The All India Council for Technical Education, the national body supervises technical education in the country, has agreed to remove the word ‘mandatory’ from its controversial notification that mandated the engineering colleges to use Microsoft’s Office 365.
(Office 365 offers various Microsoft Office services online over the cloud).
The AICTE notification mandated institutes to use Office 365 services only, using Microsoft’s proprietary software. This has triggered a nationwide uproar against ‘restrictive’ measures.
A group of Members of Parliament and representatives of Free Software Movement of India (FSMI) have opposed the AICTE move and asked it not to make it mandatory.
The MPs, led by P. Rajeev and Sitaram Yechury, felt that the council should not put such restrictive measures on the use of software.
The FSMI argued that the public institution should not enter into an agreement with a particularly private company and make it mandatory for all its institutions to join that programme.
“They have agreed to remove the controversial clause,” Y. Kiran Chandra, General Secretary of FSMI, told Business Line.
Violation of norms
The AICTE decision to use Microsoft Office 365 is in violation of the open standards norms as mentioned through National Information Technology Policy 2012. Office 365 does not conform to this standard,” he said.