Belgium Chooses OpenDocument

Freggy writes "The Belgian government decided today that all public services should use open standard file formats for the exchange of office documents ( press release in Dutch, French). The reason is that they don't want to force people to have to buy a proprietary program to be able to read official documents. All federal public services should be able to read ODF files by September 2007. If no problems arise after a study, the use of the file format will be obligatory from September 2008."

agree

[joe 155]

I agree completely, no one should be barred from having access to their governments documents because they can't afford some software... although I wonder what closed standard they were using that couldn't be opened by free aplications. ".doc" opens fine in Oo, .pdf's open fine in Xpdf... Still, it is a good move from the side of being able to access the data in years to come (and it's good for open source as a whole)

Bad Reason Then

[Anonymous Coward]

The reason is that they don't want to force people to have to buy a proprietary program to be able to read official documents.

Huh? There are free downloadable viewers for Microsoft Office documents as well as pdf files. You don't have to force anybody to buy anything when they are already free.

More FUD from the OSS crowd once again. Its not just the big bad evil corps that seem to be engaging in it.

Nice... not like here in MA

[ThinkingInBinary]

This is really great to see progress on the open format front, even if it isn't in the US. The Massachusetts thing is such a farce... first they say they'll do it, then vendors make them question it, then who knows... I saw an article [boston.com] in the Boston Globe about Microsoft donating $30M "worth" of "advanced software-writing and Web-building technology" software to Massachusetts public high schools and colleges. While it's nice to get free stuff, we can easily see that Microsoft is doing that to keep schools from adopting open solutions. Why try GNU/Linux + the GNU dev tools for development, or Nvu for web site creation, when Microsoft gave us Visual Studio and (gulp) Frontpage for free? It's a good argument, too! I don't know who can do it, but someone needs to sit down and realize that accepting $30M of donated software is really allowing M$ to bypass a real evaluation of the best software for the school's needs, and gaining them favor in future business dealings. If the whole school has Visual Studio for free, of course they'll buy upgrades, especially if M$ throws in another discount! And for M$,it's just pure cash.

this is stupid

[stubear]

Why is the government sending out documents which can be easily edited? Word and its ilk (word processing documents) are the absolute worst file types to distribute things like this in. PDF and Microsoft's new XPS are perfect for this sort of thing and it's what they were designed for. Not only would PDF be great for reading, you can extend its functionality with forms. Governments could do away with paper forms cutting down on processing time and errors.

Deja view, all over again

[leonbrooks]

We/You have several hysterical^Whistorical examples of MS-Office components being changed to do exactly that.

When you realise that Bill appears to do everything either for more money or more control, this stops being surprising. This observation also makes the future plain: MS-Office document formats will almost certainly be broken several more times during the suite's death^Wlife-span, whereas more suites (possibly including MSO) will come to do OpenDocument I/O as well.

Belgium has (once more) planned to avoid the social tragedies which regularly afflict so many other Euro countries. Sometimes they miss the mark, but they're always a very educational country to pay attention to.