Bill Gates is new Secretary-General of ISO

Phew, just managed to file it before 12AM!

Bill Gates is new Secretary-General of ISO

In a dramatic development, Bill Gates of Microsoft has taken over as the new Secretary-General of ISO. The outgoing Secretary-General, Illbeser Vile said that since most of the ISO members now belong to Microsoft, this is the most appropriate course of action.

Announcing his ascendancy at a press conference, Bill Gates justified the takeover of ISO. "Just as George Bush invaded Iraq due to WMD (Weapons of Mass Destruction), we have invaded ISO for approving a WMD (Weapon of Monopoly Destruction) called ODF (Open Document Format).

"For 26 years, we have been one step ahead of the world, constantly changing the file formats to suit our whims and fancies. Then one day we woke up to find that governments are embracing ODF. This had to be stopped."

Flicking the dandruff off his suit, Gates said that he has been itching for action ever since he stepped down as CEO of Microsoft. "I built two great monopolies in Windows and Office but it got kinda boring. I went off on a retreat, called all the M$ top-shots to the table and asked, "What's the next great monopoly that we can build?"

After three days of intense discussion, the M$ guys finally said, "Why even care to build products, when we can monopolize standards itself?"

Speaking to the press, Microsoft's VP for Interoperability, Wescroo U said, "Now we are back to where we belong - bang in the center of the universe! There was a time when the desktop world used to revolve around Microsoft. Then these pesky Internet startups like Yahoo, Google and Facebook turned up, making us looks like fuddy-duddies. Once we control the standards, we'll see what happens to the sky-high stock valuation of some of these companies."

Speaking to investors, Gates said that controlling ISO was the ultimate business model. "Now we don't even need to build products ("we were not very good at that anyway, just look at Vista!") Our new strategy is:

1) Drive adoption of our standards
2) File a thicket of patents around it
3) Sit back and collect royalties or sue the buggers who don't pay up.

If the software business was a 80 percent margin business, this is a pure-cash play," Gates told salivating Wall-Street types. "Then why have so many employees?" asked a shiny, bald-headed guy in a pin-stripe suit. Promptly, 40,000 out of 50,000 Microsoft employees were fired, sending Microsoft stock into the stratosphere, where it finally overtook Google. The remaining 10,000 employees were reassigned to frantically create "standards" or file patents around them.

One Microsoft minion patented the English language. Everytime, the press asked a question in English, Microsoft was a few dollars richer. The Queen was reportedly furious about it but there she could do little about it since England is now the 51st state in the United States of America. Another Microsoft factotum patented the right-hand drive as well as the left-hand drive. Microsoft lawyers promptly scurried around halting traffic on the streets and collecting royalties from bewildered commuters, ably assisted by the traffic police, especially in the banana republics around the world. The only exceptions were the rebel outposts of China and India, which refused to toe the Microsoft line. To neutralise these pesky, non-Microsoft compliant countries, Gates and co, told investors that they will foment a war between the neighboring countries. "That will teach them how to comply," sniggered the man whose net worth was now half the GDP of the world.

"Is there no limit to your greed?" asked a reporter asked a journalist in an awed whisper. "No. Our aim is TOTAL WORLD DOMINATION(TM)," said Gates.

Watching this on his TV in the Oval Office, George Bush turned pale. Promptly, Secretary of State, Condoleeza Rice, whispered into the President's ears, "Don't worry sir. If nothing else stops them, we can try nuclear deterrence."

NOTE: The sequel to this is coming soon to a multiplex near you. Tickets will cost double since the movies will be encoded in Microsoft's proprietary WMA format.

ADDENDUM: Gates said that he is also going to unveil an April Fools Day joke on the world called called OOXML. However, since there are some well known date problems with the OOXML format, it will be unveiled only on April 2nd, 2008. Get ready for the Microsoft Tax!

A quote from Swami Vivekananda

I came across this great quote from Swami Vivekananda:

No great work can be achieved by humbug. It is through love, a passion for truth and tremendous energy that all undertakings are accomplished."

After a full year of reviewing a half-baked, 6,000 page proposal called OOXML, I cannot agree more :-)

Microsoft files complaint on OOXML vote to apex office and Ministry of Consumer Affairs

I love Microsoft for their sheer willingness to piss off every human being on this planet in their quest for approval of OOXML. At the meeting held on 20th March 2008, we were informed that Microsoft has complained to the Ministry of Consumer Affairs and to the apex office of the country about the constitution of the committee and also cast aspersions on the impartiality of the chairperson of LITD15, Mrs. Neeta Verma. The chairperson was furious and offered to step down from her post. She pointed out that the committee has met numerous times and Microsoft never brought this issue up in front of the committee nor did they check the facts with her or her organization before complaining to the apex office. I do not have a copy of their complaint but am assuming that their complaint is that the committee is packed with supporters of ODF.

Mrs. Verma was persuaded to stay back only after all the other members requested her to stay. After that, Dr. Arora of CSI displayed great statesmanship by asking the Microsoft representative if Microsoft would like to withdraw its complaint. Sadly, the Microsoft representative said that it cannot be withdrawn because it was sent by his senior or some similar reason. The Wipro representative then chimed in and tried to stall the vote by saying that he did not believe that the committee has not been able to apply its mind to the subject and should therefore abstain from voting on this issue! For those of us who have been engaged in this issue from the very beginning (as compared to the software exporters who put in cameo, guest appearances and contributed very little to discussing technical issues) this was obviously not acceptable.

I am just amazed and shocked by the depths to which Microsoft is willing to descend. I have had the privilege of representing Red Hat and the Indian open source community on the LITD 15 committee and have attended almost all the meetings convened on OOXML over the last one year. I would therefore like to place on record my appreciation for the Bureau of Indian Standards and Mrs. Neeta Verma for the transparency and openness with which they conducted an exceptionally difficult task. The manner in which they conducted the proceedings has done India proud and is in stark contrast to the controversies surrounding committees reviewing OOXML in other countries.

Some of the most respected academic institutions (IIT Bombay, IIT Delhi, IISc, ISI Kolkatta and IIM Ahmedabad) besides several government organizations were part of this committee and I have no doubt that they will wholeheartedly agree with my opinion. I would also like to point out that the academia and government bodies have comprehensively voted against OOXML after spending more than a year reviewing it. Doubters who are still not satisfied can verify the transparency of these meetings by requesting recordings of the meetings from the Bureau of Indian Standards and anyone under the Right to Information Act.

To cite just one example, a four-member committee at IIT Bombay spent countless hours reviewing OOXML before voting against the proposal due to its technical flaws. The only group to vote in favor of OOXML was the software exports group and that too on the basis of “support for multiple standards,” an argument which had no relevance because the committee was asked to review OOXML on technical merits and national interest.

Considering the fact that some of the finest technical minds in the country have spent more than a year reviewing OOXML before India finally voted No, I feel that Microsoft's complaint is a great disservice to the committee, its chairperson and the Bureau of Indian Standards. For those who are interested, this is how the committee voted on the question, "Should India change its NO vote on OOXML?"

1. National Informatics Center - NO
2. Center for Development of Advanced Computing - NO
3. Computer Society of India - NO
4. Department of IT - NO
5. IBM - NO
6. Institute for Electronic Governance - Absent
7. Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad - NO
8. Indian Institute of Science - NO
9. Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi - NO
10. Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay - NO
11. Infosys - YES
12. Indian Statistical Institute, Kolkatta - NO
13. Manufacturers Association of IT - Abstain
14. Microsoft - YES
15. National Association of Software and Services Companies - YES
16. National Institute of Smart Governance - Absent
17. Reserve Bank of India - Absent
18. Red Hat - No
19. Standardization Testing and Quality Certification Directorate - NO
20. Sun - NO
21. Tata Computer Services - YES
22. Wipro - YES (for changing India's vote from NO to Abstain)

India's comments on BRM to ISO

There were widespread reports of irregularities in the BRM held in Geneva. At the meeting held on 13th March 2008, the Indian delegation to the BRM gave a debriefing to members of LITD15, which is reviewing OOXML. The very diplomatic Deputy Director General of BIS said that he had not attended such a meeting in 28 years of his career. Based on the debriefing, the LITD15 committee sent a message to ISO with India's suggestions (we are too polite to call it a protest!) on how the BRM should be conducted. Before sending off these comments, everyone was asked if they have any objections and since no one (including Microsoft) had any objections, these comments were unanimously approved.

LITD15's comments to ISO are given below along with my comments.

1. All technical issues raised by different member bodies should be discussed adequately during BRM. If balloting on technical issues is envisaged, it should not be done during BRM. Balloting may be done after discussion within corresponding mirror committees of the national bodies providing sufficient time for discussions. In other words, duration of BRM should be in consonance with the requirement of time to sufficiently discuss all technical issues raised.

MY COMMENT: The biggest complaint about the BRM was that five days is too little time to review the changes. The five day BRM was sufficient only to discuss 54 issues and the rest of the issues were decided over a paper ballot. The Indian delegation pointed out that if a paper ballot is to be done, why should countries go to the expense of sending four people to Geneva for five days? It would be much simpler to do a ballot from the home country after discussion with committee members.

2. If the basic structure of the submitted document is proposed to be changed during BRM, provision for circulation of restructured integrated document for consideration of member bodies should be incorporated in the Fast Track Process as well. Enough time should be given to member bodies to examine/carry out the impact assessment of the modifications proposed.

