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Belgian Gov't requires ODF From 09/2008

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the moving-faster-then-MA dept.

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)."

1 of 106 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Not necessarily... by sangreal66 · · Score: 0, Troll
    With the need to upgrade just to be able to read other people's documents removed, nobody is ever going to buy a paid-up copy of MS Office again.
    The problem with your theory is that you don't need MS Word to read other people's documents. Microsoft offers for free the MS Word viewer for this purpose.