Heads up! It’s official!

——————————————
The Governing Body of the International Society for Krishna Consciousness (ISKCON), commonly known as the Hare Krishnas, have decided to phase out all Microsoft products across the Hare Krishna organization, and adopt Linux as a world-wide standard. It’s not clear yet whether they are going to produce their own “Krishna-distro”, or whether they will use an existing distro, but apparently they are in negotiations with the Fedora community project and also rumoured to be talking directly with Red Hat about the possibility of a special “religious discount” for a fully supported solution beginning in Q3 2006.

While the idea of Hare Krishna’s, better known for dancing in the street and distributing Krishna literature, and high-tech may seem ludicrously oxymoronic at first, don’t be surprised - the organization actually has a relatively high degree of IT sophistication, and the projected shift to Linux is part of a five year project to well and truly bring the Krishna’s into the twenty-first century. Hare Krishna is a branch of traditional orthodox Hinduism that have met with success in the West in part due to the adoption of western technology by the visionary founder of the sect, Swami Prabhupada, who came to the US from India in 1965.

Discussing the rationale behind the move to Linux, spokesman Ramaraj Das, head of the ISKCON IT unit located near the prestigious Indian Institute of Technology in Delhi, where many staff members have graduated, and a member of the think tank that produced this recommendation, among others, had the following to say:

“Partly we are motivated by business logic - we are a voluntary organization that relies on donations and operates in many third world countries, so value for money is a major concern of ours. However we also feel some affinity for the consciousness behind the development of Linux and Open Source software in general. The distributed, voluntary nature of OSS development is something like our own mode of operation, so there is some link there.”

About the technical difficulties of implementing a world-wide conversion to another operating system:

“Currently our software developers support our applications on both Windows and Mac, and we have been looking at ways to streamline that. We are increasingly abstracting the business logic from the presentation layer and developing mainly for the server. We want to push through our new “technology-enabled preacher” project and we need a standard platform world-wide to do it. Now that broadband access is proliferating even here in India and Linux is reaching a point where it is able to be deployed with a standardized interface, we should be able to save energy on developing for two platforms, develop for open standards, and if necessary put some energy into supporting users. There are companies now that provide completely supported solutions, so we may be able to outsource that aspect and concentrate on application development and our core business activity, spreading Krishna’s glories.”

Asked what the motivation to move away from Microsoft was, and whether there was any “religious fervor” amongst Hare Krishna on this point, Das was wry:

“I’m not going to say that you can’t get into Heaven using Windows, but it looks like Linux will be the preferred platform.”

————————-

You heard it here first!

(P.S: This is a joke)