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Netherlands parliament makes open standards mandatory
- jwildeboer 10y agoOriginally this was indeed published as a Microsoft DOC file. But now it is a PDF file, generated in a Linux box. Nice :-)
- tremon 10y agoNote that this isn't a law (yet). This is a house initiative (motion?) that requests the current government to: - mandate by law the use of open standards - publish its knowledge about open source software through normal publication channels The second provision is a small step towards creating a knowledge-sharing platform regarding the use and deployment of open source software in both government and business. The original motion asked for a dedicated platform, this amended version allows governments to use already-existing platforms. I don't expect big changes from this, I suspect that MS Office Open XML would also be considered an open standard.
- pmontra 10y agoIt's an ISO standard and we remember how it was approved https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standardization_of_Office_Open_XML https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standardization_of_Office_Op...
- buovjaga 10y ago> I don't expect big changes from this, I suspect that MS Office Open XML would also be considered an open standard. https://www.forumstandaardisatie.nl/lijst-open-standaarden https://www.forumstandaardisatie.nl/lijst-open-standaarden https://www.forumstandaardisatie.nl/standaard/odf https://www.forumstandaardisatie.nl/standaard/odf Unable to locate OOXML
- cor4office 10y agoThe law will be into effect in 2017
- mrweasel 10y agoThe Danish government mandated that you should be able to use both OOXML and ODF when communicating with the any branch of the government by 2008. As it turned out, when January 2008 came around, 20% of the the government offices didn't know how to deal with ODF files. By 2010 most could open ODF, while around 7% of the smaller kommuner (counties/cities) still didn't know how to deal with the open formats. After that it has just sort of slipped out of the public spotlight. In 2010 nobody really used the ODF format, because ordinary people don't need to send documents to the government, it's mostly self service online and companies all use Microsoft Office. I would very much doubt that the government offices actually use anything but docx for documents internally. Even if they really should use a simple format that would be easy to parse in the future.
- mtgx 10y agoNone of those problems are anywhere close to being insurmountable. You just need competent people in the government to implement the right policies and ask for the right things in laws. Just an example: if the EU as a whole said that by mid-2018, all document services and tools that work in the EU need to support ODF by default, then that is what would happen, and this issue would disappear. The problem is you still have too many people that aren't too interested in making this happen in the EU, and even fewer people that have the competence and power to require all the right stuff to make it work. But all of it could be fixed with enough public pressure and political will. Your solution seems to be to just throw our hands up in the air, because there's too little momentum right now to make the necessary changes.
- dhimes 10y agoNone of those problems are anywhere close to being insurmountable. You just need competent people in the government What's the word that means the opposite of tautology again?
- matt4077 10y agoWhat's the word that means "uninformed person spewing tired cliches" again? The EU bureaucracy is actually pretty good regarding open standards. They publish most documents in html/doc and pdf, see for example http://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/FR/TXT/?uri=CELEX:52016PC0595 http://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/FR/TXT/?uri=CELEX:520... They have also adopted the Akoma Ntoso standard internally, meaning all legislation is crafted in standardized semantic xml (as well transcripts, court proceedings & decisions etc). The public launch should happen some time early next year, and it'll allow anybody to do the kind of fun stuff you can do with a meticulously annotated, machine-readable history of 40 years of governing.
- adrianN 10y agoAll software used by and written for the government should be open source, just like all research paid for with government funds should be open access.
- matt4077 10y agoAll software used by governments should be whatever is best in terms of features/price/security/etc. Open Source is nice but not really important. All data, however, should be in documented, standardized, open formats. Where it makes sense, software should have APIs using common standards. Where it's possible without revealing national secrets or personal information, those APIs should be open to the public,
- rpedroso 10y agoPublic auditing of voting terminals strikes me as a place where open source of government-used software matters.
- kirushik 10y agoAnd the problem always is: how are you going to verify that the terminal you're using is running precisely the version of software you've seen? There's an awesome online course touching all those topics and then some, from J. Alex Halderman, Associate Professor in University of Michigan. It's called 'Securing Digital Democracy' and is available on Coursera: https://www.coursera.org/learn/digital-democracy https://www.coursera.org/learn/digital-democracy
- rpedroso 10y agoThat's a good point, and thanks for the recommendation!
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- noobiemcfoob 10y ago
- nxc18 10y agoA lot of the interest in mandating open standards, at least a few years ago, was targeted at the dominance of MS Office. That's interesting nowadays because: - MS Office's default file formats are open standards with open source libraries/ reference implementations - MS Office (both desktop and web app) can handle ODF very well nowadays. At least for small business and home users, Google docs has become increasingly dominant with surprisingly little concern for long-term document accessibility. For example, Google Drive will only sync down links to Google doc files on desktop. Aside from manually exporting every single document you have in the preferred format, there is no way to get your documents for backup/archival purposes, and good luck switching to another service/software. It would be nice to see a little interest in standards/compatibility for google docs now that so many businesses use it.
- tremon 10y agowith open source libraries/ reference implementations Citation needed? FAFAIK the reference implementation is closed source, and there are no libraries -- only a powershell module that is actually a wrapper around the Word/Excel OLE objects.
- christophilus 10y agoI agree with this. Even if MS formats were all proprietary, proprietary formats can generally be hacked/decoded/understood. Closed remote storage services on the other hand, can hold your data hostage, and there's not much you can do about it.
- EngineerBetter 10y agoI expect that this is one of the reasons they're adopting Cloud Foundry: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u18nKAOY5mo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u18nKAOY5mo, along with the UK, USA, and Australian governments. I think there's a few others too now.