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."

Comments

Good

[MaxPowerDJ]

This is a very good example for other countries to follow. This actually encourages competition and speeds up the embrace of open standards. The government should always be involved in iniciatives like this.

Re:Good

[ergo98]

This is a very good example for other countries to follow.

Two quick (and largely similar) stories:

-I was at a Rona recently getting some bags of gravel for a project. A gentleman walking by saw my gravel, at this point 9 bags on my cart, and suddenly decided that he needed gravel. It was obvious that he didn't intend to buy gravel, but seeing me buying gravel made him believe that there was something interesting about this gravel, and he should follow.

-Again at a Home Improvement store, yesterday I was at Home Depot and a gentleman was standing there trying to decide which soil to buy, asking the clerk to help him out, when I pulled up and started loading some "magic soil" into my cart. Instantly his mind was made up, and he started loading up. Seeing two people loading up, suddenly several other people pulled their carts over to get some of this deal. Of course I chose this soil completely randomly.

Both were cases of a social proof, and it's much like everyone waiting for the first one to leave a party. For these reasons this sort of event, even when it's a small, seemingly inconsequential Scandinavian country, are very much noteworthy. Often it's the pebbles that precede a landslide.

Re:What about non-tech

[xMilkmanDanx]

This isn't about copyrights or patents, only about government information. It will have to be presented in an open format.

Basically, they're saying that you can't provide government info in a format that would require someone to buy software to be able to read it. Which, all in all, is a good thing - information is more publicly available with fewer differences in who can access it.

Re:This is an emergency!!

[DaveCar]

Given that Norway is extremely wealthy due to the vast reserves of North Sea oil that they own, has one of the highest standards of living in the world and have "one of the most advanced telecommunications networks in Europe" (http://cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/geos/no. html) among other things,I think they might be a fairly important customer, yeah.

Now if US companies would get it...

[Eric Damron]

When CNN announced that hey were offering news video clips for free viewing I thought well good for them... Then I tried viewing one from my SUSE box and found that they were using Microsoft's media player :-(

I left a message with them and explained the problem but I think it will take a LOT of people (hint, hint) to email companies who use proprietary formats before they'll get the message.

Office 12 with XML. Doesn't matter. It's MS.

[zanderredux]

Perhaps. But keep in mind that Microsoft can still publish stuff in XML and keep data proprietary, encoding binary data in a ASCII-or-something-like-it-encoded XML field.

The *format* will be open (it's just plain XML), but the data it contains (the binary thing) is not. What if that ASCII-encoded-binary-field contains key formatting data? How do you expect to properly view the document?

See the trend? Microsoft is continuously trying to charge access for your *own* data! Just like DRM!

Re:Can someone please explain

[mrchaotica]

Cost is completely irrelevant.

The point is that proprietary formats -- by definition -- cannot guarantee free access to the information they contain, and free access is essential to the functioning of a democratic government.

Re:True

[Xabraxas]

When the government doesn't want to pay licensing fees it is great to be able to run your computer infrastructure on the freebie software. Usually you get what you pay for too.

Get a clue. That argument might have worked on some people 5-10 years ago but now that we have IBM and SGI making super computers with linux, you can hardly convince even the most naive among us.

Doesn't really matter anyways since MS is already going to open standards for the next Office.

The format is not so open anymore when you consider that basically all GNU software will be prohibited from using it. Without any real good BSD licensed Office software out there (as far as I know) what's the use?

Open Source is not very important

[picz]

Open Source is not very important. Open Standards are. That is what it should be all about. Open Source is in fact totally irrelevant, if all of your data is locked inside proprietary files. Somebody will sure start to reverse engineer the formats, but it almost never works 100% right.

Right now I'm looking at an OS browser showing HTML with CSS. There are som jpegs around and some png's as well. If Microsoft or other company had their way, all of those formats would be secret, closed and patented and the software should be licenced from them.

Open Source is nice and efficient way of writing code, but real freedom is inside open standards.

As it is now, every government and every company has a lot of unreadable documents sitting around on their disks. They only become readable, when a licence is paid to MS or Adobe etc. And who knows, how long these companies will be around? And what if they choose to abandon old platforms and try to force everybody to use the newest Longhorn 2020 Ultra Plus for $499 pr. licence? This is not freedom.

What if I work for some government office and would like to make a nice, indexed and searchable database of my Word documents available to the public. Where is the innovation, when the standards are closed and secret and unreadable for my programmers

Knowing what's inside your own documents is essential. Specially if you are a government.

I hope that EU will look at Norway and learn. There's not much hope for the US I'm affraid. Too much corporate influence inside the political system. /picz

Right

[dustmite]

Microsoft pulled this "don't switch to alternatives just yet, the next version of Office will have an open format" trick the last two versions of Office. And you're falling for it a third time? Don't you people learn from repetition? I think Bush said it best, or tried to: "fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me"

There is no doubt that there will be something "non-open" about the formats when Office 12 arrives. Microsoft are playing this game of "we're moving the direction of moving open formats", the catch is that they will forever just be "moving in that direction" - they'll never "arrive".

I suspect that in a few years you'll be posting on slashdot again with "don't bother switching to OpenOffice 3, Office 13 is going to have an open format".

Microsoft will give up their proprietary formats when you pry them from Bill Gate's cold, dead fingers --- the core of their entire business model is that nobody else is compatible with Office.

Re:True

[Doc Ruby]

"You get what you pay for" doesn't say anything about what you get when you don't pay. Not to mention all the extra crap you get that you don't want, when you pay for some things.

But then, perhaps all this wisdom and logic is wasted on you, Anonymous Microsoft apologist Coward. Of course Norway's policy matters: that policy is exactly the kind of pressure forcing Microsoft to abandon one of its favorite monopoly abuses. You're going to have to find some other abuse to love, while supplies last.

Re:Norway population 4,593,041 - IT budget $10,000

[FuzzyDaddy]

Does anyone really think that the Norwegian government spends enough money each year on software to make it worth Microsoft's time?

The real question is whether the Norwegian market is large enough to sustain and develop a good competitor, and give it market exposure and testing. Sure, MS won't miss the income - but is it a large enough market to give a good proving ground for a significant competitor? That's what should worry Microsoft.