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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?"
>What do you think: what would be the best way to cooperate?"
Invade?
Open Source Drum Kit, LPLC deve board - mjhdesigns.com
There are plenty of "open standards", and plenty of "closed standards" as well. If you were starting your own country and had to implement government data practices, which would you choose to implement, given:
1) Open standards can be understood and used by anyone/any program that implements them, and
2) Closed standards are locked down and hidden by the vendor that created them, forcing you to use their software?
*Jeopardy music*
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
Yes, but open standards mean that just about any open program can read them. For example, it doesn't matter if I choose to use the open WAV, FLAC or OGG Vorbis file format, the default media player in Ubuntu can play it. The more closed the file is, the fewer programs will open it.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
Don't forget the typos and "unintentional" omissions in the proprietary standards and of course the "reasonable fees" to purchase the standards documentation.
Nullius in verba
Mandating the use of open standards is anti-competitive and is harmful to taxpayers. Such a regulation prevents software publishers such as Microsoft from competing for government contracts because their standards are not open. Restrictions such as this never enhance competition but instead eliminate it by artificially reducing the number of bidders for any contract. While I understand the desire to embrace open standards, and why it would be a consideration for any government agency seeking bids for a project, it should not in itself disqualify bidders.
Well more to the point. You release a file format and say this is the format used by our tool. But because your tool is closed sourced nobody actually knows if you are telling the truth. Another way is to release a container format within which you encode your propitiatory format.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
XML is abused way too often in places where it doesn't belong. Also it is not easy to read or edit with the ultimate tool - the good old text editor.
Want to hear the voice of GOD? cat
This is something MS pulled off with the office format. Sure, the XML schema might be open but the binary blob data representing some of the elements is still closed.
Open standards need be truly open, meaning easily accessible, free of cost, readable by anyone and patent unencumbered.
As to the submitters question, the way to help is to be open and honest about the existing softwares capabilities and when the opponents speak about software inadequacy, keep your mind open and listen. There are ways in which some closed source programs are better than their OSS equivalents. For example - there is no ProE or Solidworks competition that is OSS. Not even close when you take into account the CAM, interference checking, flow analysis, strain modeling modules. If people want governments to take OSS software and standards seriously, they themselves have to be serious about making their software and their standards encompass the functionality of the status quo.
You can't legislate goodness. Let each to his own destiny, by will of his freely made choices.
I don't think anybody is saying "Everyone must use this standard." But to move to truly open standards (and not just fake ones like OOXML, no matter how Microsoft managed to scam its way through), has obvious advantages for large entities like governments and corporations. That's the beauty of something like 7bit ASCII. I can open up a file created in 1970, and every text editor, and pretty much every word processor, developed in the last four decades can read the file.
But we don't use ASCII very damn much any more, so now we're stuck with proprietary formats like the Office formats, which even in their latest incarnation, have binary blobs and insanely complex documentation. On the other hand, we do have the ODF format, which while not perfect, is relatively easy to crack open and grab the data out of (I've written a PHP script to split out spreadsheet data, so it can't be that hard). The notion is that forty years down the road, data will be as portable to applications then as ASCII is to applications now. I think for governments, in particular, this isn't just a good idea, it should be a mandatory goal.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
<lit><token><llama xmlns:xdc="http://www.xmlsucks.com/rocks"
xmlns:h="http://www.w3.org/HTML/1998/html4" >
<freown>No its <![CDATA[<]]> really <![CDATA[>]]> not
<reasons>
<reason>Poor Compression<![CDATA[>>]]> other languages <examples><example>JSON</example><example>YAML</example><example>CSV</example>
<examples><reason>
<reason>Goofy namespace</reason>
<reason>Bad For Lists</reason>
<reason>Packs too much in a node<examples><example>Its a scalar</example><example>its a list</example><example>has namespaces</example><example>Is a hash</example><example> and parsing is h
orrid when a value <interruption>Interrupt</interruption> can be interspersed <kitten meow="woof"/> with sub<![CDATA[-]]
nodes
</reasons></freown></llama></token>
This gets worse when you have thousands of lines of the crap to deal wtih.
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sakdoctor
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1087155
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You call that XML"
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This is BS. Most proper standards define a way to extend the standard with "proprietary" extensions in a way that they are put forth by a company, added to a register and implemented to that "proprietary standard". For example OpenGL has a lot of these and it's an excellent breading ground for the "glacially slow" standard standards.
HTML is a biased example because of it's history. The process has been subverted and it's broken, thanks to the early "web", large part in Microsoft and Netscape.
Most innovations happen on a way higher level than document format standards, but if the need arises proprietary extensions can be defined for a document format, then that can slowly be worked into a new version of the main standard. I see absolutely no issues here with requiring openness. It doesn't stifle innovation one bit.
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Be yourself no matter what they say
Of course, the major players just redefine their file formats to be "open standards".
In Hungary, we have a standards body that decides which formats are actually "open". Oh, and it's made up of engineers, not politicians.