These are the comments I sent off on behalf of Red Hat. Today is the last date for comments on the Interoperability Framework for E-Governance (IFEG) in India, which lists the standards approved for e-governance in India. These standards were identified based on the Policy on Open Standards for e-Governance that was notified in November 2010.
Regards, Venky ===== Red Hat's comments on Technical Standards for Interoperability Framework for E-Governance in India (Phase I) On behalf of Red Hat, I would like to thank Department of IT for following up so quickly on the Policy on Open Standards for e-Governance, and issuing the draft list of Technical Standards. This provides welcome guidance and clarity to e-government practitioners who have to implement the Open Standards policy. We also welcome the fact that open standards like ODF, OGG Vorbis and OGG Theora have been listed as the approved standards for e-Governance in their respective areas. These are unencumbered standards and are well supported in open source software. In the open source domain, a wide variety of word processing and multimedia software programs that encode and decode these formats, are available. A significant benefit is that these open source software programs can be used without royalty payments, thus bringing down the cost of e-Governance. On JPEG 2000 Part 1 (Section 5.2.3), we request DIT to consider replacing this with PNG's lossy compression format, since this format is not widely supported. For example, the Mozilla Firefox browser, which is used by 350 million users around the world, runs on multiple operating system, and has a 30 percent share of the browser market, does not support this format. We are happy to note that the Expert Committee has selected only a single standard for a particular domain. We would like to reiterate our stance that a single standard should be used for e-Governance because multiplicity of standards will lead to serious problems if different data formats have to be integrated. If multiple standards are used for a single domain, the time taken for data integration and the errors induced by this process would defeat the very purpose of the open standards policy. We request DIT to make vigorous efforts to implement this policy and look forward to working with DIT to make this policy a success. Venkatesh Hariharan Corporate Affairs Director (Asia Pacific) Red Hat
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