On Wed, Mar 18, 2009 at 12:53 PM, Sandip Bhattacharya <[email protected]> wrote: > On Sunday 15 March 2009 09:35:54 Raj Mathur wrote: >> >> Great work, everyone who contributed and specially Venky for taking >> the initiative. Everything else being equal, a clearly-articulated >> FOSS policy would definitely sway my vote towards the BJP. > > Nothing specific against BJP, but do you really think that a policy > intention has in the past ever worked against market forces in a > government/economics setup which is market-driven? >
As one of the many people from the FOSS community who worked on localization and other issues that help bridge the digital divide, I am happy that political parties are looking at FOSS more seriously now. We need this support because proprietary software is so deeply entrenched. For example, we have been trying to make the syllabus remove the endorsement of proprietary software for so many years. I guess most of us in the FOSS community believe that FOSS and open/free content like Wikipedia can be powerful forces for development. The fact that the top leaders of BJP and CPIM have acknowledged this in their political manifesto/vision is a powerful coming of age for FOSS in India, This is a very important milestone for all of us. We must congratulate ourselves, but also realize that the real work of taking FOSS to the grassroots level begins now. > Our past "friends" CPIM talked about FOSS on one hand and proudly > announced strategic partnership with M$ for state education on the other > hand. > The CPIM's stand on software patents, open standards and FOSS is driven by an anti-monopoly approach and also a respect for the growing paradigm of the "knowledge commons" which benefits everybody. I may have missed the news but I cannot recall reading any, "strategic partnership with M$ for state education." Would be interested in knowing more. > We cannot rejoice/rely on support by political parties for pushing for > FOSS. > We should rejoice that they are publicly supporting FOSS. A few years ago, many of the policy makers I met would privately criticize proprietary software vendors and pay lip sympathy to open source. However, in the presence of the proprietary software vendor, they would turn into meek lambs. Some policy makers used to treat the worlds "open source" like bad word. The fact that FOSS is now being talked about in the highest political circles will definitely change these mindsets and that is a powerful change in itself. On the statement that, we should not "rely on support by political parties for pushing for FOSS," I would heartily agree and add that we should build such a vibrant FOSS community that no political party can ignore. We must now focus on areas like FOSS open source in education, for the visually handicapped etc where there are clear benefits to the country and prove once and for all that FOSS is the best bet for India in the long term. > I however do acknowledge that the Indian contingent in the recent ISO > OpenXML saga did a very commendable job against very heavy odds. Of > course the people involved weren't government officials, but at least it > had the blessing in some way of the Indian government. There were six government organizations that voted against OOXML (I don't think OpenXML is a good name for 6,000 pages of XML dump of a legacy file format :-). All of them spent a lot of time reviewing one of the most voluminous standards ever created. Also, way before the OOXML saga, some key officials in the government have always said that India will mandate open standards. The OOXML issue forced them to finally come put with a clear policy on open standards and tame the beast of proprietary standards. To give credit where it is due, some of the bureaucrats within Department of IT and the Bureau of Indian Standards did a tremendous job despite the immense pressure from all sides, -- proprietary vendors, the media coverage of the issue, the uncompromising stance taken by open standards supporters, the issue being escalated to the Prime Minister's Office... See: http://osindia.blogspot.com/2007/10/media-replies-on-ooxml-issue.html Many of my friends have said that the OOXML saga was one of the most brilliant lobbying efforts and also a great example of how the checks and balances of a democratic country like India work. In our neighboring countries, the negative vote against OOXML by technical committees was overturned due to the pressure exerted on the ministries that the standards bodies report to. Some of the committees were plain rigged, as happened in Pakistan: http://osindia.blogspot.com/2007/09/microsoft-certified-ballot-box.html The heavy odds comment is spot on. When the whole issue started, Gora, myself and others had attended a BIS meeting (see below) and we never thought that we would be able to get India to vote against OOXML. http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/msg16585.html Miracles do happen! Venky _______________________________________________ ilugd mailinglist -- [email protected] http://frodo.hserus.net/mailman/listinfo/ilugd Archives at: http://news.gmane.org/gmane.user-groups.linux.delhi http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/
