Norway Moves Towards Mandatory Use of ODF and PDF

Andy Updegrove writes "Norway has become the latest European country to move closer to mandatory government use of ODF (and PDF). According to a press release provided in translation to me by an authoritative source, Norway now joins Belgium, Finland, and France (among other nations) in moving towards a final decision to require such use. The Norwegian recommendation was revealed by Minister of Renewal Heidi Grande Roys, on behalf of the Cabinet-appointed Norwegian Standards Council. If adopted, it would require all government agencies and services to use these two formats, and would permit other formats (such as OOXML) to be used only in a redundant capacity.Reflecting a pragmatic approach to the continuing consideration of OOXML by ISO/IEC JTC 1, the recommendation calls for Norway to 'promote the convergence of the ODF and OOXML, in order to avoid having two standards covering the same usage.' According to the press release, the recommendation will be the subject of open hearings, with opinions to be rendered to the Cabinet before August 20 this summer.The Cabinet would then make its own (and in this case binding) recommendation to the Norwegian government."

When will the US join?

[lixee]

This is excellent news. I'm expecting the US to be one of the last to adopt it because of the influence MS has on politics. Any thoughts?

Seems obvious

[AKAImBatman]

If adopted, it would require all government agencies and services to use these two formats, and would permit other formats (such as OOXML) to be used only in a redundant capacity.Reflecting a pragmatic approach to the continuing consideration of OOXML by ISO/IEC JTC 1, the recommendation calls for Norway to 'promote the convergence of the ODF and OOXML, in order to avoid having two standards covering the same usage.'

The results of this investigation seem obvious to me. They'll find that there are no significant features of the OOXML format that aren't already replicated by ODF. They will also find that OOXML is needlessly complicated by support for odd bugs and backward compatibility issues with previous Microsoft Office releases. Finally, they will find that a dozen or so major software providers are actively supporting ODF while only Microsoft is actively promoting OOXML.

After the report is released, Microsoft money will step in and suppress it. The guys who wrote the report will be fired, and a new report will be written recommending OOXML as an "industry standard" with "longstanding vendor support". ODF supporters will be recast as small companies that could go belly up at any time. The whole standardization effort will collapse in the backlash, and nothing will get done.

On the bright side, they're keeping up the good fight. Without this pressure, nothing will ever change.

Redundant copies?

[HostAdmin]

> Other formats may be used however, as long as documents with the same content are available at the same time in ODF or PDF.

I suppose this is to limit opposition from MS and crew, but it's a bad idea. How's going to audit every document to be sure they're in sync?

Make a choice and stick with it.

Re:I hate PDF

[Anonymous Coward]

I agree. Fortunately since it's a published standard, there are other PDF readers other than the one from the vendor you describe...

Re:That is insane.

[niiler]

I agree that patent-free formats is good. However, one must specify something or run the risk of having numerous open formats chosen by anyone who might have a say. While this may be good for "freedom", it is not so good when you actually have to get something done. As ODF is now an ISO/IEC 26300:2006 standard it seems to meet the requirements better than most options.

Will it become obsolete? Surely. But it will have better staying power than just about anything else I've seen to this date.

Re:When will the US join?

[Short Circuit]

The mere fact that MS is fighting this with a 'standard' of their own should be indication enough to anyone that MS means to keep them locked into MS products.

Well, duh. That's what you do when you make your money from software licenses. The only thing that "obligates" them to make emigration possible is their status as a convicted monopoly.

If Flash hadn't come along, and Sun had locked down Java (and made a deal with the top two or three OS vendors to distribute their product), people would be saying the same thing about Sun.

Re:Hmm.

[Volante3192]

But, being required to use it if you're a govt. employee? Weird.

Not really. It's simply policy. Governments have hundreds of policies that need to be followed, this is just another one. The reason it gets coverage is of what it means. It wouldn't do to have individual departments, or worse, individual people, decide what file format to use.

It's like a business. A business will dictate the use of one format in order to streamline operations; it wouldn't make sense to have one branch use Word while another used WordPerfect and so on.

Forced adoption is simply just keeping consistancy.

Re:Redundant copies?

[networkBoy]

Simple, only the ODF document can be authoritative. Any derivative document can not be considered authoritative by default as it is not the Gov't spec'd format.
-nB

Not Getting Excited

[Nom du Keyboard]

I keep hearing that some large company, county, state, or country is moving closer to ODF and (fill in FOSS of your choice), but it doesn't actually happen. Microsoft swoops in, independent thinking I.T. director is fired, reassigned, or re-educated, and nothing big happens. Microsoft may be paying some of these entities to continue using their software, rather than the other way around, to keep up appearances, but it still doesn't happen.

Give me a story where 50,000+ desktops have actually thrown Microsoft out, and kept them out, and then we may have a news story. Until then, stop wasting the bandwidth!

Re:When will the US join?

[CastrTroy]

The US is the last to adopt any kind of standard. They still haven't even picked up on the metric system yet. How do you expect then to standardize of document formats?

