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Dutch Government Adopts Open Source Software Initiative
christian.einfeldt writes "The Dutch government has set a target date of April 2008 for its agencies to start preferentially using open standards-based software. Organizations in the government will still be able to use proprietary software and formats ... but will have to justify it. A Microsoft Netherlands spokesman claims that Microsoft's Office productivity suite will still be used widely in the Dutch government until April, and that Microsoft Office will comply with the new Dutch rules once Microsoft's so-called "Open Office XML" standard is approved as an international ISO standard in February."
I was at the commission meeting, lets say the Christian Democrats really don't get what Open Source is. They think in terms of 'Experimental' and 'Gratis'. The other parties understand the concept completely, thank God ;) ODF is the preferred way to go. Open Source should have preference if the software is equal on the requirements. Next to this, software specially made for the government shouldn't be licensed to, but completely owned by the government. This was the procedure but many 'errors' were made at some ministries.
The Socialist Party wants the cost of a PC split in a software part and a hardware part. This concept of course is the way to go, but I don't see this happen soon.
Microsoft should not worry at all, since the users in the government use the plug-in at some departments already. I didn't hear anyone mentioning OpenOffice.
Support Eachother, Copy Dutch Property!
The Associated Press article yet again misquotes the MS standard as "Open Office XML". It is Office Open XML; and the tragedy is that neither is it Open; nor does Office 2007 fully support the OOXML; as documented.
The only saving grace would be for the BRM to reject this from becoming an ISO standard in February. Else Microsoft's efforts to confuse the market with their skewed terminology looks set to continue.
If you keep throwing chairs, one day you'll break windows....
See, I don't think that secrecy is the only thing that makes ms office worth buying. It really is a fairly nice package in most respects (except price.. $400?!), and of course it integrates well with Windows. The latest versions come with lots of options and clip art and little niceties that users like, and I think even if MS switched to ODF by default, they would still sell just as many copies of Office. Hell, they could sell a suite of conversion tools to batch convert from proprietary formats to odf across Windows networks. So the question then becomes: if you can make just as much money by playing nice, why do you still feel the need to throw sand in everyone's face at every turn? If only MS would use its powers for good instead of evil... instead, it's a big game of monopoly (literally and figuratively) where they haven't won unless they get every single dollar.
Microsoft need no worry on the short term, because most departments will most likely resort to the Sun ODF plugin for MS Office. But a lot of cities and smaller goverment bodies are switching or have switched to OpenOffice.org. As for as their ooxml format: the new policy specifically names ODF as the standard for office documents. So it doesn't matter al that much if ooxml is approved as an ISO standard or not. I'm just curious how many countries need to adopt policies like this before Microsoft takes it loss and starts supporting ODF natively.
;)
Fixing the faulty ISO process should be next on the list for the Dutch government
I talked about this with a friend yesterday, and we noticed that this was a very badly written article that gets basically everything wrong. But that's tech journalism for ya.
Here are some relevant links from his blog:
I suffer from attention surplus disorder.
What's with the !oktoberfest tag? I mean, yeah, oktoberfest is over, and this article isn't about it, but I think that kind of applies to just about everything.