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Danish Study Recommends Open Standards for EU

Posted by timothy on from the danish-studies-are-fattening dept.

PDAJames writes "The Danish government has wrapped up a two-year study of open source's potential for the public sector, and has some pretty interesting things to say. For one, it says that tie-ins to proprietary software effectively eliminate competition for government procurement and are inherently bad. For another, it recommends a public sector-led effort to adopt an XML-based standard document format, either that of OpenOffice or a new one developed by the EU. Will they push ahead with these plans or is it just more talk?"

5 of 185 comments (clear)

  1. OpenOffice vs. other office products by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Why don't the KDE developer stop working on KOffice and support OpenOffice instead?

    We need more people working on OpenOffice. OpenOffice is the only product that has a chance against MS Office.

    1. Re:OpenOffice vs. other office products by Elektroschock · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Both KOffice and Abiword will adopt the OO.org file format! OO may be a technology trap. Concumers want choice. Programmers also want choice. This is not totalitarism, everybody is free to do what he wants. 1 + 1 2!! Your philosophy is the philosophy of state economy (one factory has the best economies of scale) or the big old industries. A market economy enforces competition.

  2. Theres the Killer by Crashmarik · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Open standards are the best thing imaginable for the customer. The data that software manages is consistently orders of magnitude more valuable than the hardware/software that does the managing.

    This wont open up things entirely, there are still patented feature sets, and purely proprietary technologies. It will at least let the best product win, not the company that got their first.

  3. sweet!!! by the_2nd_coming · · Score: 4, Insightful

    nice...if the EU uses a public open format, their economic power will force MS to have filters for the format!!

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    I am the Alpha and the Omega-3
  4. Open Standards != Open Source by pfafrich · · Score: 5, Insightful
    I think we need to make a clear distinction between Open Standard and Open Source. They are very different beast and should not always be confused. The Report seemed to be more enthuisatic about the standards than the source.

    Open Standards are all about interoperability creating a level playing field where companies can compeat to produce the best readers and writers of the standards. Consumers and Govs are free to choose which suits them best. This is one of the reasons the web took off as html was essentially an open standard, even though there were no open source browsers about in the early days.

    Open Source is a different beast. I don't think the the benifits for a company to open source its products are as clear. Yes there are advantages with transpanancy for govemental use. Yes its great for hobbyiest, probably great for products aimed at developers. But the economic model is dificult, the viral licencing can cause problems.

    In general I'm much more passionatle about Open Standard than Open Source.

    --
    There are four sorts of people in the world: fools, lunatics, idiots and morons. - Umberto Eco, Foucaut's pendulum.