Resource Centre for Free/Open Source Software (NRCFOSS) of India at Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (CDAC), Chennai, in collaboration with the Gujrat Technical University (GTU) and the Defence and Research Organization (DRDO) in a bid to form a more robust cybersecurity environment.  Bharat Operating System Solutions or BOSS, is an open source, Linux based operating system (OS). First launched in 2007, the current version of BOSS is 5.0., code named ‘Anokha’. The latest release is code-named ‘Anoop’. Over 150 engineers from across the country had been working on creating this Indian OS. BOSS shares a major feature with the country. It is multilinguistic as it has almost 20 different language support and packages.

It is receiving huge popularity while being promoted as part of #MakeinIndia campaign by Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government. The ‘Make in India’ campaign certainly has a great logic behind it. When most of the world’s leading organizations are being led by extremely talented Indians, (notably, Satya Nadella CEO, Microsoft, Sunder Pichai CEO, Google, Indra Nooyi Chairperson and CEO of PepsiCo, New Development Bank’s President K V Kamath, Shantanu Narayen CEO, Adobe), why not use home-grown talents for our own betterment.

One of the major benefits of BOSS would be warding off attacks and infiltrations by other countries. Whistle-blower Edward Snowden had warned that India was one of the major targets of intrusion by the U.S. China is already infamous as harnessing hackers to leak out sensitive data from other countries. Even the terrorists today have become quite tech-savvy with new recruits holding high level technical degrees.

Other countries have also used the same route in the past to ward off intrusion threats. North Korea, famous as a sceptic, has the Red Star OS. It is a Linux OS that has more of a MAC appearance and makes use of a modified KDE desktop. Even the general public is prompted to use the same.

While India’s State departments have been asked to switch over to BOSS and bank ATMs would also be upgraded to BOSS aka Linux, individuals can use the OS of their own choices.

A new self-developed OS would certainly yield a lot of benefits. If India is gearing-up to go mostly digital then it better gear up with its own equipment, at least its own operating system.

So, is BOSS 6.0 secure enough? Well, it does seem to be. Given that during its three months long trial it has successfully defended cyber-attacks from various hackers, even the Indian Army’s attacks. It is thus being lauded as a Safe, Secure and Easy-to-Use OS.

But security threats don’t just constitute access through OS; they could also come from applications, network devices, etc.

Yet, something is better than nothing and this something seems really good. Let me know what you think of it?

BOSS 6.0 is available for download on http://www.bosslinux.in/