Belgian Gov't requires ODF From 09/2008

An anonymous reader writes "The Belgian government has decided all government agencies will be required to use only open document standards from September 2008 onwards. One year earlier, they should be able to read them. In practice this means only ODF will be supported, although OpenXML will be considered if it becomes an accepted standard, and enough applications use it. According to a Belgian Microsoft-spokesman, Microsoft is considering supporting ODF (article in Dutch)."

*ONLY* open document standards? AWESOME!

[mrchaotica]

You know what that means, right? It means that not accepting MS Office files is just the tip of the iceberg. It means every other format the government uses will have to be open too, including audio/video codecs, and -- best yet -- CAD FORMATS!

As a civil engineering student and Free Software advocate, this is really exciting, because right now AutoCAD has a near-monopoly on CAD for civil engineering applications, to the point where governments often require its native format (.DWG, .DXF) for contract proposals and such. Don't get me wrong -- AutoCAD isn't a bad program, but it's a Windows-only one, which makes me constantly frustrated at work. Mandating use of an open standard format might give a boost to competing, cross platform, software.

Incidentally, I ran across this website that has a lot of good information about this: the Open Design Alliance [opendesign.com]. From their FAQ:

Why is the Open Design Alliance necessary?

Despite the common availability of neutral file formats, such as IGES and STEP, the vast majority CAD drawings are stored in proprietary formats. The best-known of these is Autodesk's DWG file format. DWG has, for many years, been far and away the world's most popular format for the storage and exchange of 2D and 3D CAD drawings, with billions of important drawings in this format around the world. With an estimated 5 million seats of AutoCAD sold throughout the world, AutoCAD is in a monopoly position within its market segment, where no competing product could be successful without the ability to read and write DWG files.

Beyond this, DWG files have been used to store the designs of publicly funded roads and bridges, and US and other government contracts often explicitly require that drawing data be stored in DWG format. Autodesk has declined to publish the format or to make libraries available to read and write DWG files to those companies it considers competitors. The Open Design Alliance was originally founded as the OpenDWG Alliance in 1998 to provide an open specification for OpenDWG (it's version of the DWG format), and to provide program libraries -- to anyone who wanted them -- for reading and writing OpenDWG files.

Re:Not yet

[lord_rob the only on]

Don't forget that, even Belgium is a small country, its captial city is Brussels, which is also the capital of Europe. Given Europe recent action against Microsoft Windows Media player and all, I wouldn't be so indifferent of that decision.

Here come the deep discounts

[gelfling]

Here comes the deep discounts to Belgium for MS Office

Here comes yet another bad business practice for MS stockholders to suffer at the hands of WalmartSoft.

Here come the ./ bots to mod down my comments about MS.

Re:Yeah, right.

[NNWizard]

Actually, for some issues the government has already adopted open standards for text documents. For instance, as far as research funding is concerned, many calls for proposal, along with the forms that must be completed, are distributed in odf format. It sure annoys our secretaries here at the university, but it is a good step at promoting open standards. If educated people who are potentially future decision makers are faced with such issues at 'training time', maybe they can make enlighted decisions at 'work time' ?

Towards critical mass

[CAPSLOCK2000]

This is a big step forward.
The Belgium federal government might not be the biggest government in the world, it's still a big (read rich) government.
You can bet your ass that many sotware companies are allready thinking of how they can make money out of this.
This will increase the amount of secondary support and software available for OpenOffice.

Also, if your biggest customer is the government (which is true for many companies), it would be logical to use the same file format. Especially if you can use it for free.

Thirdly, if the government publishes documents on it's website, they will now do it in ODF, instead of MS-Office. Which means that many civilians will install ODF compatible software, just to read them.

Ethics of Open Source

[Potor]

Great news! I live and work in Belgium, and am quite busy promoting OSS whenever possible. My university does not yet support OOo, or even FF/Thunderbird (although I use all three). Hopefully this decision of the Federal government will have a knock-down effect, and lead other sectors to a similar conversion. It is funny to see people put such value in installing copied versions of MS Office when OOo is so easy to obtain and use.

On a related note, I edit a well-established, peer-reviewed academic journal, and am presently putting together an issue on the ethics of open source software (to appear June, 2007). Anyone who may be interested in contributing is invited to email me, and I'll send the CFP.

Re:Yeah, right.

[spectrokid]

My brother works in the Belgian justice system, and they are (slowly) migrating to Linux on the desktop. Money talks, yes indeed. And Linux is a hell of a lot cheaper.

C'mon

[fishdan]

well, sending your RESUME in odf might also get you hired if you send it to the right place -- and at my VERY large company (60k+ employees) we only accept resumes in .txt or .rtf or .pdf format. Emails with a .doc attachments sent to [e-mail] bounce back with that message. We also list that very clearly on the web page.

I'm not saying be a complete nazi about it, and I'm not advocating doing anything as stupid as sending your resume in a format someone might NOT be able to read (which includes Word IMHO). I'm saying that on occasion, you should consider if you can "help the cause" by sending out a document in odf.