Re:Seems obvious

[hyfe]

After the report is released, Microsoft money will step in and suppress it. The guys who wrote the report will be fired, and a new report will be written recommending OOXML as an "industry standard" with "longstanding vendor support".

That's called corruption. You know, it doesn't have to be built into the system. Although It obviously can be, as the US is bloody rich.
.

Either way, I'm kinda curious how the money gets to be part of this. The elected represantatives are, well, elected, and obviously aren't allowed to take bribes. If any party accepted money with strings attached they would pretty much instantly lose their integrety and a large part of their voter-base. It really is amazing how much harder it to screw you over when there's alternatives.

Re:When will the US join?

[nine-times]

Sure, they (MS) think the MS OpenXML thingy is better, that's their job to think that way. The simple truth is that an open standard would comoditize MS products.

Not necessarily-- well, maybe I don't know quite what you mean by "commoditize". But really, insofar as Microsoft is competing fairly in the Office-suite market, what file formats people use should be relatively unimportant. The only additional cost to them is to include read/write support for ODF into their applications, which I'm guessing would be a pretty minimal cost. Beyond that, there's no good reason why Microsoft should care if my documents are stored in PDF, DOC, DOCX, ODF, HTML, or anything else. So long as they're trying to sell MS Office on the merits of the programs themselves, Microsoft's concern shouldn't be for what file format users choose, but whether MS Office is the best editor for those file formats. They should be eager to support ODF even better than OOo.

However, they aren't doing that, which demonstrates something about the culture at Microsoft. They don't want open competition (no surprise here). They don't want to be in a position where they have to make the best software, but instead are more concerned with maintaining vendor lock-in.

Re:When will the US join?

[Matt Perry]

Actually, let's be totally fair here. Yes, having everyone in the world use the same measurement system would make a lot of things easier.

Yes, let's do be fair. Every country in the world except for Burma, the US, and Liberia [cia.gov] currently use the metric system as their primary method of measurement.

Having everyone in the world speak the same language would make things even easier -- indeed the benefits of a common language are far greater than the benefits of a common measuring system.

Especially if 94 percent of the world already spoke the same language it would make sense for the other 6 percent to learn it too. 6% being the 350 million people in USA, Burma, and Liberia.

Re:When will the US join?

[molarmass192]

How about if we in the US adopt French as our official language and the French will revert to imperial measurements ... sounds fair right? I mean it only fair ... we only have to undo 400 years of historical use of English as opposed to France having to undo 2000 years of historical use of French. I know you're joking around, but you're not comparing apples to apples here. A more equivocal trade would be for us to adopt the Euro while Europe reverts to the imperial system.

Re:When will the US join?

[smilindog2000]

Competing fairly is something Microsoft hasn't had to do for years. Otherwise, we would all get the OS and Office for free, or close to free, as OSes and word processors are mature technology which has already been fully paid for. How else could OpenOffice and Linux be so successful? In my experience, when a product is still valuable in the marketplace, vendors prefer to sell them rather than give them away for free. Microsoft continues to extort payments for software we already paid for, simply because of it's monopolistic position. The rest of us (I'm a software developer by trade) have to actually innovate in order to convince clients to pony up.

Re:When will the US join?

[bobbyandck]

So you want to be totally fair ?

First of all France, what have they got to do with this ?

One measurement system would be fantastic, if only to facilitate international exchanges (check out the mess in the international commodities or metals markets for an example) it is even more useful than having every country drive on the right. But as for languages, not only it is a very strong part of national identity, but it is also much more difficult to change. And if you would imagine taking one language for all countries, you probably should take Chinese or Spanish.

P.S.: as a side point, don't you find that the metric system is actually quite logical ? going from distance to weight through volumes and all that just with base 10 conversions ?

Re:I hate PDF

[replicant108]

foxit reader

...free, but not Free unfortunately.

Re:I hate PDF

[BitterOak]

I like PDF.

There are free, open source PDF creators and readers out there. Actually, I like the Acrobat readers up to version 5.0. After that it became bloatware. What I like about PDF is that fonts are embedded right in the file, so you know that documents will look the same and print correctly on a Linux, Mac, or Windows environment. Images and text are stored compactly. Compare a typical PDF file size to the equivalent PostScript size. It is also a very convenient way of getting files to a printer. I have PDF writers installed everywhere, and if I am using a computer with no printer attached, I print to a PDF and copy it to my USB key drive. I can then print the file on any computer with a printer attached and it comes out looking correct. Most other file formats get screwed up if the other computer doesn't have the same fonts installed, or has a different version of the software used to decode the file. The P in PDF stands for portable, and in my experience, it is.

Re:When will the US join?

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

Every country in the world except for Burma, the US, and Liberia currently use the metric system as their primary method of measurement.

Yep. That's why this evening I bought 2 pints of milk from the supermarket 2.6 miles from my home, travelling along roads with 20mph and 30mph speed limits to get there, probably with hideous fuel economy of about 20mpg, before returning home and walking to the pub so I could safely drink my pint of bitter without having to drive back, conveniently allowing me to pick up a quarter-pound burger for a late-night snack on my way home.

But yep, here in the UK we're metric through and through. :-)