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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.
Just so you realize, those viewers ONLY run in windows.
Show this to your friends and family that don't know what a real hacker is
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.
Probably because it blatantly ignores common knowledge, and at the same time speaks in a derogatory manner. I think the moderator is probably correct that it is willfully ignoring in the hopes of trolling, rather than actually being poorly informed and mistaken.
The MS free readers are Windows only. They are also illegal under antitrust law and the subject of current litigation. If the post was no modded down half the space in this article would have been wasted as hundreds of people needlessly pointed this out.
Yes but does it run on linux ?
I hate all sigs, mine included.
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
I don't know. Will I need to install a new mouth to eat it?
"Besides, Word Viewer is, and always has been, free. "
It is not once you factor Windows price.
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