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3. It is the contention of each of the appellants that the goods are in fact software within the meaning of the definitions. They rely in this connection upon the decision of the Tribunal in Pentafour Software & Exports Ltd. v. CC, 2001 (43) RLT 96. The counsel for Tullow India Operations Ltd. contends in addition that benefit of the exemption contained in Entry 124 of notification 20 of 1990 will be available.

4. The Explanation to notification No. 20 of 1999 defines IT software to mean "representation of instructions, data, sound or image including source code and object code recorded in a machine-readable form and capable of being manipulating or providing interactivity to a user, by means of an automatic data processing machine".. The Commissioner has relied upon his view that "software" is "generally understood as a computer program for instructions that cause the hardware to do a work", quoting from the English Encyclopaedia. He has also relied upon reports submitted by K T Soneji, Chartered Engineer and Prabhat Kitai, an employee of M/s Enhanced Software Solutions, a Mumbai software firm and quoted from their reports. These experts visited the Seismos Data Processing and Interpretation Centre of ONGC at Panvel and submitted a report. He concludes from these reports as follows:

"Source code is the only format that is readable by human. When you purchase program you usually receive them in their machine language format. This means that you can execute them directly, but you cannot read or modify them. Some software manufacturers provide source code, but this is useful only if you are an experienced programmer."
"Object Code The code produced by a compiler. Programmers write programs in a form called source code. The source code consists of instructions in a particular language, like C or FORTRAN. Computers, however, can execute only instructions written in a low-level language called machine language.

16. The Tribunal's decision in Multimedia Systems Pvt Ltd v. CCE is again of no assistance to the appellant and it also does not help the appellant's case. In that decision, the Tribunal was concerned with whether the compact disc that contained such material as encyclopaedias were interactive or not within the meaning of the Explanation Entry 231 of notification 23/98 and it concluded, after considering the meaning of the term "interactive", that such were files of interactive and therefore were interactive. The Tribunal in that case was concerned with applications software. We do not find anything in that decision that would lead to the conclusion that data does not contain source code or object code and is not capable of manipulation or being interactive can be considered to be software.