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EU Should Switch To ODF Standard, Says MEP

Posted by timothy on from the so-should-the-u.s. dept.

DTentilhao (3484023) writes "The European institutions should switch to using the Open Document Format (ODF) as their internal default document format, says Member of the European Parliament Indrek Tarand. Speaking at a meeting of the European Parliament's Free Software User Group (Epfsug), last week Wednesday, MEP Tarand said: 'Moving to ODF would allow real innovation, and real procurement.'"

3 of 111 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Why switch to that Euro-weenie format? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    You really haven't been paying attention have you?

    OOXML is an outrage and became a "standard" through bribery and corruption - all of which is well documented - and MS Office itself did not actually conform.

  2. Re:It makes too much sense by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    EU has managed to pass a network neutrality law as well as cancel all roaming chargers starting 2015. I'd give them more credit than you do.

  3. This is a big deal by Trachman · · Score: 5, Interesting

    If EU switches to open document format, significant part of the market will consider European advice. They get many things wrong but this one they got right. The proprietary documet standard could be comparable to the proprietary railway track gauge. Can you imagine paying an extra royalty because you are using "specially measured" difference between the wheels. The problem for Microsoft is that at some point, very soon they will figure out that it does not matter which operating system is on user's PC. I fully expect that in 5-10 years most of the users will not know what operating system they are using.