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."

Comments

agree

[joe 155]

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)

go without saying

[jandar]

"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.

Re:go without saying

[Kadin2048]

Well it's self-evident to most governments that aren't receiving a substantial amount of tax revenue from a particular company marketing the software, or where the individuals in that government haven't been given large campaign contributions by said company.

It's sort of a litmus test, in fact. It's like sending out a survey ("Question: Do you think that forcing all of your citizens to send between $80-300 USD each to Redmond, Washington, USA is a good idea?") but without having to do all the paperwork. You just watch the results roll in.