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Norway Mandates Government Use of ODF and PDF
siDDis writes "Earlier this year Slashdot mentioned that Norway was moving towards mandatory use of ODF and PDF. Now it's official: the Norwegian government has mandated the use of open document formats from January 1st, 2009. There are three formats that have been mandated for all documentation between authorities, users and partners. HTML for all public information on the Web, PDF for all documents where layout needs to be preserved and ODF for all documents that the recipient is supposed to be able to edit. Documents may also be published in other formats, but they must always be available in either ODF or PDF."
Does Garbagestan have normalized relations with Petoria yet?
Actually, Garbagestan completely surrounds Petoria. Normalized relations don't make for good ratings on the news, so none exist. We are, instead, working on a Garbagestan/Petoria Peace Plan which involves a Roadmap to Peace. This roadmap goes nowhere and states that when all the residents of Petoria, go off and drown themselves in the sea (and somehow they have to do this without traversing through Garbagestan), we will be at peace.
They refuse to drown themselves in the sea. We refuse to budge from our demands for total annihilation of Petoria. And somehow, we manage to make it look as if Peter is the aggressor and we're just poor Garbagestanians trying to survive his terrible oppression. News ratings are through the roof! Heh heh. Nobody pays attention to the fact that we surround him! Bwaaaaaaahaaaaaaaaa haaaaaaahaaa aaahaaaaahaaaah aahaahahhahaha hahahahahah ahahahahah ahahaha!
These applications do not feel snappy and crisp at all, though the code base is at least 10 years old.
I know it's a matter of time before ODF applications catch-up to Microsoft's offerings.
Your spare time [klerck.org]? The mobo blew Join GNAA X(GAY Duty to be a big kiil myself like flaws in the BSD say I'm packing development model the facts and
It just seems like mandating a specific and standard set of document formats in a country undermines freedom of speech. If you look at it a certain way, the format itself can be thought of as part of the expressiveness of the content. It -is- the content, so really, what Norway is saying is that only certain tools and the mindset behind those tools is appropriate. If the government were smallish relative to the society, such standardization would not be so bad, but given that European governments tend to be largish affairs, it seems that this sort of regulation will only serve to undermine software and content in the long term.
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