Belgian Gov't requires ODF From 09/2008

An anonymous reader writes "The Belgian government has decided all government agencies will be required to use only open document standards from September 2008 onwards. One year earlier, they should be able to read them. In practice this means only ODF will be supported, although OpenXML will be considered if it becomes an accepted standard, and enough applications use it. According to a Belgian Microsoft-spokesman, Microsoft is considering supporting ODF (article in Dutch)."

Comments

Again ?!

[GrosTuba]

You can tell they've definitely made up their minds !!!

Translation from a belgian

[cazzazullu]

Here you go guys:

Government bans Microsoft-documents

From September 2008 onwards all digital office-documents of the federal
government wil be ODF-files.

ODF or open document format is a file format for office documents that
was officially accepted last month by the international
standards-organisation ISO.

It concerns an "open standard", that can be used at will by software
developers to create applications. ODF is therefor a potential
concurrent for the own file formats the software giant Microsoft uses
in its office software Microsoft Office.

The federal ministrial counsel took the radical decision last friday to
make the ODF-standards obligatory from September 2008 onwards for all
federal governmental services. One year earlier all services must
already be able to read the ODF documents. According to the magazine IT
Professional Belgium is the first country in the world to take such
measures, and thus de facto forbids the usage of the Microsoft formats.

However the door isn't entirely closed for Microsoft. The company now
has the choise: either they open their programs for ODF-files, or they
develop a standard themselves that can be used next to ODF. The most
important candidate for the latter is the by Microsoft designed Open
XML.

But according to Peter Strickx, who is responsible for software
standards at the federal government, Open XML has to be first
officially recognized and there have to be enough applications
supporting the format. According to Microsoft spokesman Frank De Graeve
they also consider supporting ODF in the Office software.

Re:Translation from a belgian

[ngaro]

The articles on the government website in french and dutch.

So you want someone to translate them ?
Here is my (I am a Dutch, French and English speaking Belgian) translation:

Use open standards for the exchange of office documents.

The council of ministers approved the law-suggestion (I don't know the English word) for the use of open standards for the exchange of office documents.
Minister Vanvelthoven: The exchange of office documents such as text documents and spreadsheets has been especially based on popular officeprograms such as Microsoft Office, Corel WordPerfect Office, etc. in recent times.
But most of the time, documents which are made with these products can only be read by those products. Therefore, when you want to exchange such documents with someone else you oblige him/her almost to also buy the office software with which the original document has been made. To reduce being dependent on those ' company-owned ' formats it is necessary to use an open standard as an exchange format.
XML is such a standard for exchanging information between several computer systems. A document based on XML is therefore a guarantee of accessibility of information in the long term. The Opendocument Format (ODF) is a XML-based document format that is accepted by the ISO (international Standards Organization). Therefore we suggest to use ODF as a standard for exchanging office documents such as editors, spreadsheets, ... after it is definitively approved by the ISO.

Each government (the government in Belgium is pretty complex for such a small country, it can be divided in 3 'gewesten' or in 3 'gemeenschappen' or in 10 'provincies'.) must ensure by September 2007 that ODF documents can be read. This does not exclude the use of other formats. How the 'read-functionality' will be guaranteed is something that each government can choose. Depending on the results of an impactanalysis carried out by Fedict (this is a service of the goverment that is responsible for doing things like this and other things that waste tax money :) ) as from September 2008 ODF will be used as a standard format for the exchange of office documents.

Re:Not yet

[Kjella]

Don't forget that, even Belgium is a small country, its captial city is Brussels, which is also the capital of Europe.

Brussels is the seat of CoEU, EC and EP and is unofficially called the capital of the EU, but it's not official. Also Europe != EU != Euro-countries. We're in Europe, but like hell if Brussels is any sort of capital for us.

Re:*ONLY* open document standards? AWESOME!

[TapioNuut]

You know what that means, right? It means that not accepting MS Office files is just the tip of the iceberg. It means every other format the government uses will have to be open too, including audio/video codecs, and -- best yet -- CAD FORMATS!

Well, from the real article this seems not to be so simple.

They use sentences like "Belgium's government departments will be instructed to use an open file format for internal communications", "all document exchanges within the services of the Belgian Government will have to be in an open, standard format" and "Belgium's Federal services must use ODF when exchanging documents, though other formats will still be allowed for internal use". (The sucky emphasis is mine)

And when you take into account the fact of AutoCAD's DWG being de facto standard and the fact that principles and reality often collide in decisions like this, I wouldn't throw my AutoCAD away just yet.

Nevertheless it's exciting to see what this decision does in reality and what this means for European Union...

Re:*ONLY* open document standards? AWESOME!

[mrchaotica]

since you're in the industry and all...

You did notice I said I'm a student, right? ; )

Anyway, most of my (limited) experience has been with AutoCAD and SolidEdge, which are both expensive and Windows-only. I have done some research into the matter at times, though, but I don't think I'll be of much help.

First of all, if your needs really are simple, you could just use a drawing/diagramming tool like xFig, Dia, or Inkscape. Beyond that, though, all I can really suggest is QCad or possibly BRL-CAD, seeing as how those are about the only two Free* CAD apps for Linux that aren't already dead or "in planning" or whatever.

I also found this list, although I suspect it isn't of much help.

*I don't like QCad's license either, especially seeing as how the Free Software version is crippleware. I'm surprised nobody's forked it yet -- it needs it!

Re:Not yet

[CastrTroy]

I think OO.o would fix this because there's an actual standard. If the next version doesn't output files according to the standard, then there's a bug and it has to be fixed. With MS Office there is no such standard. They change the standard in every version to add new features. This has adverse effects on old versions.

ODF should be easily verifyable

[fritsd]

Disclaimer: I don't know much about XML

Because ODF is XML-based, there are fast standard techniques to verify whether a given document is 100% ODF compliant or not.
This would mean that a lot less "cheating" is possible than with a difficult-to-implement binary format.

To be fair, the same would hold for Office Open XML (that's what Microsoft calls their format -- i wonder why), so if that also becomes a standard you'd be able to choose :-)
On groklaw I read a discussion on the legal and technical merits of both:
(DISCLAIMER: its written by people from the OpenDocument fellowship, so it's understandably biased towards ODF)
http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=200511251 44611543

And this is what I could find on validation on the W3 consortium website (as I said, I don't know anything about XML):
http://www.w3.org/TR/xmlschema-1/#concepts-schemaC onstraints

Re:ODF should be easily verifyable

[WindBourne]

I am more than familiar with XML. You can embed binary in it. In fact, I would guess that is the approach that MS is using for the open XML. The question is how much flexability does ODF allow in their schema. And it is enough that MS can embrace and extend? That I do not know.