On Sat, 2006-04-22 at 23:25 +0530, Saswata Banerjee & Associates wrote:
TCS assured me that it is designed to work both on Linux and Mac in addition to Windows and that they are including the relevant drivers with the token. However, the additional software tools they are providing for automating digital signatures on other documents will work only on Windows. I would like to know if any of you have used the Digital Siganture / Digital Certificates that is being issued under MCA-21 and can confirm that it works properly on Linux.
You missed my earlier posting under the "subject: Fwd: GOI wants us to buy M$ products for interacting with it." TCS gave you a snow job at the lecture. The basic web pages for company search name and the feed back from do not work properly in Firefox on Win XP forget about Linux. Essentially you are locked into using MSIE. Surprise, surprise - the site http://www.mca.gov.in/ has been developed by none other than TCS! I hope you have the TCS guy's visiting card to put him/her thru the "ganna juice" wringer.
I do not know much on Digital Certificates. However with this becoming a major part of commercial and business transactions, I hope what the government is doing does not work only on Windows. If necessary, we (or perhaps FSF) will need to initiate a dialog with the government.
After seeing the stuff on Ministry of Company Affairs website, I am afraid the whole e-governance will require you to use Windows to do your transactions unless there is a strong protest now. Personally, I don't care what they use on the server side but whatever their server spews out should work with any standards compliant browser. Unfortunately, this is an endemic problem with a good number of Indian sites - the Govt. being no exception.
In the next year, it is estimated that just government requirment will result in over 1 million digital certificates being issued. I think the actual figure will be close to 5 million as more government depatments like Income Tax, Sales Tax, Excise and Customs departments move to "digital documents only" mode. (Just imagine - if every shop keeper needs to file his sales tax returns online and needs a digital certificate to be able to upload the return to the government). It would be very important for us to ensure that Linux gets supported in the process.
Specific to the MCA dictat, the move will be a major fiasco since they do not seem to have a transition plan or a fall back plan. Only time will tell.
-- Arun Khan (knura at yahoo dot com) Why can't you be a non-conformist like everyone else?