MY COMMENT: The scope of the document has changed. The document is being split into five parts. If the scope and nature of the document changes substantially (as it has in this case) then adequate time needs to be given to review the changed proposal. As one of the esteemed academic members of LITD15 says, "What document is there for us to vote upon?"

3. Definitions of newly introduced terminologies should be clearly articulated before discussions are initiated on the related issues.

MY COMMENTS: The fact that we have to make such an elementary request highlights the hollowness of the "Fast-track" process and the BRM.

4. Voting process especially in terms of considering simple majority/two-third majority and counting of P member/O Member votes at BRM should strictly be adhered to as defined in JTC 1 Directives.

MY COMMENTS: This is a serious ethical and governance issue. If O member votes are not counted (as per JTC 1 directives) then the Microsoft claim of getting "more than 98 percent of the comments were accepted" falls flat. The voting was forced upon the BRM after overruling the objections of several countries, including India. The vote was to be decided by a simple majority by paper ballot for 847 issues which could not be discussed. Four P members (Czech Republic, Finland, Norway and Poland) voted for approving the 847 issues, Four P members (including India, Malaysia, South Africa and the US) voted against these issues. The votes of two O members (Chile and Ivory Coast) was improperly counted in contravention of JTC1 rules. The head of the Chile delegation landed in Geneva on the last day, just to vote Yes. The head of the Ivory Coast delegation is Wemba Opota, a Senegalese citizen, who is responsible for Microsoft West Africa!

Even by the "simple majority" rule imposed by the ISO conveners on the BRM, the result is a TIE and not a majority, as claimed by Microsoft.

5. It is suggested that the resolution to the issues raised during the process of development of standard shall be provided before the publication of the standard and shall be included in the published standard and shall not be deferred to the maintenance phase.

MY COMMENTS: As the delegation said, maintenance is for issues that are identified *after* the standard has been frozen. Known issues cannot be swept under the carpet under the guise of "maintenance."

OSFI comment on India's No vote on OOXML

The open source and free software communities are motivated by the
desire to build an inclusive information society. Open standards are
the foundation of this vision. With respect to Microsoft's OOXML
proposal submitted to International Organization for Standards (ISO)
through ECMA, the open source community has consistently pointed out
that ISO's "fast-track" processes were never meant for a complex,
6,000 page proposal like OOXML. Several serious ethical and governance
issues were also pointed out with respect to the Ballot Resolution
Meeting (BRM) on OOXML that was held in Geneva in February 2008 and
the European Union has initiated an investigation into OOXML. The
Indian committee consisting of government, academia, industry and
software exporters voted overwhelmingly against approving OOXML as an
industry standard with 13 votes against and only five votes in favor.
It is worth noting that the academia consisting of the most respected
Indian institutes; and the government voted against OOXML.

The Open Source Foundation of India believes that all stakeholders
should collaborate on the creation of standards and should compete on
creating the best implementation of these standards. As we have seen
in countless standards battles (VHS versus Betamax, Blu-Ray versus
HD-DVD, Microsoft's proprietary extensions to HTML versus Netscape's
proprietary extensions) battles over standards end up hurting
consumers and the industry. On the other hand, unified standards like
the HTML standard that governs the Internet, ends up benefiting
everyone. Standardization around HTML has converted the Internet into
a global platform that is now used by 1.2 billion users. The amount of
innovation we have seen in terms of social networking, search engines,
Web 2.0 etc would not have been possible if the Internet was a
fragmented platform. We therefore believe that vendors should stop
pushing their own standards, which leads to wasteful competition.
Instead, they should collaborate with all stakeholders to create
unified and open, royalty free standards as this delivers the best
outcome for all stakeholders.

India votes NO for OOXML

After a colossal amount of debate and discussion over the last one year, India has finally voted NO for OOXML. Today the committee was asked "Should India change its September 2007 No vote into Yes?"

13 members voted No
5 members (including Microsoft, of course) voted Yes.
1 member abstained
3 did not attend

The government bodies, academic institutions and industry voted against OOXML. The only people who voted for OOXML were the software exporters--TCS, Infosys, Wipro and NASSCOM (National Association of Software Services Companies).

Steve Ballmer was in India?

One of my friends informed me that he saw Steve Ballmer and Microsoft India Chairman, Ravi Venkatesan on the Jet Airways, 9W811 flight from Delhi to Bangalore on 13th March 2008. My friend was on the same flight which was scheduled to leave at 5.50PM but finally took off at 6.10PM. Apparently, he was the last person to get into the flight and the first to deplane. Interestingly, that was the day when BIS met to discuss OOXML. For those who have been following this issue, India's final vote on the subject will be on 20th May 2008. Talk about timing!

It was difficult to believe this at first because Ballmer is known to travel by private Jet. However, our sources at Jet Airways confirmed that it was Ballmer! Strange indeed. If you happen to know anything that confirms or invalidates this, let me know. If he was indeed in India, we would love to know who he met. Mail me or leave a comment on my blog.

US Navy to focus only on open systems

The US Navy is one among a growing list of organizations that are making open technology solutions mandatory. An article in Federal Computer Week quotes Vice Adm. Mark Edwards, deputy chief of naval operations for communications, as saying,

“The days of proprietary technology must come to an end,” he said. “We will no longer accept systems that couple hardware, software and data.”

For customers, there is no alternative to open standards and open technology platforms, unless they are comfortable with (a) being captive to their vendors (b) paying what their vendors dictate and (c) putting up with inferior technology solutions.

What happens when Murphy's Law goes overboard and a customer has to suffer a, b and c together? Red this article, "Software glitches leave Navy Smart Ship dead in the water."

Such a long journey (OOXML, pronounced O O Hex ML)

The Bureau of Indian Standards committee on OOXML will be meeting up on 13th March 2008 to get a debriefing on the Geneva BRM. The BRM attracted a fair share of criticism from participants for the manner in which it was conducted. Malaysia issued a press release expressing their dissatisfaction with the BRM. The press release quoted Puan Fadilah Baharin, Director General of STANDARDS MALAYSIA as saying:

"Malaysia had submitted 23 comments and more than 70% of them were not addressed satisfactorily by Ecma's proposed dispositions. We intended to resolve these technical issues at the BRM, but we could only raise 2 concerns due to the time constraints imposed."

Microsoft's Brian Jones meanwhile announced on his blog that 98% of Ecma responses have been approved and I hear that Microsoft has shot off letters to Indian policy makers spreading this misinformation. I don't know what reality distortion field Microsofties are living in but it looks like they dragged ISO into the morass they live in. Let us go back to the Malaysian press release:

Last year, many countries raised concerns against the appropriateness of the voluminous OOXML draft standard submitted by the Ecma International to ISO for a Fast Track process. To date, our observation to these concerns have yet to be addressed better after the BRM. Malaysia's concern is currently being shared greatly by many other National Bodies from Asia including India, China and Korea; as well as from the US and Canada.

Andy Updegrove has some of the sanest comments on the OOXML BRM. Whatever Microsoft may claim, the fact is that emerging economies like Brazil, China, India, South Africa, Malaysia and others have voted against OOXML. Even the US, which had voted "Approve with Comments" in September 2007 voted "No" at the BRM.

What I predict is that Microsoft will apply heavy pressure on countries like Cyprus, Ecuador, Jamaica, Lebanon, Pakistan, Trinidad and Tobago, Turkey , Uruguay, Venezuela, which joined the JTC1 ISO committee reviewing OOXML just before the previous vote in September 2007 to make sure that they vote "Yes." I am sure that Indian policy makers are also under heavy pressure but many of them are smart enough to know a fraudulent standard when they see one. In the rest of the countries, Microsoft may have burnt another bridge and left themselves more isolated among policy makers.

Here is what others said about the BRM.

U.S. National Body Head Frank Farance

"Eighty percent of the changes were not discussed . . .It's a big problem .
. I've never seen anything like this, and I've been doing this for 25
years."

Canadian National Body Delegate Tim Bray

"The process was complete, utter, unadulterated bullshit. I'm not an ISO
expert, but whatever their 'Fast Track' process was designed for, it sure
wasn't this. You just can't revise six thousand pages of deeply complex
specification-ware in the time that was provided for the process."

Brazil National Body Delegate Jomar Silva

"Here are the facts: 1) If [Microsoft] finds that the process functioned,
is because [they] really did not see the process! 2) Anyone who says that
we made rigorous revisions, his nose will grow 10 cm, and anyone that says
the countries had resolved only some important points, his nose will only
grow half as much (chalk it up to a wood shortage). I am even more
irritated when I see that people who had not been there, had not
participated at all, saying whatever they want."

Greek National Body Delegate Antonis Christofides

". . . the BRM was essentially confined to making changes that only
scratched the surface of the problems. . . I and my reviewers found 13
additional errors in the original specification. However, national bodies
were not allowed to submit new comments . . . Therefore, there was no way
to submit and correct them. . . the Ecma responses make the text slightly
better, but though slightly better it is still abysmal . . we did not have
the time to study one thousand responses . . . In fact, even the 80
responses that Greece studied, we did not study at the level of scrutiny
that is required when you inspect a standard. There was no time for that.
What we did was glance through, and make fast decisions based on what seems
right at a quick glance."

The last one year has been such a huge learning experience for me in how standards are created and how some are hijacked!

