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