Sam Varghese
Thursday, 27 March 2008 21:42
Opinion and Analysis
Page 2 of 3
Times have changed and India now gets most of its foreign exchange reserves through its business dealings with the rest of the world. Central to this is the population of technically qualified students who enter the job market each year. They need to have skills which are useful across different technologies. Hence India cannot lock itself into any one standard or be seen to be supping at just one table. It has to appear even-handed.
And if India wants to educate its young using technology it cannot afford to look to costly proprietary technologies. Free software makes sense in India more that it does in most places; one state, Kerala in the south, has a leftist government that has made the use of open source software a priority.
It is notable that the more populous countries - China, India, Brazil, for example - voted no in September. Both Brazil and China are unlikely to change their votes.
But there are smaller countries like New Zealand which voted no last time and which are expected to vote no again. This is a country which demands respect, a country which seems to think on its own.
The analysis which the New Zealand Open Source Society
provided to the country's standards body, about ECMA's responses to Standards NZ's comments, indicates that of the 54 comments made by SNZ, ECMA offered improvements to only 13.
And out of these 13, only in one case did the response really tackle the issue and fix it.
According to the NZOSS, incorporating changes to the OOXML standard, changes that were proposed in the ballot resolution meeting held last month, is a long and arduous process - the results of 1027 responses plus discussions at the BRM will have to be applied to the existing specification.
