The Hindu : Andhra Pradesh News : Meet held on e-governance initiative

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Sunday, Dec 19, 2010
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Andhra Pradesh

Andhra Pradesh

Meet held on e-governance initiative

Staff Reporter

Awareness crucial to policy on open standards, says NIC official

HYDERABAD: The government of India is currently in the process of identifying standards for various technological domains through numerous committees comprising experts and academics, said P. Balasubramanian, who heads the Open Technology Centre at the National Informatics Centre.

He was speaking on the recently released national policy for Open Standards in e-governance at the National Convention for Academics and Research being organised here by the Free Software Movement of India. This policy, Dr Balasubramanian points out, will ensure that this law is a “trendsetter” because it mandates the use of a ‘single and royalty-free standard' for each domain.

“The non-ambiguous use of the term ‘single' is important, for this will ensure interoperability between software systems developed by different agencies, it will stop vendor lock-in and leave the end user (the government or the citizen) with multiple choices,” Dr. Balasubramanian explains. Further, it creates a fair and competitive market for the implementation of the standard.

Patenting regimes

Even in the European Union, where there are moves to dilute the progressive interoperability framework by proprietary software lobbies, this policy is being viewed as an inspiration. Venkatesh Hariharan, director of corporate affairs, Red Hat, charted the political and social history of Intellectual Property Rights and patenting regimes. The three-day conference, that had over 500 academics and researchers participating, drew to a close on Saturday.

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