Norway Moves Towards Mandatory Use of ODF and PDF

Andy Updegrove writes "Norway has become the latest European country to move closer to mandatory government use of ODF (and PDF). According to a press release provided in translation to me by an authoritative source, Norway now joins Belgium, Finland, and France (among other nations) in moving towards a final decision to require such use. The Norwegian recommendation was revealed by Minister of Renewal Heidi Grande Roys, on behalf of the Cabinet-appointed Norwegian Standards Council. If adopted, it would require all government agencies and services to use these two formats, and would permit other formats (such as OOXML) to be used only in a redundant capacity.Reflecting a pragmatic approach to the continuing consideration of OOXML by ISO/IEC JTC 1, the recommendation calls for Norway to 'promote the convergence of the ODF and OOXML, in order to avoid having two standards covering the same usage.' According to the press release, the recommendation will be the subject of open hearings, with opinions to be rendered to the Cabinet before August 20 this summer.The Cabinet would then make its own (and in this case binding) recommendation to the Norwegian government."

Comments

Seems obvious

[AKAImBatman]

If adopted, it would require all government agencies and services to use these two formats, and would permit other formats (such as OOXML) to be used only in a redundant capacity.Reflecting a pragmatic approach to the continuing consideration of OOXML by ISO/IEC JTC 1, the recommendation calls for Norway to 'promote the convergence of the ODF and OOXML, in order to avoid having two standards covering the same usage.'

The results of this investigation seem obvious to me. They'll find that there are no significant features of the OOXML format that aren't already replicated by ODF. They will also find that OOXML is needlessly complicated by support for odd bugs and backward compatibility issues with previous Microsoft Office releases. Finally, they will find that a dozen or so major software providers are actively supporting ODF while only Microsoft is actively promoting OOXML.

After the report is released, Microsoft money will step in and suppress it. The guys who wrote the report will be fired, and a new report will be written recommending OOXML as an "industry standard" with "longstanding vendor support". ODF supporters will be recast as small companies that could go belly up at any time. The whole standardization effort will collapse in the backlash, and nothing will get done.

On the bright side, they're keeping up the good fight. Without this pressure, nothing will ever change.

Re:I hate PDF

[Anonymous Coward]

I agree. Fortunately since it's a published standard, there are other PDF readers other than the one from the vendor you describe...

Re:I hate PDF

[Englabenny]

There is no such requirement. Many operating systems (Ubuntu, OS X, and probably everyone except .. ) bundle other lighter and nicer PDF viewers because they are nicer to the users.

Is it a question of time before a lightweight, free software pdf reader captures the windows userbase as well?

Re:I hate PDF

[tajmorton]

However, the current implementation requires that I have a bloated reader that typically includes Additional Crap (tm) in the installation which installs by default (if even given the option).

Try another PDF viewer. KPDF and XPDF are both great for Linux/X users. For a barebones Windows viewer, try SumatraPDF.

If you're stuck with Adobe Acrobat for some reason, then you might try these instructions to make Acrobat run a lot faster.

Just thoughts...

Re:I hate PDF

[Oswald]

It's amazing how slowly word is getting around, but you do not have to put up with Adobe's bullshit. This company makes a no-cost reader that absolutely blows Acrobat Reader away. It's lightweight, fast, stable and when you close the window, the process actually stops instead of just sitting in the background, screwing up your system.

Re:When will the US join?

[CastrTroy]

The US is the last to adopt any kind of standard. They still haven't even picked up on the metric system yet. How do you expect then to standardize of document formats?

Re:When will the US join?

[Matt Perry]

Actually, let's be totally fair here. Yes, having everyone in the world use the same measurement system would make a lot of things easier.

Yes, let's do be fair. Every country in the world except for Burma, the US, and Liberia currently use the metric system as their primary method of measurement.

Having everyone in the world speak the same language would make things even easier -- indeed the benefits of a common language are far greater than the benefits of a common measuring system.

Especially if 94 percent of the world already spoke the same language it would make sense for the other 6 percent to learn it too. 6% being the 350 million people in USA, Burma, and Liberia.