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Controversy surrounding national policy on open standards for egovernance in India
A draft policy on open standards for governance, more than a year in the making is about to be dramatically altered due to pressure from proprietary software based technology firms.
The Ministry of Information and Communication Technology, India last year(2008) released a Draft policy on Open Standards for eGovernance. This policy is very progressive and mandates adoption of single and wholly public standards in various e-governance projects in India .However technology trade-bodies in India like NASSCOM and MAIT , at the behest of certain software companies have written to the government asking for the policy to allow multiple standards and to allow royalty encumbered standards.
In order to ensure that the draft policy is not diluted and corrupted,
and national interests not sacrificed, FOSSCOMM ( a civil society
alliance of organizations and individuals working to promote use of free
and open source software (FOSS) in India) has written to the Department
of Information and Technology(DIT) requesting that the present draft
policy not be diluted by including recommendations on multiple and
royalty encumbered standards as asked for by NASSCOM and MAIT.FOSSCOMM is also working to increase awareness about these attempts to dilute the policy and is also trying to ensure that the government does not bow to commercial interests and sacrifice national interests , by diluting the policy.
More details on this issue can be found at - http://fosscomm.in/OpenStandards
Articles in the media about this subject -
Publication – DNA, Date – July 15th
URL -
http://www.dnaindia.com/money/report_members-irked-with-nasscom-over_1274086
Publication - The Economic Times, Date : July 8th
URL -
http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/Infotech/ITeS/Draft-on-open-source-standards-splits-IT-industry/articleshow/4752282.cms
Publication - Deccan Herald, Date - July 18th
URL -
http://www.deccanherald.com/content/14536/rat-race-begins-among-vendors.html
More on the issue -
Blog post by Venky Hariharan, Director, Red Hat India
http://osindia.blogspot.com/2009/07/last-minute-dramas-around-around-open.html
Blog post by Prodyut Bora, Technology chief
of India's main opposition party, BJP
http://blog.prodyutbora.org/?p=116
Blogpost by a faculty member of the inst. of math. sciences, chennai-
http://www.imsc.res.in/~kapil/blog/floss/natl-pol-open-standards-2009-07-07-08-50
Background on importance of open standards
http://osindia.blogspot.com/2007/01/importance-of-open-standards.html
