Enrolment Software for UIDAI - (Unique Identification Authority of India) - Another Microsoft Blunder waiting to happen???

Just my thoughts about the UIDAI enrolment software request from Microsoft.

UIDAI is Unique Identification Authority of India., for those who have not heard about it can visit http://uidai.gov.in/ to know more.

Microsoft has been sending out mailers to all known Indian registrants with the title of (CALLING ALL .NET CHAMPIONS). It is a good effort to form a community for one of the biggest software projects that has ever happened in India. Well, the magnitude is enormous consisting of approximately 1180~ Million people spread across 3 Million Sq. Kms. (Amazing isn't?).

UIDAI and Microsoft wants people to write code for free(that's us people!! The oppressed software developers!!).

(Well, you have to qualify first! technically..) They (UIDAI, I am not sure about Microsoft's contribution on this project.) will not pay for any code that a person writes / contributes to the project. (I am not talking of GNUGPL here. Though I am one, for all ya GNU GPL Fanatics, it costs hell a lot of time and money to spend on free stuff. Think about it.(!)). So, they are looking at people's contribution for free (Free as in Beer! :)) which is not a good thing to do for such a large community project.

Why can't they ask the big corporations who are all involved in this project to give everything else for free too?

Shouldn't the hardware, storage, networking, bandwidth required for the project be free too? Also, electricity, data centres, back bone networks, interfaces, backups, BCP, DRP stuff, security, distribution of media / badges, well, almost everything that is involved in this project need to be free.

Why just the software need to be free?

With the current conditions prevailing in the dog eat dog market, only a truly, truly out of the mind person would be going around implementing stuff for free for UIDAI or Microsoft (I'm not talking about the GNUGPL stuff).

FYI, the request from microsoft is available at here.(http://download.microsoft.com/download/B/F/E/BFE235AA-B374-481D-9C2C-8579FD536D67/CodeContributionToUidai.pdf)

Probably Nandan Nilekani begs to differ. Probably he might even get all the required "software" and "hardware" resources from Infosys for free too!!

But hey wait!!! What happens to the ~412 Million USD ((INR) Rs. 1900 Crores) allocated budget? Whose pocket is it going to go? :)

Isn't this really the irony of the software developers?

Please post your comments / critics.