This is great news (for the Dutch, at least). I am forced to have Windows VMs in order to properly interact with multiple functions of the Brazilian government and it's not funny.
As a Dutch citizen, I'm not too excited. Why should our government spend time and money promoting a document format that is little used and not very suitable for document exchange, when conversion between formats is easy and loosing relevance because of cloud based services.
This is simply aimed at replacing Microsoft Office for Open/Libre Office, and breaking the Microsoft monopoly. But less than 1% of the national IT budget is spent on Microsoft licenses, less than what is spent on other closed software and an order less than what is spent on Services from companies like IBM, who lobby for these policies to get more government business.
If the Dutch government wants to support open source and open standards, it should create a policy that requires all its own software projects, outsourced or not, to be published as open source. That would save much more.
I dunno. Why do your government spend time and money promoting a document format that is only implemented in software that can't be freely used by your citizens, nor has good enough converters so they can use the software they like?
Who knows, I may be personally responsible from some of the GP's problems. But making an entire country depend on a single company's product isn't something to take lightly - if you don't have a very good reason for it, don't do it.
Why should your government continue to enrich a single company from another country that tries to lock you in as much as possible into their software so you never leave them?
Because not doing this means that the government is saying: "If you want to interact with our documents on the internet, you need to buy your OS from Apple or MS and another application from MS."
I'm not sure what you mean by:
> not very suitable for document exchange, when conversion between formats is easy and loosing relevance because of cloud based services
It's actually the opposite - conversion between formats is very hard and you may not even realise when you lose data unless you have the official software available for comparison.
"The UK Government Digital Services shared the journey that led them from user needs to a government-wide policy on the use of ODF, and the extensive guidance on best practices for ODF usage they published last week."
6 comments
[ 5.5 ms ] story [ 25.3 ms ] threadThis is simply aimed at replacing Microsoft Office for Open/Libre Office, and breaking the Microsoft monopoly. But less than 1% of the national IT budget is spent on Microsoft licenses, less than what is spent on other closed software and an order less than what is spent on Services from companies like IBM, who lobby for these policies to get more government business.
If the Dutch government wants to support open source and open standards, it should create a policy that requires all its own software projects, outsourced or not, to be published as open source. That would save much more.
Who knows, I may be personally responsible from some of the GP's problems. But making an entire country depend on a single company's product isn't something to take lightly - if you don't have a very good reason for it, don't do it.
I'm not sure what you mean by:
> not very suitable for document exchange, when conversion between formats is easy and loosing relevance because of cloud based services
It's actually the opposite - conversion between formats is very hard and you may not even realise when you lose data unless you have the official software available for comparison.
"The UK Government Digital Services shared the journey that led them from user needs to a government-wide policy on the use of ODF, and the extensive guidance on best practices for ODF usage they published last week."
Here is the link to that guidance
https://www.gov.uk/guidance/open-document-format-odf-guidanc...