Microsoft "persuades" NGOs to support OOXML

Our friends at Linux Delhi have put up a copy of the form letters that Microsoft has been sending NGOs on the OOXML issue. Apparently, these NGOs have been sending copies of these letters to the Ministry of IT and Bureau of Indian standards.

Raj Mathur of Linux Delhi asks makes some pertinent points which are quoted below:

There is a possibility that some, if not all of these NGOs are beneficiaries of cash inputs from their (MS') Corporate Social Railroading ^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H Responsibility arm. I'd really be interested in answers to these questions, anyone up to asking them?

* How many letters supporting OOXML has the Government of India received from NGOs in the recent past?
* How many of these NGOs have received cash inputs (directly or indirectly) from MS?
* How many of these NGOs can sit across a table and discuss OOXML?
* How many of these NGOs can enumerate the benefits of OOXML over, say, ODF for their own organisations?

The NGOs supporting OOXML are probably as clueless as ASSOCHAM (Associated Chamber of Manufacturing) which told a journalist from the Economic Times that they supported OOXML because "Microsoft is a member." If that's the case, ASSOCHAM should have been honest about the fact that they are supporting a member and not palmed it off "in the national interest."

I feel sorry for these NGOs who probably depend on Microsoft's donations. Do you know of any NGO that has received similar letters? Please bring this to my attention and I will give them a call to find out how much they know about OOXML and ODF :-) Meanwhile, everyone, give a big hand to Microsoft for redefining Corporate Social Responsibility. If their tribe increases, doomsday is not far away!

"Talk is cheap; flouting the rules is expensive"

Microsoft's interoperability announcement has been met with skepticism by the European union, which levied a record $1.3 billion fine on Microsoft. This comes on top of an earlier penalty of $1.17 billion.

Marketwatch reports that:

The European Commission in 2004 found that Microsoft was using its dominant position in operating system software to prevent new competition, and ordered the company to grant rivals access to its technology "protocols" at a reasonable price so they could develop compatible products.


When billion dollar fines do not deter Microsoft, what else will? This is a classic example of the worst excesses of capitalism where companies become so powerful that they are not answerable to any soverign country. The systematic subversion of ISO's processes to "fast-track" a massive 6,000 page "standard" with huge gaping flaws, gaming the ISO system by fixing the ballot in countries like Pakistan and Sweden, getting a whole bunch of countries to join ISO at the last minute to rig the system so that OOXML gets two-thirds majority required to become an ISO standard.... how long will this abuse continue? And how long can India remain a mute bystander to such blatantly unethical practices? We are a soft state and we often pay the price for it.

This is where I admire the European Union for having the guts to investigate the anti-competitive practices of Microsoft. I doubt if any Indian policy maker will ever make the kind of statement that Neelie Kroes, European commissioner for competition policy made. "Talk is cheap; flouting the rules is expensive. Microsoft continued to abuse its powerful market position after the Commission's March 2004 decision requiring it to change its practices."

The EU is also investigating Microsoft's anti-competitive practices around OOXML and I thank god that at least one government has the sense to do something more than stand by and watch like a dumb pole. I hope that one day, Indian policy makers will display the kind of spine that Neelie Kroes and others at EU have shown in taking on Microsoft.

Meanwhile, the eerie radio silence from the OOXML BRM at Geneva is unnerving. More than 120 people discussing such a critical issue and not a peep out of the blogosphere! Such a secretive way of creating globally important standards is a practice that stinks to high heavens!

OOXML BRM in Geneva

By now, day 1 of the OOXML BRM in Geneva must have ended. The outcome is still not known, but whatever the outcome, ISO is going to be in for a lot of questions. How does a shoddy, half digested 6000 page long document (I am being *very* polite in my description) be eligible for a fast track review process. Does anyone believe that a complex standard like OOXML can be reviewed in six months? If that is the objective then why even review it in the first place? ISO's credibility has been permanently dented and, as my friends in the FSF points out, we need to make it clear that ISO standards are not open standards.

I have also been talking to a group of young technologists who are alarmed by what is happening in the standards world. We believe that it is time India took a more active (if not activist role) in creating international standards. This realization is spreading to neighboring countries also because policy makers I spoke to in Sri Lanka, Pakistan and other countries are also alarmed at the blatant manner in which OOXML is being pushed through. It may be time for emerging economies to come together and tame the beast of proprietary standards.

OSFI raises objections to ASSCOHAM's stance on OOXML

The Open Source Foundation of India would like to place on record its objections to ASSCOHAM's stance on OOXML. Neither us nor the Open Document Format Alliance (www.odfalliance.in) nor the Free Software Foundation (www.fsf.org.in), which have been leading the fight for open standards were consulted before ASSOCHAM issued its press release. An industry body is expected to listen to all sides of a debate before arriving at a conclusion and we are disappointed that a respected body like ASSOCHAM, which has temendous credibility among policy makers has not followed this process.

We would like to ask ASSOCHAM if it:

A) Has a clear definition of an "open standard" and if it has evaluated OOXML to see if it passed the test. For the record, OOXML has been submitted a few months ago to ISO, so it is not even an international standard nor does it meet the criteria for an open standard. See www.odfalliance.in for more information.

B) Is ASSOCHAM aware that the European Union is examining whether Microsoft Corp. violated antitrust laws during a struggle last year to ratify its Office software file format as an international standard.

C) Is ASSOCHAM aware of the serious allegations of abuse of the ISO processes by the proponents of OOXML. For example, in Pakistan, the 12 member committee reviewing OOXML was stacked with four Microsoft Gold Partners and even the IT Ministry and Pakistan's IT leaders were not aware of the committee's participation at ISO?

It is clear that only a single interested party's opinion is being reflected through this press release. We would like to point out that ASSOCHAM's credibility as an industry organization will be seriously affected if it does not give due consideration to alternate points of view.

Venkatesh Hariharan
Co-Founder,
Open Source Foundation of India
www.osindia.blogspot.com

CNBC Panel Discussion on Open Source, Free & Proprietary Software

Last week, Jon "maddog" Hall, Executive Director of Linux International; Atul Chitnis, Senior Vice President at Geodesic Information Systems and I were on a CNBC panel discussion on "Open Source, Free & Proprietary Softwares" at IIT Bombay's Techfest. I am used to 30-45 minute talks on open source where I happily ramble on with my pet theories on why open source is changing the world. I have also been on panel discussions where the panelists normally gets to make an opening statement before the moderators and the audience start shooting questions. However, TV is very, very different as I discovered last week.

To start with, the CNBC panel was shot in three segments of seven minutes each (a 30 minute show has around 9 minutes of ads telecast during breaks in the show) which meant that all three panelists could speak about 3-4 sentences in each of the seven minute segments. Oh well, hopefully, it will do some good to the world of open source. The audience seemed to be mostly teenagers, which I think is a good thing. If teenagers think something is sexy, it probably is :-)

I was trying to figure out what time the panel will be on TV and the politest thing I can say is that the CNBC TV Schedules suck. Later, I got to catch up with Jon Hall and treat him to coffee at the IIT restaurant. Despite the ferocious nickname, he is a gentle giant of a man and I felt honored to be on the same panel as Jon.

I am still clueless as to when the program will be telecast. If anybody knows, drop me a line :-)

WEF opens with a call for "collaborative innovation."

I am reading Wikinomics so it was no surprise when I came across an online article that spoke about the World Economic Forum's call for "collaborative innovation."

One of the blurbs in the book is by Klaus Scwab, founder and executive chairman of the World Economic Forum, who says, "A deeply profound and hopeful book, Wikinomics provides compelling evidence that the emerging "Creative Commons" can be a boon, not a threat to business. Every CEO should read this book and heed its wise counsel if they want to succeed in an emerging global economy."

We live in exciting times. If we take my previous post on the Science Commons, and this post, we get the clear sense that policy makers at the highest levels are taking note of the phenomenon called free and open source software. Open standards, open source and open access are what make "collaborative innovation" possible and it is nice to see policy makers take a note of this.

Science Commons, Open Source Drug Discovery etc

Last Friday, January 18th, 2008, we (Knowledge Commons, Delhi Science Forum, IIT Delhi, Red Hat and Sun) organized a workshop on science policy for a very select group of 20 policy makers. Participants included members of the Planning Commission, which drafts India's Five Year Plans; the National Knowledge Commission, a high-level advisory body that reports to the Prime Minister of India, the Chairman of the Board of Governors of IIT Delhi and some of the most respected scientists in the country. The objective was to look at the Free and Open Source model of knowledge creation and examine the impact it can have on India. The highlight of the event was the session on Open Source Drug Discovery, a $34 million program to fight diseases that are prevalent in India.

Prabir Purkayastha of the Delhi Science Forum and the brains behind the event, set the ball rolling by giving a brief overview of how the patent system evolved as a trade-off between the inventor and society, with society granting a temporary monopoly to the inventor in return for disclosure of the invention, which ensured that inventors did not take their creations to the grave. He pointed out that the era of the individual inventor is over and most innovations are now done by corporations.

Prabir also pointed out that the myth about patents leading to innovations was not always true and cited the example of James Watt's patent over the steam engine which lead to 30 years of stagnation. It was only after Watt's death that the efficiency of the steam engine improved. Even during this era, collective innovation flourished as can be seen from the invention of the blast furnace and the improvements in the steam engine within the Cornish mines.

