Hungary has voted to mandate open source standards in government IT.
Note: open standards not open source. It’s worth your while (not speaking to the converted) to get your head around the difference. Not sure I have completely yet. But I’m trying.
There’s a movement building here. I’m paying attention. Hope you are too. Watch this space.
Your link to Hungary mandating open source standards is broken.
This is certainly a good thing though, I would hate to see the day where to read government reports I would have to buy either Microsoft Office or Windows. Mandating open standards of either type means that there will always be an option out there for people who refuse to (or can’t afford to) use closed systems.
I’m for that.
Thanks Josh. try now.
Mandating open standards for government use is at least one step further to an free and open market and is something that all countries should be doing. And they should all be mandating the same standards.
Open standards help avoid the “upgrade treadmill” of Microsoft Office products, where you are essentially forced to upgrade versions of your product in order to interoperate with users of the newer versions, without going back to them and asking them to save in a different format.
The open standard in this area, ODF, was contemptuously implemented by Microsoft so that it failed to interoperate with other ODF implementations, such as OpenOffice and Google’s online tools. There is no excuse for this monopoly behaviour.
They also tried to come up with their own “standard”, basically the rubbish that goes into their closed format expressed as XML. The standard they came up with was long, judged by many as impossible to implement, and offered no real benefit versus ODF. Even its name (OOXML) seemed an attempt to cause confusion with the version that OpenOffice (OO) writes. The process Microsoft went through to corrupt officials voting on whether the standard should be accepted is well documented. The first vote declined the standard, the second – after MS had corrupted more standards voters, got more island nations to join the standards body responsible, etc – passed by a slim margin.
But there are others who can tell the story far better than I. See for example http://nzoss.org.nz/news/2009/microsoft-odf-plugin – http://holloway.co.nz/blog/2009/05/opendocument-support-in-microsoft-office-sp2-odf/
Lots more here as well: http://www.openmalaysiablog.com/ooxml/