[FSUG-Bangalore] Document Freedom lives on

[Anivar Aravind]

harish singh wrote:
> Hi Everyone,
> Kudos to Arvind, Vincent and all participents in bringing much needed 
> attention to open document formats.
> 
> An analysis by Ditesh Kumar on the adoption of ODF in Asia and support 
> by national bodies worldwide is published on Asia Pacific Development 
> Information Programme website at http://www.apdip.net/apdipenote/18.pdf. 
> The Government of India's stand on ODF states
> 
> The Government of India strongly supports ODF, with the Ministry of 
> Information and Technology stating that: ...considering the huge 
> potential of eGovernance in the nation as well as the need to adopt open 
> standards to make our data systems more inter-operable and independent 
> of any limiting proprietary tools, we feel that ODF is a great 
> technological leap and a big boon to further propel IT right to India's 
> grass root levels. I congratulate this initiative of leading private and 
> public organizations...
> 
> There have been other moves to adopt ODF in India:
> • The Allahabad High Court of India made a policy decision to use ODF.
> • The Election Commission of the Government of India is working on 
> adopting ODF using open source software.
> • The government of Delhi moves to ODF-based office suites for cost reasons.
> • The state of Kerala in India suggests the use of ODF in its draft IT 
> policy, stating that: Open standards such as Unicode and Open Document 
> Format and Open Architectures will be followed in e-governance projects 
> to avoid total dependence on select vendors.
> 

Thanks for posting this

We have some state policies, National E Governace plan (NeGP) , Knoledge 
commission suggessions, 11th Plan Documents mensioning or suggesting 
Open standards

BIS did their best at ISO voting too.

But A national policy is still lacking. Presure from M$ side is also 
there. Without a proper definition for Open standards & a national 
policy they can claim OOXML as a Open standard. Community protest like 
this will help to prevent it and help policy makers to get the issue better

They Did it in APDIP's eprimer on Open standard.


> On a related note, a BBC World documentary on FOSS and how poor 
> countries are using FOSS applications for development is hosted at 
> http://www.apdip.net/news/fossdoc
> 
> Best,
> Harish Singh
> 
> 
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