Press Release Policy on Open Standards for e-governance 20 November, 2010 The Department of Information Technology (DIT), Ministry of Communications and Information Technology released its policy on Open Standards for e-governance , Version 1 last week.
Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC) is pleased to note that DIT recognizes the importance of Royalty-free standards for solutions enabling e-governance and the integration of existing services. This is a crucial step without which real effective e-governance for everyone would be delayed, denied or made much more expensive. We understand that the implementation of this policy will make all the difference. The exceptions forced into this policy by certain vendor interests, permitting fall back to standards based on FRAND or RAND licensing under ill-defined conditions threaten to permit the undermining of this policy's value in practice. What we believe will be absolutely necessary is vigilant efforts by DIT to prevent vendors from subverting in relation to individual tenders, the principles declared in this policy through the exceptions DIT has been forced to accept. The policy unfortunately does not insist that all standards incorporated in e-governance technology must be freely implementable by all competitors. This means that some lock-in is inevitable somewhere. Unless only freely implementable standards are exclusively employed citizens will pay too much to get too little. The expertise and determination shown by DIT in this process are excellent signs of their commitment in the future. SFLC looks forward to continuing our assistance to DIT. We wish to strengthen our direct relationship with DIT in implementation of this policy and its protection against subversion by vendors. -- Warm Regards Mishi Choudhary Counsel Software Freedom Law Center 1995 Broadway Floor 17 New York, NY-10023 tel) 212-461-1912 (fax) 212-580-0898 www.softwarefreedom.org _______________________________________________ network mailing list [email protected] http://lists.fosscom.in/listinfo.cgi/network-fosscom.in