He added that science is not purely for profit and the current scenario where patents are seen as a metric of innovation could lead to a situation where sharing is hindered. This could be dangerous in areas like medicine and agriculture. In this context, the Free and Open Source model had emerged as an important paradigm that generated advances that are outside the proprietary domain. Therefore, the question in front of the group was – Can we look at alternate ways of doing research and can these be harnessed for the public good?

Prof. VS Ramamurthy, Chairman of the Board of Governors, Indian institute of Technology, Delhi and one of the veterans of the Indian scientific establishment said that knowledge is important for socio-economic development and today, knowledge has become multi-disciplinary. When multi-disciplinary groups are involved, secrecy will only increase the cost of doing research.

In science, failures are as important as successes but the patenting system encouraged only the recognition of success and not the process by which a particular result was arrived at. He said that we need to look at knowledge management in totality and examine whether answers we have been given in the past are relevant anymore. He concluded by saying that the open source model has enormous relevance for countries like India which have limited resources but unlimited human resources.

Prof. Abhijit Sen, member of the Planning Commission and one of India's leading economists asked a succinct question, “Do patents deliver?”

Prof. Sen pointed out that patents create private property through exclusion, increase the cost of communication and therefore escalate the cost of the production process in science. In areas like climate change, which involved a whole range of technologies, the free flow of knowledge was extremely important.

“Property rights are not an unalloyed virtue if the externalities are very large. If patents do incentivize, do they do so in the right manner?” he asked. Prof. Sen pointed out that two of the world's poorest countries, India and China, are now becoming more important globally and for those managing money, it becomes important to invest in these countries. Therefore, these countries should reexamine patents in light of the new realities of the commons and growing economic clout.

Dr. Samir Bramhachari, Director-General of the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR), unveiled a $34 million plan for Open Source Drug Discovery. CSIR is one of the world’s largest publicly funded R&D organisations 38 laboratories working on a range of subjects from molecular biology to road research to Himalayan bio-resources. The Council has more than 4,000 scientists working for it at these 38 labs.

Dr. Bramhachari noted that there was very little R&D money being spent by MNCs on the typical diseases that afflict Indians because of the relatively low purchasing power in our country. At the same time, MNCs are aggressively scanning Indian academia for research being done by Indian students and adding this knowledge to their database. He also pointed out that collaborative R&D networks like Innocentive had a lot of Indians contributing to it. Therefore, he had proposed to the Indian government the creation of an Open Source Drug Discovery framework which will harness the collective minds of Indian scientists. The OSDD project will kick off by focussing initially on the Tuberculosis bacilli and the web site will be launched once CSIR finalizes the legalities of a “Pharma GPL” share-and-share-alike license.

This workshop demonstrated that there is remarkable understanding of the potential of open source within the highest echelons of the Indian policy making elite. Prof. Ramamurthy summed it up best when he said that in the government system, change is always a very slow process. However, open source is inevitable and will be the norm 10 years from now. What we can do best is to accelerate the change in favor of open source.

Videos and transcripts of this event will be uploaded soon. Thanks to Red Hat India supporting the event and covering the cost of the videos.

Photos of OLPC deployment in Khairat, India

As 2007 was drawing to a close, I got a chance to visit the OLPC deployment in Khairat, India. This deployment is supported by Reliance, one of the largest industrial groups in India. I have uploaded photos from the visit and added a small description to each photo. These are at:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/venky7/sets/72157603606772250/

It was wonderful to see the enthusiasm with which the teacher, students and parents had embraced this project. Definitely one of the more fun things that I did in 2007 and something that I look forward to in 2008. Do visit the Flickr page and add your comments, feedback, brickbats etc...

Today's Economic Times poll on Free Software (Please Vote)

Today's Economic Times has an online poll that asks, "Should India support free software to take PC penetration to the next level?"

Please login to www.economictimes.com and scroll down to the voting section on the right hand side of the web page and vote "Yes."

This vote will be on only today, so please vote at the earliest.

Open Source is Democratizing Knowledge

In September 1991, when Linux Torvalds, a student at the University of Helsinki in Finland, released 10,000 lines of code on the Internet, nobody could have believed that it would spark off a revolution. In the fifteen years since then, Linux has grown into an enormously capable operating system that contains more than 100 million lines of code that runs on tiny embedded computers to supercomputers and everything in-between. This has been made possible through the contribution of thousands of volunteers across the world working together over the Internet, in what is perhaps the largest collaborative projects in the history of mankind.

Linux is the leading example of the open source movement that is democratizing knowledge and the tools with which we access knowledge. The open source principles of community, collaboration and the shared ownership of knowledge have lead to a transformation in the way knowledge is created and distributed. This has profound implications for India and other developing countries.

Linux was released under the General Public License created by the Free Software Foundation which gives users four freedoms: The freedom to run the program, for any purpose; the freedom to study how the program works, and adapt it to your needs, the freedom to redistribute copies and share it with others and the freedom to improve the program, and release your improvements to the public, so that the whole community benefits. A precondition to these four freedoms is that the source code for the software is freely available.

For millions of software developers across the world, this access to source code and the ability to improve it to meet their needs has been enormously empowering. In the area of supercomputing, scientists have coupled together commodity hardware and open source software to build complex systems that have drastically reduced the cost per teraflop for supercomputers. For millions of users across the world, the ability to freely copy the operating system has meant that they can try it out on their computers for free and pay for value added services like support, customization and training, as and when they are ready. Across the world, governments like China, Brazil, Venezuela and others have been embracing open source because it reduces their dependence on monopolistic vendors and their monopoly pricing structures and restrictive licensing practices. In India, Kerala, West Bengal and Tamil Nadu have declared their intention to use open source software to make IT more widely accessible to their citizens.

Enterprises across India have also been quick to realise the benefits of open source despite the enourmous amounts of FUD (fear, uncertainity and doubt) that proprietary vendors have sought to create. Today, enterprises like LIC, IDBI, IRCTC, IndiaBulls, UTI Bank, Canara Bank, CESC and others use Red Hat Enterprise Linux and other open source software to run their mission critical applications. The SMS voting backbone for highly popular TV shows like Kaun Banega Crorepati and Indian Idol also run on Red Hat Enteprise Linux.

Linux is now well established as a reliable, stable and secure operating system on servers. According to IDC, Linux server sales grew from 4.3 billion in 2004 to 5.3 billion in 2005 as customers deployed it in a wider range of technical and commercial workloads. Over the last few years, Linux has also emerged as a capable desktop operating system with slick desktop user interfaces and an excellent, free office productivity suite in Open Office. Those who have used the Linux desktop have been pleasantly surprised by its capabilities. The Kerala government has decided to move around 12,500 schools to Linux after finding proprietary software to be unaffordable.

It is no surprise that Linux and open source software have caught on rapidly in India. Our traditions of knowledge like yoga and ayurveda have always been free and open to all. We have successfuly built commercial models on top of free knowledge as can be seen from the proliferation of Ayurvedic spas and the fact that yoga is a $30 billion industry in the US. Open source proves that the age old adage that we all grow richer by sharing knowledge still holds true in the Internet era. For decision makers who are implementing IT, it is time to take a long hard look at the long term benefits of open source and evaluate the value it provides on servers and desktops.

Tata supercomputer ranks fourth, runs Linux

I came back from a nice long (and completely unplugged) break trekking around North East India (shameless plug: Check out my photos at http://www.flickr.com/photos/venky7/). Among the many e-mails that were accumulated in my inbox, the one that made me happiest was the news that India has finally broken into the TOP500 Supercomputer List. The icing on the cake is that it runs Linux!

This feat was achieved by the Pune-based Computational Research Laboratories, incorporated as a fully-owned subsidiary of Tata Sons with a mandate to achieve global leadership in the area of high-performance computing systems.

This is wonderful news for the open source community and the Indian IT fraternity!

Suggestions for the National Policy on ICT in Education

My friends at Digital Learning magazine are coordinating inputs for the "National Policy on ICT in Education" to be sent to the Indian Ministry of Human resources Development (MHRD). Today was their deadline and here is what I have sent them.

Suggested Policy Objectives for the "National Policy on ICT in Education."

ComputeRs have emerged as the Fourth R of education, after Reading, wRiting and aRithmetic. If our future generations have to be a part of the global mainstream society, and build upon India's great success in IT and IT enabled services, we have to equip them to be IT literate. Since IT is becoming an all-pervasive aspect of our lives—from booking train tickets to receiving exam results to managing retail cash counters, IT education will help our students become a member of the global information society. This will also help the country by helping us consolidate our leadership position within the global IT and ITES industry and maintain our lead over competing economies.

We therefore suggest that ICT should be considered an integral part of the educational system and that the government must invest in making all students who are a part of the Indian education system IT literate.

Suggested Guidelines for the "National Policy on ICT in Education."

The challenges in ensuring that all Indian are IT literate are formidable. According to the Ministry of Human Resources Development website, India has 888,000 educational institutions, 179 million students and more than 2.9 million teachers. In many villages and cities across India, millions of children have no access to basic educational facilities. And even as the Indian school system grapples with basic challenges such as the lack of elementary facilities like blackboards, along comes yet another challenge—How do we ensure that the next generation are not just literate but also digitally literate? Open Content and Open Source Software can be freely modified, improved upon and redistributed without paying any royalties or license fees to anyone. A venerable academic institution like MIT is using the open source Creative Commons license to share its knowledge with others at its Open Course Ware (www.ocw.mit.edu) site. MIT's web site says:

“MIT is committed to advancing education and discovery through knowledge open to everyone. OCW shares free lecture notes, exams, and other resources from more than 1700 courses spanning MIT's entire curriculum.”

