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

Re:*ONLY* open document standards? AWESOME!

[LordNightwalker]

Ah, just the man I wanted to talk to... ;)

I need a simple and free CAD application for a one-time project, and I was wondering, since you're in the industry and all... Which one would you recomment? What I need is a simple 2D CAD application that's free and runs on both Windows and Linux (and preferably other OS'es) so I can share my files with others with as few restrictions on the platform it runs on as possible. I have some experience width CAD from using RoboCAD back in highgschool (which is now free as in beer, but it's a DOS application and its age shows). I know there's QCAD, which probably does everything I want, but I don't like their license. Is there something better out there, and if so, which one would you recommend?