BOSS stands for Bharat Operating System Solution it is a home grown Operating System touted to replace the mighty Windows OS in all Indian Government run Organizations. BOSS is an open source GNU/Linux distribution developed by C-DAC under the initiative of National Resource Centre for Free/Open Source Software or NRCFOSS of India with an aim to protect the government's online computer network system from various vulnerabilities. In past this has resulted in repeated attacks from Indian and Chinese hackers. The BOSS OS promises to offer all the important features to carry out online activities without any glitches. BOSS is available for enterprise and education use you can download them for free at http://bosslinux.in/downloads. The website claims that with features like bulk document converter, presentation tool and plug and play feature migrating to BOSS environment should not be difficult to any Microsoft users. Implementing BOSS OS is one more step in the direction of “Make In India” campaign. Currently BOSS supports different Indian languages including Assamese, Bengali, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Oriya, Punjabi, Sanskrit, Tamil, Telugu, Bodo, Urdu, Kashmiri, Maithili, Konkani, Manipuri. This will help people who are not well-versed with English to use BOSS.
To make this a success many state departments is switching to BOSS OS as their computer's primary operating system. Some of the government organizations like Airport Authorities are holding workshops to make users familiar with the OS. The main reason for developing this ingenious OS is to protect government computer network system from Chinese and outside hackers and keep the confidential data safe.
Launched in 2007 the current stable version of BOSS 5.0 is finding some early adopters who are getting used to new environment. The long term success of the BOSS OS depends on mass adoption by employees, continous products enhancemnet, training, great support and building awareness around the product. If you are a developer you can download it, play around and offer your suggestion on their feedback page.
