On Thu, 2006-04-27 at 21:57 +0530, Rony wrote:
On Thu, Apr 27, 2006 at 04:25:28PM +0530, Arun K. Khan wrote:
Further, I strongly disagree that similar justification can be applied to Govt. portals, that have been developed and funded with the Tax Payer's money and have a wide impact on the public. The Govt. _cannot_ _dictate_ to the public which specific browser (MSIE) or OS platform (Windows by inference) the user must have in order to engage in e-Governance transactions. It is tantamount to endorsement of a specific vendor and application.
Very true. I believe Prez. A P J Kalaam is in favour of open source, maybe he could be given a proper briefing to enable him to put pressure on other Govt. depts.
IIRC, Prez. Kalam has discussed his views favoring OSS with Bill Gates when he called on him during one of his visits to India but ... I guess his message gets diluted by the time it reaches the Govt. depts.
The vendors (most of them BIG IT houses of India) who develop such portals for the Govt. are equally responsible for such travesties. If the Govt. tender fails to identify standards and inter operable issues then they must "educate" the Govt. officials who manage these projects.
If the vendor does not know abc of programming in Linux, how will he promote anything other than what he knows and can support (M$). The govt. officlals too are ignorant of anything other than windows and internet explorer. In another mail, I will post some 'pearls of wisdom' of triband's tech support.
The high profile Govt. web sites are usually developed by one of the big IT houses of India. To the best of my knowledge all of them are Linux/OSS savvy. My point is, that whatever they do on the web server side should play with browsers other than IE on the client side. On the flip side a bad site implemented on Apache/Linux that does not work right on IE is equally appalling.
-- Arun Khan (knura at yahoo dot com) If A equals success, then the formula is _A = _X + _Y + _Z. _X is work. _Y is play. _Z is keep your mouth shut. -- Albert Einstein