Ten years after first attempting to get Linux out to the public, one has had one’s failures and one’s victories.

Today was one of the victory days.

The newspaper announces the official Indian National Portal, put together by the Government of India with the NIC and the Department of Information Technology.

It works really well, has tons of well organised information, and is a great sign of things to come. Very clean design, excellent formatting, and lots of useful information.

And for some strange reason, after being subjected to government site after government site that only works with Internet Explorer, this site works flawlessly with Mozilla Firefox and any other browser I threw at it.

This needed some digging.

And the results blew me away.

India’s National Government portal server runs on Linux.

Not only that – the site is built with the world’s favourite web scripting language – PHP – that just happens to be Free & Open Source Software as well.

I almost jumped out of my chair and saluted.

This was almost like a declaration of national digital independence.

Am I proud, or what?