The Indian state of Kerala has adopted open source software to make its students IT literate for the freedom it provides in terms of modifying the source code and making improvements and its cost effectiveness. Governments across the world are now using open source software to modernize their education systems. In India, it has been found that the education system indirectly discourages open source software because the syllabus sometimes mandates the use of proprietary software. In light of the benefits of open source software, we recommend the following guidelines:

1.The syllabus/curriculum should emphasize principles and not products. In other words, it should teach wordprocessing, spreadsheets etc and not a specific brand of software. Endorsing a specific brand is illegal under the Monopolies and Restrictive Trade Practices Act. Also, products may get outdated while principles are eternal. It is therefore in the interests of teachers, students and the education system to rectify this issue at the earliest.
2.Wherever possible, the education system must use open source software. If proprietary software has to be purchased, there has to be adequate justification for such usage of tax payer's money. A wealth of educational software is available freely from web sites like Eduforge (www.eduforge.org) SchoolForge (www.schoolforge.net) and Gcompris (www.gcompris.net) which offer Open Source educational software in for courseware management, school administration and for teaching children in disciplines like mathematics, music, astronomy, languages etc that can be freely downloaded and used by educators. Since the source code is available for modification, educators can customize these software programs to Indian conditions, localize it to Indian languages and make it more appropriate for their students. Open Office (www.openoffice.org) offers students and teachers a high quality office productivity suite which has rapidly become the second most popular office suite.
3.Software developed with taxpayers money should be placed under a suitable open source license. This will allow the larger education community to build on top of existing software rather than reinvent the wheel every time.
4.Content developed by the government using taxpayers money should be placed under a suitable open source license. Licenses like the Creative Commons licenses (www.creativecommons.org) offer alternatives to the restrictive “All Rights Reserved” copyright licenses by offering flexible licensing schemes for authors of content.


These guidelines, if implemented strictly, can save the Indian education system thousands of crores of rupees over the next decade.

Suggested Practices for the "National Policy on ICT in Education."

The Open Source philosophy is catching on in the world of content. For example, Wikipedia (www.wikipedia.org) has rapidly emerged as one of the largest online dictionaries in the world. In a short span of five years, Wikipedia has attracted five million entries from across the world in several languages and is a fantastic educational resource that we should localize to Indian languages. Because it is released under the open source, “Creative Commons” copyright, Indian educators have the freedom to translate Wikipedia into Indian languages and share it with their students.

The Open Source philosophy has proved to be so popular that other disciplines are embracing the tenets of community, collaboration and shared ownership of intellectual resources with powerful results.

Other web sites like Planet Math (www.planetmath.org)aim at creating communities of educators focused on a specific domain to make knowledge more accessible.

Many educational institutions themselves are now coming together to leverage the economic benefits of participating in Open Source development. For instance, leading universities like the University of Michigan, Indiana University, MIT and Stanford are investing up to $1 million in staff time to develop producing open source Collaboration and Learning Environment (CLE) software. Even universities that are not members of the Sakai Project can download the software and interest in the Sakai Educational Partner Program (SEPP) is growing at the rate of 1-2 universities per week.

Thus it is clear that whether it is for creating educational content, managing coursework and learning, teaching a specific discipline or administration of an educational institution, the open source model offers tremendous benefits as a model for the creation and dissemination of knowledge. In a country where 888,000 educational institutions need to be modernized and more than 179 million students educated, the community ownership model of open source can help the country save billions of dollars that would be spent on proprietary operating systems, software and content. Since anything developed under an open source model can be shared freely, it can help in the rapid dissemination of educational materials to India's vast population of students.

From a long-term perspective, it is important that the creation and dissemination of knowledge should be a collaborative, community driven process rather than one that is monopolized by a few individuals or companies. In the Indian, intellectual tradition, knowledge has always been considered as a common good treated as a community resource rather than private property that can be monopolized and enjoyed by a few. The need of the hour is therefore a close collaboration between educationists and technologists. The open source model provides a framework that can lead to an open source renaissance for Indian education.

We therefore recommend that India should adopt the best practices of the open source community for creating educational content and software. We further recommend that a working committee consisting of eminent academics, industry and the open source community be formed to guide this process.

Suggested knowledge tools for the "National Policy on ICT in Education."

The Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) philosophy and its accompanying licenses can be powerful tools in the dissemination of knowledge.

For more on Open Source licenses, see www.opensource.org

For more on the Free Software philosophy, see www.fsf.org

A FOSS Foundation for India

Over the last few years, most of us in the community have often discussed setting up a foundation for Free and Open Source Software in India to work on policy, advocacy, promotion and development of FOSS and open standards. I think the time is now ripe to bring industry, government, academia, and the community to gether to create a FOSS consortium. Some initial thoughts on the charter of the foundation and organization structure are given below. I'd love to hear from the community what they think of this.

Charter of the FOSS Foundation

1)Formulate strategies on how India can benefit from deploying FOSS and
implement/monitor implementation of the same.
2)Monitor latest developments in FOSS technologies and ensure global
leadership in key strategic areas like supercomputing, security,
localization, affordable computing, GIS, embedded computing etc.
3)Research and quantify the benefits of using FOSS for India.
4)Work with government, industry, academia and the open source/free
software community to popularize FOSS in India.
5)Leverage FOSS to bridge the digital divide in India through affordable
computing and localization to all the major Indian languages.
6)Encourage research and analysis of FOSS in India through academic
research, market research, white papers, case studies etc.
7)Study the legal implications of free and open source licenses in the context of global patenting and copyright laws and recommending strategies beneficial to India.

Organization Structure

The Org Structure flows from the charter and therefore, dear blog readers, your comments on the above are of paramount importance. There are several org structures that we can consider:

1) W3C, which is one of the widest industry consortia with over 400 members. It also has an inclusive process which allows the public to participate in its debates and discussions.

2) The Linux Foundation

In brief, LF's structure is that each Platinum member can elect a director, subject to an upper limit of ten, Gold members can elect three directors from amongst themselves and Silver members can elect one director. From their web site, I could not figure out what mechanism they have for community participation.

3) NASSCOM

NASSCOM is the most successful industry organization in India. As its web site says, "In 1988, NASSCOM had 38 members, who together contributed close to 65 percent of the revenue of the software industry. Since then, membership of NASSCOM has grown multifold to reach over 1100 members."

We look forward to your inputs on how to create an open, participatory organization that keeps growing along with the FOSS community. Do send me your comments by the end of next week (26th October 2007).

Media replies on the OOXML issue

These are some questions that a media person sent me on the OOXML issue.

Venky
=====

> Q1. Do you look at this development as a decisive turn of events against
> Microsoft in the fight between the open source and proprietary software
> camps?

The fact that OOXML was defeated in India indicates that Indian policymakers are well aware of the importance of open standards and one must give them due credit for this. The open source and free software communities believe that public data should be in public formats. The government is the custodian of citizens data and has an obligation to ensure that this data is not tied to one particular application. Take the case of land records, which need to be preserved for 400 years or more. If land records are stored in a proprietary format, there is no guarantee that it can be retrieved a few hundred years later because the only one who can unlock the file is the organization that created the format.

The only way to assure that data can be stored and retrieved freely is to use published standards that have been built through collaboration and consensus and have multiple third party implementations. The Internet is one of the finest examples of true open standards because anybody can create web browsers and e-mail clients by following the standards published by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).

Open standards are important to humanity because it enables us to share knowledge freely. Both, open source and open standards are inclusive movements and therefore the rejection of OOXML is a great victory for those who campaign for the users freedom to encode and decode their data.

>
> Q2. How important would be the outcome of the final judgement on
> government spending on business software?

Open standards are not just important, they are fundamental to efficient e-governance. Using proprietary standards is akin to handing the keys to the treasury to a third party and is a very unwise step when it comes to citizens data.

> Q3 What are the loose ends Microsoft will have to fix in order to win the
> trust of voting members?

The Bureau of Indian Standards has submitted a list of issues with OOXML that has been submitted to ISO.

>
> Q4 Can you share on some of the concerns raised by the voting members
> regarding OOXML? How relevant are these according to you?

1) Taking the legacy Office file format and XMLising it does not make it an open standard. Third parties should be able to freely implement an open standard without recourse to the author of the document. At 6000 pages OOXML is too long and too opaque to be implemented by third parties. Most of those who claim to have implemented OOXML are parties which have private treaties with Microsoft.

2) There is an existing open standard for documents called Open Document Format (ODF). Creating multiple standards for the same purpose only leads to confusion. For example, in 1995, both Netscape and Microsoft came up with their own extensions to HTML. This lead to a profusion of websites proclaiming "Optimised for Netscape" or "Optimised for Internet Explorer."

The purpose of standards is to unify and not to divide and the best standards like ASCII, Unicode, HTML etc are ones that are created through consensus and collaboration. We have all gained enormously from unified standards for data exchange and the web. Let us ask the industry to collaborate and come up with a consensus unified standard for document exchange. Vendors should collaborate on standards and compete on their implementation. This is the best outcome for industry and consumers.

