dear all,
On Fri, Feb 29, 2008 at 2:59 PM, Nishant Sharma <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Hi, > > I was just wondering if this budget is FOSS friendly > indirectly. Excise duty on packaged softwares is > raised to 12%. > > Now, considering most of the FOSS deployment in India > is provided as a service either by individual > consultants or companies, which invites a service tax > of 12.5%. > > Any ideas? taxing packaged software does not necessarily mean the budget is FOSS friendly. i would call the budget foss-friendly ONLY IF this tax, or some part of this tax, is used by the government to fund, support, nurture, adopt, and further FOSS development and deployment in the country and globally. is that really happening? that's the question rahul's journalists should be asking the PR guys at the two ministries, as well as experts. (FOSS-cess?) if the answer is no, then the question is to wonder, why not. another point: a packaged software may attract 12% excise, but how does that level the ground with foss? what we're assuming here is that the retailprice = foss-service-or-equivalent-price. when is the last time the 'retail' of winxp = debian / fedora or whatever. in fact even comparing the two is incorrect as winxp is sans an office suite, while a distro will contain hundreds or even thousands of applications as well. so add the equivalent retail price of a cd-burner software, graphics-editing package, development tools, etc. thirdly, how would this impact bundled software? i mean, would a mac cost more since it ships with an OS that also has its own retail price? xbox? playstation? regards niyam -- niyam bhushan _______________________________________________ ilugd mailinglist -- [email protected] http://frodo.hserus.net/mailman/listinfo/ilugd Next Event: http://freed.in - February 22-24, 2008 Archives at: http://news.gmane.org/gmane.user-groups.linux.delhi http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/
