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Denmark Chooses OpenDocument Format
Seahawk was one of several readers to write in with news of Denmark's decision to embrace ODF. "On Friday morning Denmark decided to choose ODF over Microsoft's OOXML. For now the decision is only effective for governmental institutions, but regions and municipalities will most likely follow some time in the future. The decision has unfolded over a period of four years, and many open source advocates were fearing the worst, but it looks like the minister finally caved in and listened to what a lot of people were saying." While in transition away from Microsoft Office formats, the Danes may find use for this new OpenOffice integration guide (sent in by reader AdeleWard).
This is great news. Open standards, like other forms of openness, spreads like wildfire. In Europe we saw Belgium, Netherlands, Norway adopt ODF, now Denmark. A similar pattern occurred in South America, with Brazil proving to be the center of influence. So the question is: who is next?
dealt themselves a blow to their ability to interoperate with other people.
Incorrect. ODF increases your ability to interoperate with other people. Have you used Microsoft Office? It can't interoperate with its own older versions, and the reasons for that are entirely aimed at getting users to buy the latest version, nothing more.
Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law
That's not entirely true, since Microsoft Office can support ODF. If their decision was about the benefits of an open file format then the choice of software to run should be irrelevant (meaning they could still run Microsoft Office everywhere instead of something like OpenOffice).
Remember to maintain your supply of
No, SUN was well aware that MS pulls tricks like this, they thought that they would be clever and they put in a requirement in the Java licenses to stick to the standard. Microsoft's Java system was stopped by an actual court decision. Unfortunately for SUN, it turned out that Microsoft had used their work with Java to learn and they created a Java copy called .NET. Basically a lesson. It is never worth cooperating with MS even if you think you are much cleverer than they are.
=~ s,(.*),<sarcasm>$1</sarcasm>,g if any_point_you_wish();
Um, not *having* to spend money in commercial software licenses?
It's the same old argument ... why insist on having citizens pay for software so they can read official documents?
* If you force a free format, you can use any software you like -- including the same commercial software you've been using for years.
* But, if you force a commercial format, there is NO guarantee (almost like the opposite) that you can use any software you like -- even non-commercial.
"Good news, everyone!"
It's true that there is quite a bit of "noise" still ... we shall see what the dry ink says on Tuesday.
Having said that in the part of the agreement concerning editable documents, it says that:
4. Starting 1st of April 2011, govermental institutions will be required to send and receive documents in formats covered by the list mentioned in section 2 including ODF. To ensure that everyone, regardless of platform, have access to editable documents published on the websites of state authorities, the documents must be in ODF and other document formats that are listed.
So unless they rephrase this agreement, what it says here is that if you're an official, you must publish in ODF and optionally in additional formats in accordance to "The List".
As for "The List" itself:
The following principles must be fulfilled before a standard can be included on the list. The standard must be:
* Fully documented and publicly available;
* Freely implementable without economical, political or legal limitations on implementation and use;
* Approved by an internationally recognized standards organisation such as ISO, and standardized and maintained in an open forum through an open process;
* It must be demonstrable that the standard can be directly implemented by anyone in its entirety on multiple platforms;
* Interoperable within the functionality parameters with the other standards on the list
Take special note of the last point — what is interesting is that initially, ODF is the only standard on the list, so what this means is that OOXML cannot make the cut unless it "plays well" with ODF.
There is an additional provision that documents that are not intended for editing must be published in PDF/A-1 format.
"Good news, everyone!"
Denmark voted "Yes with comments" on the ISO OOXML ballot. Of course that turned out to do a hell of a lot of good since at later meetings a lot of ISO's changes to the ECMA spec were tossed away, so essentially we just voted "Yes".
A lot of the members of Dansk Standard wanted to vote "No", but it was pretty much a foregone conclusion that Denmark would say yes given that business in this country is nearly 100% MS-based. (Actually... Denmark might be the country in the West with the highest percentage of Windows installs).
And on a personal note, I don't take ISO seriously any more, and neither should you.
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