India Votes Against OOXML

harsha_c sends in a local Indian perspective on the vote against Microsoft's OOXML ahead of the March 29 deadline. Of 19 companies participating, only 5 voted in favor of OOXML. "It was the ultimate battle for control over global IT standard for documents — between Microsoft-promoted OOXML and Sun and IBM-backed Open Document Format. It was played out between Indian IT giants, namely Infosys, Wipro, TCS supported by Nasscom on one side and the global IT biggies like IBM, Sun Microsystems, Red Hat backed by te IITs, IIMs and IISc on the other, on their respective positions on Microsoft's OOXML standard. Microsoft understandably expressed its disspointment. 'While we are disappointed with the decision of the BIS committee, we are encouraged by the support from NASSCOM.'

Comments

Re:Is all about the market.

[pandrijeczko]

That is the real fight, thinking about India as good because vote against OOXML is naive, this is a battle for a stake of that BIG, BIG, BIG cake called the desktops computer.

I agree with pretty much all of your comments but would prefer it if you didn't refer to it as a "fight". Everyone will agree that Microsoft Windows has dominance of the desktop & that Microsoft themselves, as a big business, want to maintain or increase that dominance. Absolutely fine, no-one would expect otherwise from any corporation.

But to call something a "fight" means there has to be at lease 2 combatants and there are no others. Linux is not in a battle to displace Microsoft from the desktop, all it is asking for is for parity. No-one in the Linux community should either be forced to run a Windows OS & should not really care if others run it or not worried about - and that goal is achievable when the specification of all file formats is open such that it does not matter, regarding exchanging documents, whether someone runs MS Office or OpenOffice.

Yes there are zealots on both sides that think there is some kind of "Windows vs Linux" war going on but the fact is that a good proportion of the Open Source apps that run on Linux also run on Windows. So with open file formats, even a Windows user will have the choice of either paying MS Office or downloading OpenOffice just like currently a Windows user can run IE, Firefox or Opera.

I fully accept and understand that some people need the complex functionality and linkage between Word, Excel, Access etc. and that they're never going to even consider OpenOffice as an alternative. But I'm also fully aware that most home users only need fairly standard features in the same applications in MS Office but use it because they got a hooky copy of it rather than having to pay for it. OpenOffice and open file formats would become a viable legal alternative from which even MS and the legitimate users of MS Office would also benefit.