Netherlands parliament makes open standards mandatory

All 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.

A lot of the interest in mandating open standards, at least a few years ago, was targeted at the dominance of MS Office. That&#x27;s interesting nowadays because:<p>- MS Office&#x27;s default file formats are open standards with open source libraries&#x2F; reference implementations - MS Office (both desktop and web app) can handle ODF very well nowadays.<p>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 <i>links</i> 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&#x2F;archival purposes, and good luck switching to another service&#x2F;software. It would be nice to see a little interest in standards&#x2F;compatibility for google docs now that so many businesses use it.

The 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&#x27;t know how to deal with ODF files. By 2010 most could open ODF, while around 7% of the smaller kommuner (counties&#x2F;cities) still didn&#x27;t know how to deal with the open formats.<p>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&#x27;t need to send documents to the government, it&#x27;s mostly self service online and companies all use Microsoft Office.<p>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.

Note that this isn&#x27;t a law (yet). This is a house initiative (motion?) that requests the current government to:<p>- mandate by law the use of open standards<p>- publish its knowledge about open source software through normal publication channels<p>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.<p>I don&#x27;t expect big changes from this, I suspect that MS Office Open XML would also be considered an open standard.

Originally this was indeed published as a Microsoft DOC file. But now it is a PDF file, generated in a Linux box. Nice :-)

I expect that this is one of the reasons they&#x27;re adopting Cloud Foundry: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=u18nKAOY5mo" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=u18nKAOY5mo</a>, along with the UK, USA, and Australian governments. I think there&#x27;s a few others too now.

The law will be into effect in 2017