On Tue, 2006-04-25 at 16:42 +0530, Prasad wrote:
- Starting this thread back only to solve the problems with digital
certificates issued by TCS-CA (I once worked on the digital cerficates and related tools support for GNU/Linux here).
Your commitment to get things working right is appreciated.
We normally associate the lack of awareness of issues like vendor lock-in and the philosophy of FOSS etc., with non-IT people. The sad truth is that even with the IT community, there are lots of people who are not aware of these issues - lots of them in big companies like TCS.
From my experience the bigger the company the more apathy it exhibits to
play well with others.
The older have an excuse but there are a huge number of youngsters who are not aware too!
I agree and find the trend very disturbing - implies the younger generation is growing up with "Mickey see Mickey do..." attitude without any quest/thirst for exploration and invention.
Well, in my opinion (a) this is not something done intentionally and knowingly; at best it is ignorance, at worst it is succumbing to a perceived convenience (http://www.zdnet.com.au/news/software/0,2000061733,39168780,00.htm) and
For a corporate environment, there may be some justification for the stuff discussed on the above link. For their Intranet, they develop the apps and they pay for the maintenance of the desktop (the OS platform, virus scanners, spyware scanners etc.) and thus they can dictate which browser to use but ... for external customers they have to be more flexible and support at least the top 5 browsers in the market.
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. 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. The vendors cannot feign ignorance about standards and inter operable issues. Take the MCA web site http://www.mca.gov.in/. Besides, other issues w.r.t Digital Certs. brought up in this list, simple activity like the feedback and the company name search forms fail to work at this site using FF 1.5.0.2 (Linux).
(b) as many people as possible should protest -- the objective is to raise awareness of the issue both in the user and the developer communities, not to blame or malign someone.
Give us name(s) and a snail mail or email addresses where we can submit our protests.
-- Arun Khan (knura at yahoo dot com) Those who can, do. Those who can't, simulate.