3) After more than 26 years of pushing proprietary formats, Microsoft is now arguing that it is OK to have multiple standards. Multiple standards for the same task lead to increasing the cost of compliance, testing and implementation for everyone. For developers, it increases the time taken to release an application, which drives up cost. For users it increases the possibility of errors and miscommunication.

For example, the recent delay in the launch of the Airbus A 380 (which will cost the organization €2 billion, or $2.5 billion over four years) has been attributed to the fact that the Airbus fuselage sent from Hamburg, Germany was received at Toulose, France, the workers found that the 300+ kms of wiring could not be connected properly. (See http://www.iht.com/articles/2006/06/26/business/airbus.php). Boeing itself has attributed it to "incompatibilities in the development of the concurrent engineering tools to be used for the design of the electrical harnesses installation." Anecdotal evidence indicates that both these organizations were using different measurement systems derived from the country of their origin. In a globalizing world having common standards helps everyone. International travelers who carry multiple power adapters for their notebooks know this logic well.

In e-governance, let us take a simple case. The revenue department uses data from the land records data base. Unfortunately, this is in a different format and therefore the the revenue department has problem decoding land records data. In such a case, who is responsible for the correct decoding of the land records? As mentioned earlier, the purpose of standards is to eliminate such friction and therefore, BIS should recommend that vendors should work together on unified standards.

The two attached docs will give more info on the subject. My blog at www.osindia.blogspot.com also has ore info. Specially these articles:

http://osindia.blogspot.com/2007/08/policy-challenges-for-open-standards.html
http://osindia.blogspot.com/2007/01/importance-of-open-standards.html

4) There are also serious objections to Microsoft's efforts at "Ballot Box Engineering" which are documented at my blog on www.osindia.blogspot.com

Venkatesh Hariharan
Co-founder
Open Source Foundation of India

FOSS.in makes the right call

Those of you who follow FOSS.in would have noticed that this year, the conference has done a reboot on its call for papers. The web page now says,

This note is going to catch many people by surprise:

As we had explained, over and over: this is a FOSS developer and contributor conference. We are no longer a FOSS user conference.

As was mentioned last year - in the end FOSS is about Free and Open Source Software, and somebody needs to write that software.

FOSS.IN is about demolishing the contention that India is a land of FOSS consumers, with almost no contributors - that we only take, not give back.

I think it is about time that we stopped being a nation of downloaders and started "uploading." TCS releasing WANem as open source is among the great contributions coming out of India, but we need more contributions going upstream given that we produce almost 20 percent of the software developers in the world. Unless and until we start contributing, we cannot have a say in the development of technology.

A couple of years ago, when I saw in Sri Lanka, Sanjiva Weerawarna told me that the island nation has 25 committers to Apache! If Sri Lanka can contribute so much to open source, so can we. Kudos to Atul Chitnis and the FOSS.in team for taking a bold call. I like it because it reminds me so much of one of my favorite sayings, "Hands that help are holier than lips that pray."

While we are on FOSS.in, as a former journalist, I also admire the well written content on the FOSS.in web site.

Policy recommendations on Open Source for India

These are some policy recommendations on Open Source for India. I look forward to your comments on these recommendations. This will be ciculated to e-government policy makers next week.

===============================================================================================

We, the members of the open source software (OSS) community in India, recommend that the Government of India should promote OSS in order to encourage competition and choice, make IT more affordable and bring the benefits of IT to the people of India.

We recommend that the Department of IT, Government of India adopt the following steps which will go a long way in promoting OSS in India.

1)Applications developed by the Government of India should be cross platform and not be locked in to a specific platform. Building cross-platform applications encourages choice and provides implementing agencies the freedom to select the platforms that suit them the best. Since applications have a long shelf-life, building cross-platform applications isolates the application from technological changes in the underlying platform.

2)Mandate that all documents and data created by government organizations follow open standards that are free from royalties, patents and other encumbrances.

3)Encourage the development and usage of Linux and open source desktop productivity applications in government. This move can reduce dependence on expensive proprietary software, encourage choice, promote healthy competition and save the country enormous amounts of foreign exchange. In areas like office productivity applications etc where open source tools match the functionality of proprietary software products, adequate justification must be provided for purchasing proprietary software.

4)Mandate that, by default, software development funded by the government should be available to the public under an open source license. This ensures that the code is available to government agencies for improvements and further enhancements. Since the code is available freely, this also provides an avenue for inputs and feedback from concerned citizens.

5)Create a central repository of open source e-government applications. This move can save India thousands of crores of rupees by facilitating reuse of applications, sharing of best practices, slashing implementation time and reducing risks of project failure. This can be on the lines of the Government Open Code Collaborative Repository (www.gocc.gov) established in the US as a, “collaboration between public sector entities and non-profit academic institutions created for the purpose of encouraging the sharing, at no cost, of computer code developed for and by government entities where the redistribution of this code is allowed.”

6) Create a collaborative community for open source in education. Enormous resources are needed for modernizing and IT-enabling the education system. An open source program for education can create a nationwide community of educators for creating software and content that can be freely shared across the system. This will help rapidly disseminate the latest educational pedagogy, software tools, content and best practices within the system. This can be organized around disciplines like mathematics, physics, chemistry etc. and involve the Indian academic community and software developers.

7) Encourage the use of the open source model which is based on collaboration, community and shared ownership of intellectual resources in scientific disciplines like agriculture, biotechnology, health care research, etc. so that the benefits of such research can reach the public faster.

8) Set up a high-powered think tank consisting of top-notch policy makers, academics and politicians under the auspices of a powerful policy making institution to provide leadership and direction on open source on a continuous basis.

The agenda for such an organization would be:

A)Identify and quantify the political, cultural and economic benefits for India as a result of open source. This would not just be restricted to software but also to issues like IP, content, scientific publishing etc. In other words, the focus of this body would be on how India can take full-advantage of the open source movement to benefit Indian society.1

B)Develop an action plan aimed at making India a global leader in the open source community. For example, India could take the lead in developing and customizing open source applications for developing countries or identify areas where it can make visible contributions to the global open source community. For example, Sri Lanka has made significant contributions to the Apache web server through the Lanka Software Foundation.

C)Leverage the open source development model based on community, collaboration and shared ownership of intellectual resources to bridge the digital divide. This forms part of point A, but is a large enough area to deserve special attention. For example, Indian language software development and localization of open source tools can be identified as a priority sector for funding. This will take IT beyond the five percent of India that speaks English and provide cost-effective software solutions to Indian users, thus bridging the digital divide. another area could be the development of applications and content that meets India's unique needs.

D)Create a road-map for open source software development for India's software export industry. In the long-term, software will be sold as a service. Open Source Software is accelerating this trend which plays to the advantage of India's vibrant software services industry.

Prof. Ashok Jhunjhunwala on OOXML

Yesterday, there was an interview of Prof. Ashok Jhunjhunwala in the Times of India where he supported OOXML. He also repeated Microsoft's statement that users want a choice of multiple formats. Prof. Jhunjhunwala is a very respected academician and prima-facie, the Microsoft line seems to make eminent sense. After all, who can argue about choice? (BTW, since when has Microsoft been about choice?) Let's scratch a little deeper by asking a few questions about choice:

1) When you wake up in the morning and choose which side of the road you drive on? I certainly don't?

2) Did you like the choice of Microsoft's HTML versus Netscape's HTML? Both companies created their own proprietary extensions to HTML that threatened to fragment the Internet. Even today, there are web sites that say "optimized to XYZ browser" and to me that is a sign of bad software design. Ironically, the Bureau of Indian Standards web site says, "Best viewed in MSIE 4.0 and above browsers." If you are developing or redesigning a web site, it would be much better to make your web site compliant to the World Wide Web (W3C) standards (called recommendations in W3C parlance). I am much happier having one single, unified web standard because it makes my life easier.

I therefore urge academics, policy makers and others to push for common, unified document standards, not a multiplicity of standards. The industry and vendors should collaborate on standards and compete on their implementation.

PS: There was one important question that the Times of India journalist missed asking Microsoft. I would have loved to know what the venerable professor thinks of Microsoft's attempts at Ballot Box Engineering on the OOXML issue.

Software Freedom Day

Today is Software Freedom Day. According to Wikipedia:

"Software Freedom Day (SFD) is an annual worldwide celebration of the free/open-source software. SFD is a public education effort, not only to celebrate the virtues of free and open source software, but also to encourage its use, to the benefit of the public."

We don't usually link the two words "Software" and "freedom" together. After all, what does the high tech world of software have to do with freedom? However, freedom is basic to any human activity and software is no exception.

For example, the open standards movement is about your freedom to encode (create) and decode (retrieve) your own data. If you store data in proprietary formats, only the maker of that format knows how to unlock that data and you are now dependent on that vendor. This is like buying house but the keys to the house still remain with the builder. Why take the risk? Actively use open formats like ODF and OGG and avoid using proprietary formats like .doc and .mpeg which are proprietary formats.

The open source and free software movement is about your freedom to modify code and share it with others. It is for this reason that Linux can scale from tiny embedded systems to mighty supercomputers. Wikipedia is about your freedom to share knowledge and information with each other.

Over the next few years this movement will go from strength to strength because the open source and free software communities have shown that we can grow richer by sharing!

Microsoft Certified Ballot Box Engineering in Pakistan?

