On Mon, Oct 12, 2009 at 10:37 AM, Terence Monteiro <[email protected]> wrote: > On Sat, Sep 19, 2009 at 10:59:21PM +0530, Nagarjuna G. wrote: >> On Sat, Sep 19, 2009 at 2:37 PM, Terence Monteiro >> <[email protected]> wrote: >> This is excellent. Could you write a brief of what you did, with >> links to the work, then FSF India will write to IncomTax department >> asking them to upload OpenOffice version on their website. > > I will do that shortly. For everyone's info, I had written to the Info > tech head of the Tax department and following his suggestion, to the > chairman of Income Tax about it. Let's see what happens. > My 2 paise:
We had some discussion about values and money, partly wrt income and expenditures relating services etc, during the FOSSCOMM meeting. It seems to me that DRL's work here, Terence's in particular, shows that exceedingly serious, critical and important work can be done, without 'charging' for services. By this I mean (in this case), without billing the department whose job it is to collect taxes. Of course, it may be this was possible to complete in this fashion because this is a migration, not an original work, hence no iterations between client and developer were needed, but that is not my point. In the present environment, one based on what Gandhi would have considered a doleful deterioration of societal standards (if I can presume to apply what I believe to be his thoughts), we (not FOSSCOMM, not the people on this list, but India, and humans in India in particular) have no proper means of appreciating the value of Terence's contribution to an open and free society. I think that we cannot continue blindly accepting this state of affairs, and that is why I advocate relooking (as often as possible - every time, if that is needed) at 'conventional' ways of dealing with the government, whether as a client, or as a partner in driving change for the better in India. It may be w.r.t. an initiative to introduce ICT for learning in Maharashtra's schools, or in e-governance applications and services aimed at empowering local self-government (panchayats), or taxes - we owe it to ourselves to continually examine /why/ we do something, rather than limiting ourselves to doing the same thing using FOSS. In this, I endorse (and applaud) Terence's contribution as a first step along that path. May a thousand follow, sooner rather than later. Also, maybe we should think of how best to host a Hall of Fame together with the Hall of Shame, a mark of our positive attitude, rather than only highlighting other's negativity. -- Vickram http://communicall.wordpress.com _______________________________________________ network mailing list [email protected] http://lists.fosscom.in/listinfo.cgi/network-fosscom.in
