Portuguese Government Adopts ODF (The Standards Blog) [LWN.net]

Andy Updegrove covers a press release from the Portuguese Open Source Business Association on the government adoption of standard formats for documents. "[T]he Portuguese government has opted for ODF, the OpenDocument Format, as well as PDF and a number of other formats and protocols, including XML, XMPP, IMAP, SMTP, CALDAV and LDAP. The announcement is in furtherance of a law passed by the Portuguese Parliament on June 21 of last year requiring compliance with open standards (as defined in the same legislation) in the procurement of government information systems and when exchanging documents at citizen-facing government Web sites."

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Meanwhile, the sins of the virtuous...

Posted Nov 20, 2012 18:04 UTC (Tue) by pboddie (guest, #50784) [Link]

But in the great majority of cases, where ODF has been approved for use, so has OOXML.

It's a shame, then, that Norway, as one of the leaders in mandating open standards in government, is now at risk of mandating OOXML as an interchange format for editable documents, when we all know the history of OOXML and its status in the feature list of Microsoft products. It gets worse, though, because alongside OOXML, the proposed guidelines also mandate support for "doc format". Yes, that's what the discussion paper says, and it's a direct quote from various "stakeholders".

Quite how any public interoperability requirements can have such a naked reference to a proprietary document format dictated by a single vendor's products and not violate various directives and regulations is perhaps a matter best left to a proper investigation of those who want this so badly. Regardless of whether anyone has been having persuasive conversations with the "stakeholders", delegating control over the public document record to the lottery of proprietary Microsoft formats is at the very least irresponsible, if not an advert for bureaucratic incompetence.

I guess the lesson for us all is to watch out for people complaining that open standards are "too hard" and the sudden subsequent introduction of things that they would prefer instead, guaranteeing "business as usual" and the perpetuation of the Microsoft Office addiction. (It's also worth noting the remarks about "newer versions of Office" in the referenced proposal: a perverse example of how "open" standards are used to advocate the procurement of upgrades to a specific product.)