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Belgium Chooses OpenDocument
Freggy writes "The Belgian government decided today that all public services should use open standard file formats for the exchange of office documents ( press release in Dutch, French). The reason is that they don't want to force people to have to buy a proprietary program to be able to read official documents. All federal public services should be able to read ODF files by September 2007. If no problems arise after a study, the use of the file format will be obligatory from September 2008."
bon métier belgium
Hope they don't waffle on this like MA (USA)
Dah dumph!
I agree completely, no one should be barred from having access to their governments documents because they can't afford some software... although I wonder what closed standard they were using that couldn't be opened by free aplications. ".doc" opens fine in Oo, .pdf's open fine in Xpdf... Still, it is a good move from the side of being able to access the data in years to come (and it's good for open source as a whole)
*''I can't believe it's not a hyperlink.''
"The reason is that they don't want to force people to have to buy a proprietary program to be able to read official documents"
Incedible this isn't self-evident for any government.
Belgium?! wtf? It's spelt Belljum and now these speltards are using OpenOfiice?! Go figyour! ROFLMAO!!
The reason is that they don't want to force people to have to buy a proprietary program to be able to read official documents.
Huh? There are free downloadable viewers for Microsoft Office documents as well as pdf files. You don't have to force anybody to buy anything when they are already free.
More FUD from the OSS crowd once again. Its not just the big bad evil corps that seem to be engaging in it.
No one in the Belgian government is enjoying "contributions" from Redmond. Simply rectified, though, just like it was in MA.
Ignore anything I said above, I actually agree with everything you believe - mod accordingly.
...and in other news, The UAE chooses Toro as it's official brand of snow-blower.
This is really great to see progress on the open format front, even if it isn't in the US. The Massachusetts thing is such a farce... first they say they'll do it, then vendors make them question it, then who knows... I saw an article in the Boston Globe about Microsoft donating $30M "worth" of "advanced software-writing and Web-building technology" software to Massachusetts public high schools and colleges. While it's nice to get free stuff, we can easily see that Microsoft is doing that to keep schools from adopting open solutions. Why try GNU/Linux + the GNU dev tools for development, or Nvu for web site creation, when Microsoft gave us Visual Studio and (gulp) Frontpage for free? It's a good argument, too! I don't know who can do it, but someone needs to sit down and realize that accepting $30M of donated software is really allowing M$ to bypass a real evaluation of the best software for the school's needs, and gaining them favor in future business dealings. If the whole school has Visual Studio for free, of course they'll buy upgrades, especially if M$ throws in another discount! And for M$,it's just pure cash.
ttuttle is a rankmaniac
The parent comment is a factual statement rebutting a point in the summary of the story. Why it is modded -1 Troll is peculiar. Perhaps some zealous moderator doesn't like an inconvenient truth that gets in the way of their worldview.
Instead of abusing your mod points, how about responding with a real comment.
Belgium is still the core of the EU: it's one of the three founding members and informally the capital state of EU, with Brussels as the administrative nerve center of the EU.
Belgium has a prioneering role in lots of initiatives, it's possible that other EU countries will take opening up their documents more seriously.
Hooray for Belgium!
Why is the government sending out documents which can be easily edited? Word and its ilk (word processing documents) are the absolute worst file types to distribute things like this in. PDF and Microsoft's new XPS are perfect for this sort of thing and it's what they were designed for. Not only would PDF be great for reading, you can extend its functionality with forms. Governments could do away with paper forms cutting down on processing time and errors.
I bet you used some automatic web translator since you actually wrote "Good trade belgium" or "Good profession belgium" The correct way would be : "Bon travail Belgique"
No sig for now.
If not wanting to force people to pay to be able to view documents is their reason for switching to open formats, then they are missing the point.
Besides, Word Viewer is, and always has been, free.
The point should be that the *format* is non-proprietary, not the program.
My two cents, anyway.
Now we know what tool to use when we write our Serious Screenplays.
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
Word Viewer is, and always has been, free.
If it's free, where's the source code? Or even the binary for FreeBSD?
Use of open standards for office document exchange.
The ministerial department has decided upon the open standard format to be used for the exchange of office documents.
Minister Vanvelthoven: 'The format of office documents such as text documents and spreadsheets is currently based primarily on popular office suites such as Microsoft Office and Corel Wordperfect Office. Documents produced by these products can usually only be read by those products. When you need to exchange documents with someone else, you're also forcing them to use the same software that the document was made with.'
To reduce the dependencies on these proprietary formats, we need to make use of open standard formats. XML is a standard for the exchange of information between diverse computer systems; an XML based document is thus guaranteed to have long term accessibility to the information within.
The OpenDocument Format (ODF) is an XML based document format that is approved by the ISO (International Standards Organisation). Hence we propose to to settle on the use of ODF as the standard format for the exchange of office documents such as from word processors, spreadsheets, presentations, as soon as it's approved by the ISO.
All federal government departments must be able to read ODF documents by September 2007. This doesn't exclude the use of other formats. The responsibility of guaranteeing readability is up to the relevent departments.
Depending on the result of a [federal ICT dept] managed impact analysis, from September 2008 the official format for the exchange of office documents will be ODF.
Sparks:Gadget:Beer Maker
Unless a document is digitally signed, ANY format (proprietary or open) is editable.
Like the GP, I would much prefer documents that weren't meant to be edited to be distributed in PDF format*. Although they certainly can be edited, PDF's aren't generally meant to be edited and the format reflects this - and it is actually these "reflections" that make PDF preferable, not the issue of editability (if that's even a word) itself. Examples includes not reflowing pages and the availability of a light-weight reader on every platform I can think of (although PalmOS support is rather poor).
Not reflowing content is a biggie. Image forms done in Word (oh, wait, you don't have to imagine - in many places, it's the norm!). Printing on non-standard page size (A4 vs Letter, for example) completely breaks most of these forms. Scaling is a huge hassle.
*I'd gladly support an open format, but I'm unaware of any that has even a reasonable market penetration and has as much cross-platform support as PDF.
Why is it that you FSF trolls always confuse free and Free?
If I use Linux or FreeBSD, then the Word viewer isn't even gratis. I would have to buy a copy of Microsoft Windows.
Last time I tried, I couldn't open my odt file in MS word. I had to save it as a .doc file and you can imagine what that done to the formatting.
Admittedly, this is solely Microsofts fault. But I can imagine alot of people having the same problem.
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
We/You have several hysterical^Whistorical examples of MS-Office components being changed to do exactly that.
When you realise that Bill appears to do everything either for more money or more control, this stops being surprising. This observation also makes the future plain: MS-Office document formats will almost certainly be broken several more times during the suite's death^Wlife-span, whereas more suites (possibly including MSO) will come to do OpenDocument I/O as well.
Belgium has (once more) planned to avoid the social tragedies which regularly afflict so many other Euro countries. Sometimes they miss the mark, but they're always a very educational country to pay attention to.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
At the bottom of the press release is a link http://www.belgif.be/ to a Wiki (available in English, French, and Dutch) discussing something called the "Belgian Interoperability Framework".
To quote from the site:
Looks like there's a concerted, high-level effort to solve interoperability issues.