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India on Thursday gave Microsoft a thumbs-down in the war of standards for office documents. In a tense meeting at Delhi’s Manak Bhawan, the 21-member technical committee decided that India will vote a ‘no’ against Microsoft’s Open Office Extensible Mark Up Language (OOXML) standard at the ISO.
"India's Parliamentary Standing Committee on Finance, a cross-party body created to study Bills being presented for consideration in Parliament, yesterday trashed NIAI Bill which seeks to set up a National Information Authority, whose job is to take over the functioning of the ordinated Unique Identity Authority of India(UIDAI), a branch of the Planning Commission.
The SFLC has already informed us all that OOXML is clearly incompatible with the GNU GPL. But Microsoft seems to have just picked itself another smaller target (it’s a pattern that we last mentioned days ago). It insulted the intelligence of the Groklaw crowd with some rude remarks on this issue.
Questions by Dr. G. Nagarjuna, Chairman FSF India, submitted to the Working Committee, Board of Indian Standards on Wordprocessing & answers from Microsoft's Vijay Kapur, followed by a response from Dr. Nagarjuna are used for this article in Grok law. Groklaw's PJ urge any of you interested in OOXML to read the other exchanges most carefully.
Microsoft, perhaps finally realising that OOXML as an ISO standard is not a done deal yet, is still trying to get those who oppose OOXML in deep trouble, putting their whole careers in jeopardy in hope of driving them away.