After some digging around, I found out that there was indeed a committee that met and voted yes for OOXML in Pakistan. It looks like the committee met just once. There was a presentation on OOXML by a Microsoft person to the committee members. From what I hear, no views from the opponents of OOXML were presented. I had e-mailed the directors of Pakistan Standards and Quality Control Authority (PSQCA) and to the Pakistani Minister of Science and Technology, Ch. Nouraiz Shakoor Khan saying that we would like the open source community's views to be presented before a final vote was taken but received no replies. After listening to the Microsoft person, the committee voted in favor of OOXML. Now here is the interesting bit: Out of the 12 committee members, four are Microsoft Gold Partners, one was a Microsoft representative and the rest were academics. After the invalidated vote in Sweden, I am not surprised that so many Microsoft Gold Partners were on this committee. I tried to check whether the open source community's views were taken into consideration before the voting but currently I do not have information on this.

PS: I hear that Microsoft is planning to now offer MCBBE (Microsoft Certified Ballot Box Engineer) course along with its other course. I hear that several Indian political worthies who have specialized in booth capturing are lining up to take this course and upgrade their professional skills!

BusinessWorld on ODF versus OOXML

BusinessWorld magazine has an article on the recent standards battle at the Bureau of Indian Standards over Microsoft OOXML proposal. As you know, the OOXML proposal was rejected unanimously by the LITD15 committee formed by BIS to review OOXML. The ODF Alliance which includes FSF, Red Hat, IBM and Sun worked hard to ensure that OOXML was not approved. The reasons for this can be read at www.noooxml.org

BusinessWorld is now running a vote on its web site asking readers:

"Which documentation standard do you want to vote for?" The link for this article and the vote (see right hand top corner of the page) is:

http://www.businessworld.in/content/view/2458/2536

I request all FOSS supporters to vote for ODF. Next Monday's issue of BW also has an article on this subject and I am looking forward to it.

Now, M$, please stop smoking it!

Despite all the ballot box stuffing, Microsoft's OOXML proposal was defeated at ISO. What does the company that calls darkness as light have to say? It has the arrogance to release a press release titled, "Strong Global Support for Open XML as it Enters Final Phase of ISO Standards Process." The press release quotes Robertson, general manager for Interoperability and Standards at Microsoft Corp as saying:

"Technical experts around the world have provided invaluable feedback and technical recommendations for evolving the format," Robertson said. "The high quality of the Open XML format will be improved as a result of this process, and we take seriously our role in working within the Ecma technical committee to address the comments received.

Excuse me Tom, but India voted unanimously against OOXML. In case that did not register, let me repeat: India voted unanimously against OOXML. Despite all the explanations given by Microsoft, the Bureau of Indian Standards committee formed to examine OOXML marked each of the 200 issues as unresolved. Now, do you still use the words high-quality and OOXML in the same breath?

What this company deperately needs is a moral compass!

Memo to Microsoft: Stop wasting our time!

Finally word is out and the Bureau of Indian Standards has confirmed that it will be submitting a "No with comments" vote to International Standards Organization on Microsoft's OOXML proposal. This brings to a temporary close five to six months of hectic legwork to prevent a sub-standard proposal from getting the coveted tag of an ISO standard.

I doubt if Microsoft realises it, but its actions are only making it the Union Carbide of the global IT industry. Microsoft is the world's largest software company but if you flip through their 6000+ pages of OOXML documentation, you'll be justified in wondering how they grew so big if the rest of their work is as shoddy as OOXML. The extremely flawed proposal certainly does not befit its stature in the IT industry. But, does Microsoft learn from all the feedback given to it or does it learn anything from it. No. Humility and Microsoft are like oil and water--never shall they mix. According to reports coming in from countries that are involved in the ISO vote on OOXML, Microsoft is busy stuffing the ballot boxes. Read Andy Updegrove's blog post The OOXML Vote: How Bad Can it Get? (Keep Counting). Originally, only 30 ISO members were supposed to vote on OOXML. However, as the September 2nd date for the final voting comes close, another ten more countries have joined the committee. Updegrove says:

As someone who has spent a great part of my life working to support open standards over the past 20 years, I have to say that this is the most egregious, and far-reaching, example of playing the system to the advantage of a single company that I have ever seen. Breathtaking, in fact. That's assuming, of course, that I am right in supposing that all of these newbie countries vote "yes."

I guess we'll just have to wait and see a few more days to learn whether that assumption is true. Want to place your bets?

Sitting here in India, it is difficult to influence countries like Malta, Cyprus, Ecuador, Jamaica, Lebanon, Pakistan, Trinidad and Tobago, Turkey, Uruguay and Venezuela in the two days left before the final votes are submitted, but we shall try. I checked with the IT ministry in Pakistan and brought to their attention that Pakistan is now a "P" member of ISO which entitles it to vote on OOXML. This was news to them as they were not consulted on the OOXML issue. I hope that Pakistan's vote will be cast only after thoroughly reviewing the arguements for and against OOXML.

Coming back to India, I am extremely proud of the fact that my country has voted against this proposal. To accept such a poor document would have been to denigrate the very meaning of "standards." The academia, the government bodies, industry organizations and non-profits like the Free Software Foundation spent countless hours debating and discussing this issue. Some of the best brains in India burnt the midnight oli to review this 6000 page proposal and the final consensus was that none of Microsoft's answers to the 201 technical issues raised was found satisfactory. I hope the Microsoft bosses in Redmond take note of this and make a genuine attempt to rectify the issues instead of trying to stuff the ballot boxes.

For wasting the collective intellect of India's best IT brains, Microsoft and ECMA must be blacklisted. Just as a person with a bad credit history has to redeem himself or herself before applying for subsequent credit, any standards proposal submitted by these two organizations should be thoughly vetted before it is even accepted for review or voting in India. India has more pressing problems to tackle than OOXML. Therefore, Microsoft, please do us a big favor and stop wasting our time. Next time, do your homework before you submit something to India.

PS: This is an old joke in the IT industry and shows how little Microsoft has changed in decades.

Q. How many Microsoft engineers does it take to change a light bulb?

A. None. Microsoft declares Darkness(TM) an industry standard.

Policy challenges for “Open Standards”

India's Department of Information Technology has taken a great first step by mandating open standards. Now it must take the next step and come up with a clear definition of open standards to protect national data


During India's independence movement, Mahatma Gandhi said, “Real swaraj will come not by the acquisition of authority by a few but by the acquisition of capacity by all.” Several decades later, Gandhiji's statement rings true in the context of the Open Standards movement which seeks to protect users' freedom to access their data.

One of the unintended consequences of the digital revolution is that users have often found their data locked up in proprietary file formats. As a result, users own the data they have created, but have no control over the format in which they are created. This is akin to a situation where a builder transfers the ownership of the house but retains control over the keys to the house. Software vendors have often exploited this situation by changing file formats from one version to another and thus forcing users to keep upgrading their software. Clearly this is an untenable situation and this is why India's Department of IT (DIT) has wisely chosen to mandate the use of open standards for data storage.

DIT's move needs to be applauded because it addresses serious political and economic issues that concern India's long-term security in the world of IT. The Government is the custodian of the citizens data and it therefore has the responsibility of ensuring that this data is accessible for centuries and is not locked down in proprietary file formats that are known only to the creator of the software. As a sovereign country, we cannot allow data that belongs to the people of India to be controlled by individuals or corporations.

It is a fact that the life of the data is often much longer than the life of the software which creates it. Twenty years ago Unix ruled, today it is Windows, tomorrow it may be Linux and day after it may be a software that has not even been imagined today. If data is tied to software platforms, we will need to recreate the data every time the software changes. This is neither practical nor desirable. For example, land records last for over four hundred years. If we take the average lifespan of a software platform as twenty years, this means that the data locked in proprietary file formats will have to be ported or recreated twenty times for it to be available to future users. The only practical solution therefore is to clinically separate the data from the software that created it. This what the open standards movement seek to achieve by giving users the freedom to encode and decode their own data.

Unfortunately, DIT's mandate has also resulted in several spurious proposals that claim to be “open standards.” Just as we need to be vigilant against adulterated medicines, we need to be vigilant against proprietary standards masquerading as “open standards.” The increasing move to open standards in India and abroad has forced some of the most adamant companies to now seek the coveted status of “open standards.” For example, the maker of a popular word processor that has supported only closed formats since 1983 is now demonstrating indecent haste by seeking to “fast-track” their proposal through international standards bodies. They are seeking to undermine the very sanctity of the term “open standards” by seeking to rush through craftily worded standards and hastily drafted proposal through standards bodies. E-government institutions across the country, and DIT in particular, must avoid being deceived by such wolves in sheep's clothing.

To avoid such situations, the Open Source Initiative has published the Open Standards Requirement (OSR). By implementing standards that follow the OSR, organizations can ensure that they retain full control over their data and avoid paying extortionate royalties and license fees for accessing their own data. The Open Standards Requirements are:

1.No Intentional Secrets: The standard MUST NOT withhold any detail necessary for interoperable implementation. As flaws are inevitable, the standard MUST define a process for fixing flaws identified during implementation and interoperability testing and to incorporate said changes into a revised version or superseding version of the standard to be released under terms that do not violate the OSR.

2.Availability: The standard MUST be freely and publicly available (e.g., from a stable web site) under royalty-free terms at reasonable and non-discriminatory cost.

