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Norwegian Minister: No More Proprietary Formats
Been on TV writes "The Norwegian Minister of Modernization today at a press conference in Oslo declared that proprietary formats will no longer be acceptable in communcation with government. He also calls for all parts of government to have a plan ready by 2006 for use of open source solutions. Taking great care not to mention the name Microsoft directly, but rather referring to 'the spreadsheet almost everyone uses' or saying this is the last time I will present a plan for information technology being broadcast on the net in Windows Media, the Minister sent strong signals in the direction of Redmond to open up or become irrelevant to the Norwegian Government."
I wonder if he's been reading a certain letter from Peru?
After someone (or several someones) take time to reverse engineer the file format and then the next 'update' they're broken again. It's wasted time and effort because they're closed.
I am not in anyway affiliated with Max Cannon
heh .
I don't know though , PDF was a fairly forward looking format and seems to be doing ok (.pdf and OS X seem to be fairly great , well pdf is if its used properly as opposed to people shoving everything in a pdf)and nobody can fault a pure text document for its functionality
Not to mention the plethoira of open standard formats out there.
All i can say is , Way to go norway .
The only things certain in war are Propaganda and Death. You can never be sure which is which though
They're not always opened correctly. People may have reverse-engineered the formats to a large extent, but not fully, and MS doesn't publish the specs.
500GB of disk, 5TB of transfer, $5.95/mo
Including the one for the "spreadsheet that almost everyone uses"
http://www.microsoft.com/office/xml/default.mspx
-Ryan C.
Sure, Norway is small.
It's also per-capita on of the richest nations in the world, with plenty of high tech business. And did I mention oil?
She also punches far above her weight class in international affairs with a long and distinguished history of diplomatic intercession and hosting, and could serve as a shining example to many other nations, particularly her European neighbors.
So, of course, it's easy to make disparaging remarks about a small nation, particularly posting on a site like this where the readership is predominantly USian (and, geeky or not, still subject to that typically USian fault of not knowing or caring about the rest of the world) but in fact this is a fairly prominent nation with some real influence, and it could be a turning point for MS dominance in other areas as well.
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Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
Norway isn't an OPEC member.
They do, however, have a lot of oil.
I have discovered a truly remarkable proof for my post which this sig is too small to contain.
BBC or CBC. http://www.cbc.ca/ is actively embracing open standards. They have an OGG stream they are testing out, give instructions for user of Mac or *NIX and link to Mplayer.
http://www.cbc.ca/listen/index.html
This is a very good example for other countries to follow.
:)
Much as I love Norway, Norwegians and Nemi, Peru is the one leading the way on this. They got their first and are even mandating open source software for all government use.
Still, great to see the Vikings joining in.
Aide-toi, le Ciel t'aidera - Jeanne D'Arc.
I spent a few days in Norway last year (Fredrikstad, Oslo, and Bjørkelangen) and it is really a beautiful and well developed nation.
a p o untry.cfm?id=Norway
.no as well.
Check out their GDP per capita: http://www.nationmaster.com/graph-T/eco_gdp_ppp_c
Index of Economic Freedom is good too, although a bit socialist:
http://www.heritage.org/research/features/index/c
Norway can afford to do what it wants. They are very rich (being one of the largest oil and gas producers in the world helps), and aren't even in the European Union nor do they use the Euro. The Norwegians I know are also very well educated, and tons of good software comes from
Their drug laws aren't as terrible as those we have in the United States either, nor do they have the death penalty, etc etc..
I thought MS's idea of opening up document formats was to use "industry-standard XML" with restrictive licenses.
Check out "Office 2003 XML Reference Schema Patent License" Hell, the title says it all, doesn't it?
500GB of disk, 5TB of transfer, $5.95/mo
- it has lots of money, and
- the Government controls much more than it does in the U.S. -- for example, private schools, universities/colleges and hospitals are nearly nonexistant. Heck, even the largest ISP in Norway is largely owned by the Government!
Now, for years, the Government has been spitting out money to Microsoft to purchase licenses for Windows and Office in all schools, universities, departments, hospitals and the like. Each and every high school in Norway has Windows and Office readily available for its students, many of whom have Microsoft Word and Excel as a part of their compulsory curriculum. A middle-sized high school in Norway spends up to 15,000 USD on Microsoft licenses alone.So Microsoft has done very well in Norway. In fact, Microsoft's Norwegian division did such a good job at dragging money out of the Government, that its CEO got promoted[link in Norwegian] to be the CEO of Microsoft Russia!
Fortunately, certain groups and politicians have realized that the money spent on Microsoft could be spent on more important things, and have objected to pouring out money to Microsoft, and Linux has been tried out in several schools throughout the country, with largely positive experiences.
The Government has therefore finally realized that the continuous flow of money going to Microsoft is better spent elsewhere, and that there are cheaper and better alternatives. And with this statement from the Minister, Norway is one step further on its way to stop this terrible waste of money.
Screw karma, I'm ticked.
.msi package. .msi packages are not of the devil, as so many slashdotters make them out to be. Windows 2000 and higher supports them natively. You can install the needed app to support them down to Win95.
.msi is everywhere, know it or not. Using acrobat reader at your office/house? Sure, you download a nice little .exe, but that .exe extracts a .msi to a temp dir and runs that instead. Macromedia is installed via .msi. VMWare is installed via .msi. Yes, you're running a .exe, but that .exe is just extracting a .msi and running that. Openoffice for windows is now a strictly .msi installer, and hey guess what? firefox has a .msi package too, suprise!
.msi is the .rpm of the windows world, .rpm is the .msi of the windows world. Quit blasting it because you can't run it on your linux box, it's not like the windows users can run your .rpm packages either.
Now, essentially every microsoft product comes in a
Oh, and before you call me a windows zealot and some moderator mods me down for being a windows zealot, RTFJ.
MS will be using XML to replace proprietary file formats in MS Office. So the Norwegian's will still be able to use Office.
It still all goes back to patents. MPEG and SMPTE need to release MPEG4 (AVC) and SMTPE (VC-1) to the world, but that will never happen. And no Open-Source product will be able to compete effectively in these markets in the near future. The reason I say this is that it has been 10 years since MPEG-2, and we are finally seeing a MPEG-4 (http://www.mpegla.com/avc/) and VC-1 (http://smpte.org/smpte_store/standards/). These will be used for future High Def. Video and Broadcast. MPEG-7 and MPEG-21 are on the way, but that's another story, and still patent encumbered.
He did coin a similar phrase though.
"There's an old saying in Tennessee -- I know it's in Texas, probably in Tennessee -- that says, fool me once, shame on -- shame on you. Fool me -- you can't get fooled again"
As you alluded to, this has often been attributed to Lincoln, although we don't have quite as definitive proof as the above video. I've also seen it attributed as an ancient Chinese proverb, but either way, I'm pretty sure it predates both Bush presidencies.
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