A document is often in the nature of a 'conversation' between the writer and others. In case of documents created by the government, it constitutes government citizen/community interaction, which is a vital component of our democracy.

Using a proprietary document format such as .doc or .docx to store this conversation 'locks-in' the conversation to the owner of the proprietary format. To access this conversation, the receiver of the document must pay royalty to the owner of the document format, by procuring a license of the relevant software. Paying royalties to access the "knowledge commons" is thus antithetical to the philosophies of the public systems/public software. More importantly, it contravenes the spirit of 'Right to Information' in which the citizen/community have a right to access government information without having to pay royalties for such access. This means that government documents should not be stored/shared in proprietary document formats and government websites should not require proprietary web browsers, to access.

Fortunately there are 'free and open' document formats, which are publicly available/owned, hence there is no need to use proprietary document formats and compel oneself/others to pay royalties. There are also 'free and open' software applications that use free and open document formats, such as Open Office or Mozilla Firefox web browser.

The 'Open Standards' being drafted by Government of India (http://www.mit.gov.in/default.aspx?id=945) requires open standards to be used, wherever they are available, as is the case with Open Document Format (ODF).

Ps - I have been using Open Office  for last three years, it is available on both GNU/Linux and on Windows operating systems (http://download.openoffice.org) and has similar features as proprietary office applications. Mail me if you need help/clarifications to move to Open Office .... and do share this message with your friends and colleagues.

Ps2 - See also the Free Software Foundation's campaign for the Document Freedom Day: http://www.public-software.in/node/780

Regards,

Guru

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March 31st is Document Freedom Day (DFD), a day for document liberation marked around the world. It will be a day for us all to educate our friends and neighbours of the importance of open document formats. OpenOffice.org uses the OpenDocument Format (ODF), and that means at least one hundred million people around the world use it at home, at work, at school: everywhere. What is more, an impartial open standard like the ODF can be implemented by any application, free or not. It eliminates vendor lock-in and gives users real choice today and tomorrow.

OpenOffice.org is proud of being a part of DFD, and joins many other groups, vendors, and projects in the global effort to educate the world of the freedoms given by open documents and standards. Document Freedom Day unites us all. Open standards, and especially the ODF opens the world to all.  Details on the Document Freedom Day can be found in our wiki at http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/Dfd and on the official campaign website at http://documentfreedom.org

Join us, join the future.

From the article below, I had two thoughts:

a. The net profit of Microsoft for 3 months was $6.66 billion, which is around 32,000 crore rupees. Thus in 3 months one company made more money than what the Karnataka Government has invested in school education for the last five years!

b. The rate of profit, calculated as net profit / revenues (6.66 billion / 19.2 billion) is is around 35% - very few companies in the world would have a net profit margin which more than 1/3 of revenues!!