3.Patents: All patents essential to implementation of the standard MUST be licensed under royalty-free terms for unrestricted use, or be covered by a promise of non-assertion when practiced by open source software

4.No Agreements: There MUST NOT be any requirement for execution of a license agreement, NDA, grant, click-through, or any other form of paperwork to deploy conforming implementations of the standard.

5.No OSR-Incompatible Dependencies: Implementation of the standard MUST NOT require any other technology that fails to meet the criteria of this Requirement.

The purpose of Open Standards is to include and not exclude. As we have seen from the growth of the Internet, open standards bring tremendous benefits with them. Today the Internet has more than a billion people who use it as a platform to socialize, communicate and transact. The common, unified standards like HTML has enabled the Internet to grow rapidly. Since the specifications for HTML are freely available, anyone can create tools that create (encode) HTML and tools that read (decode) HTML. Software developers, web site designers, Internet portals, social networking sites, bloggers, photo sharing sites and many others use HTML as a global means of reaching out to others. This would have not been possible with proprietary standards because that would mean that the data is accessible only through a specific software to the exclusion of other software.

For example, in 1995, both Netscape and Microsoft came up with their own extensions to HTML. This lead to a profusion of websites proclaiming "Optimised for Netscape" or "Optimised for Internet Explorer." Both these companies came up with proprietary extensions to HTML which could be viewed only with their own browsers and this development threatened to fragment the Internet. Fortunately, pressure from the World Wide Web Consortium and users forced both companies to back down and adhere to common standards. Unfortunately, bad habits die hard and we still see organizations optimizing their systems for one particular browser instead of following open standards that can be accessible through any browser.

We have all gained enormously from unified standards for data exchange and the Internet. The best standards like ASCII, Unicode, HTML etc are ones that are created through consensus and collaboration. This promotes choice, encourages competition and brings down cost for end users as companies come up with the best implementation of the standard.

As custodian of citizens' data, the Indian Government must come up with a clear definition of open standards that protects Indian citizens and enshrines their right to encode and decode data. The Open Source Initiative's Open Standards Requirement (OSR) is a good first step for arriving at such a definition. Such a definition will ensure real swaraj by ensuring “the acquisition of capacity by all” and not the “acquisition of authority by a few.”

Venkatesh Hariharan is a member of the Open Source Foundation of India. He can be reached at venkyh [at] gmail dot com.
This work is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution License and freedom is granted to reproduce this article provided this notice is retained intact.

Media coverage of OOXML issue

The media seems to have taken great interest in the OOXML issue. The Economic Times, which is the world's second largest financial newspaper had an article titled, India throws MS open format out of the window. The article said:

NEW DELHI: India on Thursday gave Microsoft a thumbs-down in the war of standards for office documents.

In a tense meeting at Delhi’s Manak Bhawan, the 21-member technical committee decided that India will vote a ‘no’ against Microsoft’s Open Office Extensible Mark Up Language (OOXML) standard at the International Standards Organisation (ISO) in Geneva on September 2.

“We unanimously agree on the disapproval of OOXML with comments. The same will be submitted to ISO,” National Informatics Centre head and BIS technical committee chairperson Nita Verma said after a marathon meeting that lasted over six hours. There was no need for a voting as only Infosys Technologies and CSI supported Microsoft.

The Open Document Format (ODF) alliance, enjoying widespread support from academia and corporates like Oracle, IBM, Red Hat, Sun Microsystems, Google, were in a jubilant mood having succeeded in stalling OOXML from being accepted as a standard in India.

Business Standard, had an article titled, "BIS stumps Microsoft for new language"

Leslie D'Monte / Mumbai August 24, 2007

Microsoft today suffered an initial setback when the Bureau of Indian Standards (BIS)-appointed technical committee did not approve of its Open Office eXtensible Mark-up Language (OOXML) as an alternative standard for electronic office documents to the International Organisation for Standardisation (ISO).

It qualified its disapproval with comments. The BIS can review the decision till September 2, when the same has to be submitted to the ISO along with 123 other country-specific standards bodies.

This article quotes a Microsoft spokesperson saying, "We respect the decision taken by the Bureau of Indian Standards (BIS)-appointed committee. At the same time, it is important to note that all the BIS members unanimously support the need for multiple standards. Going forward, we will work with the BIS and the committee members on the comments noted during the ballot resolution process.”

Well, I attended almost all the meetings of BIS and certainly do not agree with this viewpoint. My submission to BIS is that vendors should collaborate on standards and compete on their implementations. Who in the world wants two different HTML standards? I certainly don't.

Hindustan Times had an article titled, A New Duel.

Friday August 17, 12:54 AM

The biggest IT giants are at war. A war so huge that its magnitude spans almost the entire planet. The bone of contention is who will control your office documents - to be precise, the underlying document formats that run on your computers. It is a bit like what language a national anthem will be written in. It involves pride, sentiments and high stakes.

The rivals in this high pitched battle are Microsoft on the one hand and an influential axis of IBM and Sun Microsystems on the other. The IBM-Sun axis is backing the Open Document Format (ODF) alliance. A veritable who's who of the industry is lined up, taking sides.

India votes no against OOXML

Just returned from delhi where I attended the Bureau of Indian Standards meeting on OOXML. Red Hat is a voting member of this committee and I had the privilege to represent the company on this committee. The committee has voted an unanimous "No with comments" on OOXML. I will wait for an official mail from BIS before saying anything more but thought that I should share the good news with my friends in the FOSS and open standards community.

TCS joins the open source community

This is good news. India's largest software company, TCS, has released its Wide Area Network Emulation product called WANem in open source. The project is hosted on http://wanem.sourceforge.net/

Hopefully, this symbolises a small but significant cultural shift among Indian software exports companies. Traditionally, they have not encouraged contribution to open source projects because their primary focus is outsourced software development.

The Big Bazaar and Open Source

These days, I feel that i cannot pick up a book without stumbling on some mention of open source. I was reading Kishore Biyani's (Pantaloons, Big Bazaar, Future Group fame) autobiography, "It happened in India." Throughout the book, the theme is that of collaboration and partnerships. What was interesting to me was that, in the second last page of the book, Biyani talks of open source.

"In the Creative Economy, innovation will also necessarily come through collaboration. And that is evident from some of the most successful innovations that we have seen in recent years --from the Toyota Production System to the way Linux, or more recently, Wikipedia, has developed,"says Biyani in the book.

It is an interesting book and I would recommend it to anyone interested in the changing business scenarios in India. I wonder if Biyani has read Eric Raymond's, "The Cathedral and the Bazaar?" I am glad to see that more and more industry leaders are talking about open source.

Bill Gates and open standards

In 1997, in my previous avatar as a journalist, I had interviewed Bill Gates. What a different world that was!

That was his first visit to India and the fanfare would have made you believe that this was a head of state visit. Microsoft had just crushed Netscape in the great internet wars and seemed completely indomitable. I was extremely keen to meet the man who sat at the very center of the desktop universe to understand what his next move would be.

One of the biggest changes from 1997 to 2007 is that the desktop rapidly diminished into being a subset of the Internet universe. The focus of users shifted from being limited to their desktops to collaboration and communication via the Net. I remember that my first PC was bought in 1994 and I soon got bored of it until my 1200 baud modem was purchased in 1995. It was as if a whole new universe was now available to me through my rasping, screeching modem. Of couse, none of us, including Bill Gates, expected this universe to expand so rapidly.

One of the factors (and consequences) of the growth of the Internet was that open standards became more popular. The Internet itself would not have existed without open standards. One consequence that I could notice around 1997-2003 was that new file formats for audio and video and other forms of data emeerged that were no longer tightly tied down to the desktop. My term for it, at that time, was Platform Independent File Formats (PIFF). Looking back, the PIFF observation was a good one as far as trends go. However, having file formats that are independent of the underlying platform is not good enough and this is where open standards come back into the picture. If I create a document, the document belongs to me. However, if I made the mistake of creating it in a proprietary file format, the only way I can decode it faithfully is by using that proprietary vendor's application or try my best to reverse engineer that file format. That is like buying a house but while I own the house, the builder owns the keys to *my* house. Not a good idea right?

I have blogged about this in my article "The importance of Open Standards." In a world of truly open standards, monopoly pricing cannot be guaranteed. And that world is not far away because users clearly understand the alue of open standards and the impact it can have on their lives.

Six Questions on MS OOXML

Georg Greve of Free Software Foundation, Europe has come up with a simple set of six questions that policy makers must ask before approving OOXML which has been proposed as a standard.

This is recommended reading for those interested in open standards.

Eben, Kerala and other issues

I had a very long chat with Eben Moglen last week and had gone down to Delhi in this heat wave to meet with him. On Saturday morning, when the temperature was 45 degrees centigrade, around 50 people turned up to hear him talk about the issue of software patents and Microsoft's claims that Linux violates its patents. Eben is a combative force-of-nature and I am glad he is on our side!

We spoke about a number of things that will become common knowledge once the Software Freedom Law Center unveils its plans for India. Before, coming to Delhi, Eben had spent three days in Kerala. We agreed that it was important that Kerala succeeded with Free and Open Source Software because it is one place where there is both, political will as well as grassroots support for FOSS. The plans to set up an academic center of excellence for FOSS in Kerala was another thing that we spoke about. This academy is a wonderful idea and I would love to teach there. Incidentally, I will now be speaking on open source at the IIT Bombay's course on ICT for Development.