Mandatory Use of Open Standards In Hungary

qpeter writes "Hungarian Parliament has made the use of open standards mandatory by law in the intercommunication between public administration offices, public utility companies, citizens and voluntarily joining private companies, conducted via the central governmental system. The Open Standards Alliance initiating the amendment aims to promote the spread of monopoly-free markets that foster the development of interchangeable and interoperable products generated by open standards, and, consequently, broad competition markets, regardless of whether the IT systems of interconnecting organizations and individuals use open or closed source software. In the near future, in spite of EU tendencies the Alliance seeks to make its approach – interoperability based on publicly defined open standards – the EU norm under the Hungarian presidency of the European Union in 2011. To that end, it will promote public collaboration – possibly between every interested party, civil and political organization in the European Union. What do you think: what would be the best way to cooperate?"

Comments

Re:WTF are you doing?

[Ethanol-fueled]

Maybe it would be nicer to you if you made it a sandwich and brought it a cold beer once in a while.

A monopoly is a monopoly

[SiteAdmin]

Closed source, open source, who cares? If everyone has to use the same standard, it's still a monopoly.

Re:This is anticompetitive

[man_of_mr_e]

You're wrong sir. With open standards, any company can bid on projects. If their goal though is to secure future business by locking down their customer to only use their software, that's where I have a problem.

I hear this party line all the time, but it ignores one simple fact. By mandating a single standard, it means word processors are effectively a dead end. no company can come up with a new feature that requires storage in the document format. This means that, for all intents and purposes, word processor development will come to a stand still.

Sure, you can extend the format, but then you're no longer conforming to the open standard, and you are now disqualified from bidding.