[Fsf-friends] CSIR uses only Microsoft

V. Sasi Kumar vsasi@vsnl.com
Tue Jan 6 17:48:41 IST 2004


The Council of Scientific and Industrial Research, an autonomous
organisation under the Govt. of India, is a leading agency of the GoI
involved in scientific and industrial research, and publication of
scientific material. They run several journals related to different
branches of science and technology. I found that they ask for manuscript
in MS Word format. No other format is acceptable to them, including
text, pdf, TeX, and, interestingly, RTF. I wrote a letter to them
pointing out that they were forcing people to buy software that they may
not need otherwise (even people who are using proprietary software may
have other word processors like Lotus WordPro). There was no response
from their side. I was forced to save in Word format from Open Office (I
had originally prepared it in LaTeX), check for consistency in another
computer having Word and send the file. Since this happened after a
prolonged process of screening and final acceptance after almost one
year after I had submitted it, I did not want to pull out. How can we
bring some pressure on CSIR to move to Free Software?

-- 
V. Sasi Kumar <vsasi@vsnl.com>
CESS




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